Jdne 28, 1907] 



SCIENCE 



987 



need of a new code of business morality. 

 The nature, and still more the size, of mod- 

 ern transactions have affected the relations 

 of men to one another, and made things 

 wrong that were not wrong before. It is 

 right for each man to trade or work where 

 he pleases, but when a great combination 

 is used to wreck a rival or coerce an in- 

 dustry we are brought face to face with 

 another problem. The boycott and the 

 trust have iinsettled many old convictions ; 

 and when the accumulation of capital in a 

 corporate form throws into the hands of 

 the managers the power to enrich them- 

 selves by imperceptible tributes levied on 

 innumerable stockholders, as in the case of 

 a reorganization or a loan effected for the 

 general benefit of the company, we feel the 

 need of stronger rules fixing the rights and 

 duties of directors. One naturally looks to 

 the courts to lay down the principles of 

 fair dealing in such cases, but while the 

 rapidity with which vast business transac- 

 tions are negotiated has increased beyond 

 precedent, the machinery of our courts has 

 by no means kept pace. A momentous 

 trial takes longer than ever before, and in 

 affairs of great magnitude, justice, if not 

 uncertain, is at least remote. Thus it hap- 

 pens that the courts have not been fully 

 able to cope with the present industrial 

 conditions, and the law's delay is an im- 

 pediment to the maintenance of sound 

 business principles in one part of the coun- 

 try, as it is to the prevention of crime in 

 another. 



An orgy of political misrule, fostered by 

 the moral lassitude following the strain of 

 the civil war, stirred the national con- 

 science a generation ago. Earnest men, 

 mainly college graduates, spoke and wrote 

 on the subject until something like a stand- 

 ard of political probity was generally 

 recognized. It was not at once carried 

 out. Politicians, especially in municipal 

 affairs, do not live up to it yet. But the 



standard must come first, its enforcement 

 afterwards, and there can be no doubt that 

 our public life is far purer than it was at 

 the time of the Credit Mobilier, the whiskey 

 frauds and the Tweed ring. The public, 

 indeed, demand to-day a stricter standard 

 in political than in commercial life. They 

 demand of a legislator or an executive of- 

 ficer a more scrupulous avoidance of deal- 

 ings in which he may have a pecuniary 

 interest, than they do of the director of a 

 corporation; and that is one reason why 

 they regard with complacency a degree of 

 government control of industry that would 

 have been repudiated with disgust a gen- 

 eration ago. One of the crying needs of 

 our time, therefore, is a well-recognized 

 code of commercial honor. 



Now, it would be absurd to suppose that 

 universities can manufacture standards of 

 business morality. But they can help to 

 diffuse the fundamental principles on 

 which all morality must rest; and, what is 

 far more important, they can bring men 

 into that intellectual sympathy, that com- 

 mon way of looking at things, which must 

 exist before an agreement on principles of 

 any kind can be reached. Our universities 

 do, in fact, help to set up standards of life 

 and thought, and thus create a national 

 unity of principles in several ways. In the 

 first place, the instructors themselves tend 

 to be more and more alike in their aspira- 

 tions and methods of work in all our wide- 

 ly scattered universities. The graduate 

 schools, where they study their special sub- 

 jects, and prepare themselves for their fu- 

 ture career, have had a marked effect in 

 this direction. To use a highly inappro- 

 priate metaphor, these schools shuiHe the 

 pack very thoroughly. One of the pleas- 

 antest features, indeed, of the growth of 

 the graduate schools has been the migration 

 of students. A young man from Missouri, 

 for example, who has graduated— let us say 

 — at Oberlin, may come to Yale for a grad- 



