It is from such illusions as this that we must free our ideals if we would do effective work for the world and for ourselves. There are real enemies enough without erecting imaginary windmills to tilt against. Frauds, depravities, tragedies surely await us, now as ever, but we shall be doubly armed against them if we look upon them as the exceptions and not the rule and if we draw strength from the great background of human virtue and honesty. And there is such a background, unchanging, resistent, resolute, even though the limelight of publicity be persistently directed upon the few sinister figures on the front of the stage. We cannot afford to lose our faith in human nature, we cannot afford to shut out the greater and the best part of life or to gaze so persistently upon the abnormal that we can no longer see the normal and the ordinary. Let us cultivate our sense of ethical values and of ethical perspective rather than to crouch behind a shrub until it looks like a forest.
We are indebted to our commercialized newspapers and magazines for our distorted views of human life and for the cynicism that it is the momentary fashion to affect, but that is always disfiguring to the mind that harbors it. Certainly we can get no such views and no such cynicism from our own experience or from personal knowledge of the men and women who surround us. Honesty is a more familiar sight than dishonesty. All the common and familiar processes of our daily life are based upon an expectation of honesty, and if you will stop to consider for a moment you will see that those processes could not go on without that expectation. And how seldom is it falsified. Sometimes of course there comes the jar of disappointment, but the fact that there is a jar shows that it is the exception and not the rule. However much we may talk of guarantees and safeguards and securities, however much we may talk of a business method or instinct that takes nothing for granted, it remains a self-evident fact that we must take human honesty for granted, that we must assume that the man with whom we do business intends to do it rightly and honorably, that he is actuated by a settled principle of fair conduct that will work automatically, and that without this automatically working standard of behavior all our guarantees and safeguards and securities would really have very little value. It is the universal expectation of fair dealing that makes business possible and, in fact, it is this universal expectation of good behavior that makes its breach sufficiently novel to be reported in the newspapers. If fraud and chicanery and violence were the order of the day, they would have no value as news. After twenty-nine years of dealing with human nature in a business where it is seen at its extremes – at its best and at its worst – I believe that the great majority of men and women in business are honest and I am certain that if this were not so, it would be impossible to carry on business. Take the statistics of the credit insurance business, a business that may be said to be based upon an assumption of human honesty; examine the statistics of the losses made in business and you will find that these are but a small fraction of the total amount involved and even this small proportion is chiefly due to errors of judgment or to causes in which dishonesty plays no part. Ask any banker how much he relies upon human honesty as an indispensable background to the ordinary precautions and safeguards of his business. Ask him what is his attitude toward a client whom he detects in a lie or in sharp practice, and he will tell you that he has no use for such a man. He would rather be without his business and free from all contact with those whose natural and innate sense of honesty is lacking. Go wherever you like, and you will find the same expectation, the same assumption of honesty. You will find that no business can be carried on without it. Whatever high and honorable ideals you may have formed you need have no apprehension that they will be scorned in the business world or that you will have to put them away to win success. It is in the business world that they will be valued, and even the mental equipment that you are now seeking will be less important to you, a lesser guarantee of success than your sense of honor and truth and probity. When you reach the business world – and many of you perhaps will go into the great corporations that are now ceaselessly paraded before you as wolves and as public enemies – you will find there the same kind of human nature that you find here in college, the same estimation of probity and of fair dealing. If you do mean or underhand things, you will find that they are branded in the same way there as here. You will find that manliness and integrity are the rule and not the exception, and I will venture upon the prediction that when the time comes for you to look back upon your career you will see that there has been a steady improvement all along the line, just as those who are already able to look backward find that there has been an improvement since their own college days. But that will rest with yourselves, for the future is in your own hands. It is for you, gentlemen, to see that moral and ethical progress is unbroken.
