They not only tried lying, like all young children, but they tried stealing.  For years the big corporations could be seen going around from one big innocent city in this country to another, and standing by quietly and without saying a word, putting the streets in their pockets.

But no big corporation of the first class to-day would begin its connection with a city in this fashion.  Beginning a permanent business relation with a customer by making him sorry afterward he has had any dealings with you, has gone by as a method of getting business in England and America.

One of our big American magazines not long ago, which had gained especially high rates from its advertisers because they believed in it, lied about its circulation.  The man who was responsible was not precisely sure, gave nominal figures in round numbers, and did what magazines very commonly did under the circumstances; but when the magazine owner looked up details afterward and learned precisely what the circulation was for the particular issue concerned, he sent out announcements to every firm in the country that had anything in the columns of that issue, saying that the firm had lied, and enclosing a check for the difference in value represented.  Of course it was a good stroke of business, eating national humble pie so, and it was a cheap stroke of business too, doing some one, sudden, striking thing that no one would forget.  Not an advertisement could be inserted and paid for in the magazine for years without having that action, and the prestige of that action, back of it.  Every shred of virtue there was in the action could have been set one side, and was set one side by many people, because it paid so well.  Every one saw suddenly, and with a faint breath of astonishment, how honesty worked.  But the main point about the magazine in distinction from its competitors seems to have been that it not merely saw how honesty worked, but it saw it first and it had the originality, the moral shrewdness and courage, to put up money on it.  It believed in honesty so hard that suddenly one morning, before all the world, it risked its entire fortune on it.  Now that it has been done once, the new level or standard of candour may be said to have been established which others will have to follow.  But it does not seem to me that the kind of man who has the moral originality to dare do a thing like this first need ever have any serious trouble with competitors.  In the last analysis, in the competition of modern business to get the crowd, the big success is bound to come to men in the one region of competition where competition still has some give in it—­the region of moral originality.  Other things in competition nowadays have all been thought of except being good.  Any man who can and will to-day think out new and unlooked-for ways of being good can get ahead, in the United States of practically everybody.

CHAPTER V