The Psychology of the Business Man 287 



typewriter or buyer of life insurance, does not need or want to 

 see his writing or the whereabouts of his surpkis. The ad- 

 vantages of the exckisive wire telephone service is sought to 

 be overcome by the cheaper cost of the community wire sys- 

 tem. A veteran book seller surprises his street-gazing public 

 by giving up his costly display window and moving his books 

 to the unused sides of the much-traveled corridor of the latest 

 big department store, because he reasons that his decreased 

 sales to the mere passers-by will be more than compensated 

 by his greatly decreased rent. 



More entangled cases of business reasoning deal with es- 

 timates of character. A street railway manager described to 

 me how he learned to "size up" applicants for positions by 

 standing them up in a row\, comparing the physiognomy of 

 their heads, eyes, nose, and mouth ; their standing posture and 

 gait : their muscular vigor by a hand shake ; and, if uncertainty 

 yet remained, their voices, words and expressions in conversa- 

 tion. By scaling up and adding together these elementary 

 signs of character in a way he could not further analyze or 

 describe, he became quite expert in choosing men within the 

 company's required variations of character. Yet he added that 

 some remaining uncertainty and disappointment by this 

 method of choosing employees was later helped by looking up 

 the past working or business history of each applicant; fov 

 often more far-reaching inferences can be drawn from past 

 actions to future actions than from the physiognomy signs of 

 character. Likewise the bank cashier not merely becomes un- 

 consciously a skilled reader of human character, but he wants 

 to know the details of the borrower's plans and resources in 

 order that he too may reason as to the promised repayment of 

 the bank's money. And, if any doubt remains, the cashier's 

 caution of their combined reasonings requires the name of an 

 indorser whose financial reasoning and resources are willing 

 to wshare the risk of the applied-for loan. In a similar way 

 every ])etty tradesman or large wholesaler has to judge of the 

 promised payments of his customers, leading to the caution 

 against charging to strangers or too friendly friends, or entail- 

 ing an expensive and most important department of "Credits." 

 Thus the great mercantile agencies have developed out of the 

 individual business man's reasoning as an organized and wide- 

 reaching method of foretelling the probable means a'ld expec- 