Now let me say a word about the corporations of which we hear so much in the newspapers and magazines and that are so persistently represented as enemies of the community and as vampires that are sucking the life-blood of the nation. I think there may be plenty of room here for clarification of our views, and, indeed, we should all be better for it if we could give more precision to our thinking and free ourselves from the imputations that have been allowed to cluster around certain terms. You may be sure that I am under no inclination to defend criminality or wrong-doing or to deny their existence wherever they are actually to be found. There are criminal corporations just as there are criminal doctors, and lawyers, and clergymen. Wherever men are gathered together there you will find a certain number who are disposed to seek their personal advantage in reprehensible ways, but because some doctors and some lawyers and some clergymen are criminals we do not attach an imputation to their respective professions. We are content to say that there are black sheep in every flock and so pass on. But the newspapers and the magazines have seen fit to concentrate their attention upon the criminal or the illegal acts of certain individuals who belong to corporations and to explain those acts in a manner which often leads their readers to assume that the acts are an essential part of corporation business. As a result, the very word “corporation” has taken on a sinister meaning, and we are asked to look upon the corporations very much as the Rhine peasants used to look upon the robber barons who were accustomed to swoop down upon them and carry off their flocks. A corporation is absolutely nothing more than a partnership of individuals who prefer to do business under certain regulations imposed by the government. There is no difference between the corporate and the individual ways of doing business except a piece of stamped paper issued by the Secretary of State. The corporation is made up of individuals who have just the same ideas of honor as you have yourselves, who have just as much integrity, just as great a love of fair play. A man does not change his nature just because he turns his business into a corporation any more than he changes his nature because he moves from one street to another or from the first floor to the second. A corporation then is a combination of men that has been formed under the sanction of law to carry out certain projects that it would be difficult or even impossible to carry out in any other way. The men forming those corporations are just such men as we meet in daily life, no better and no worse, and therefore with all those normal inclinations toward honesty that we are conscious of possessing ourselves and that we are in the habit of finding in others. The fact that these men have formed themselves into a corporation is no more significant of evil than a combination or a partnership among doctors or laborers. It is a part of the spirit of the age, an age that is called upon to do great things, to develop vast natural resources, to feed and clothe great centers of population, and to undertake a hundred other enterprises too large for the strength of the individual. I should like you to think over the real meaning of this term “corporation” in order that you may understand that it has no sinister significance whatever, that it is nothing more than a partnership that has registered itself under certain legal conditions for purposes that are laudable and honest. If you will do this, you will understand at once how senseless is the outcry against corporations as such and how absurd it is that any stigma of dishonesty should be placed upon a particular form of doing business that is exactly like other forms of doing business, with the addition of a legal registration. As I have already said, there are some corporations that break laws, or rather certain individuals who are parts of corporations and who break laws, just as there is a certain small proportion of law-breakers in every section of every community. But that fact carries with it no reflection upon corporations as such, and when our sensational publications and politicians use the word “corporation” as though it were an alternative term for brigand or pirate they are simply assuming a public ignorance that may exist outside, but that certainly ought not to be found within a university. They are taking advantage of a nearly universal disposition to believe one's self injured and are appealing not only to ignorance, but to a low form of cupidity and of mob greed. They would have no success in their crusade against corporations as such if there were any general understanding of the meaning of terms or if it were generally recognized that there are thousands of corporations in this State, and thousands in every State against whom no whisper of wrong-doing has ever been raised and who are doing a useful work, of which every individual among us is a beneficiary, directly or indirectly. Now it is not only in our definitions that we need to be precise and to think clearly. We have already seen the need of a better discrimination between the very few corporations that are accused of breaking the laws and the vastly greater number that we never hear of at all and that do their business as quietly and honestly as the baker or the butcher. If lawbreaking is to be found in the business of some corporations, it is incumbent upon us to determine just in what way the law is being broken, why it is being broken, what sort of law it is that is being broken, and how much moral turpitude or public wrong is involved. All these factors would be determined by a judge upon the bench before passing sentence upon the meanest malefactor, and yet we find that the public is constantly urged by the newspapers to pass sentences of ruin and confiscation upon corporations as a whole, with their tens of thousands of innocent stockholders, without any kind of inquiry and under the influence of uninformed passion.