BUSINESS MAN AND HIGH-SCHOOL GRADUATE 77 



utilization of what used to be called waste. The stream of trade flows 

 so fast through a modern department store that the one cent profit here 

 and the two cents profit there aggregate in the course of the year a 

 huge amount of money. According to a recent article in the "World's 

 Work," the beef barons actually lose on sirloin steaks and choice cuts 

 of pork ; where their profits are made is in converting every scrap of the 

 animal's carcase into something that can be sold. 



To keep the stream of business flowing through a great store, and 

 to make it profitable to save every hair of every beast in the Chicago 

 stockyards, however, there must be highly-developed organization, 

 highly complicated machinery, and just as little as possible of that 

 most expensive form of power, the human hand. Human hands are 

 still wanted, and in proportionately greater numbers than ever before 

 in history; but merely as servants to machines that multiply hundreds 

 and thousands of times the initial force given by those hands. It is 

 nonsense, however, to talk of this as slavery to machinery. On the con- 

 trary, it is mastery of the forces of nature, an ever-increasing mastery, 

 which is — so to speak — kicking the brute laborer, the pick and shovel 

 man, up into the ranks of the machine-user, and is kicking the machine- 

 user up into the ranks of the organizer, those ranks where brains are 

 every day setting hundreds and thousands at new work, and every day 

 bringing what used to be luxuries down to the horizon of the common- 

 est man. The cost of living is high, not because of the scandalous lux- 

 ury of the rich, but because of the commendable luxury of the poor. It 

 is true that the desire for the good things of life is growing somewhat 

 faster than the devices and economies of modern industry can bring 

 those good things within reach ; but this is simply a question of gradual 

 adjustment. And the fact that more men are every day wanting and 

 demanding more things is one of the surest guarantees of a continued 

 and genuine prosperity. 



An inseparable accompaniment of machinery, however, is speed. 

 Therefore the next notable characteristic of modern business is whirl- 

 wind pace. Thirty years ago, even New York, Paris and London were 

 horse-car towns, with clerks nodding over pigskin ledgers, errand boys 

 playing marbles in the roadway, with no telephone, no rapid transit in 

 the modern sense, with scarcely any devices for making speed or saving 

 time. To-day, even London, the archetype of conservatism, is a whirl- 

 pool of motor-buses, speeding men and clamoring advertisements. 



Consequently, not merely what the business man, but what modern 

 business itself, demands of the high-school graduate is rational and 

 orderly speed. In the high school, in the schools below, in that larger 

 school, the community, and above all, in the boy's home, he must have 

 been trained to " go the pace," not of dissipation, but of modern industry. 



Since, however, no one can get speed, without a breakdown, out of 

 a weak or badly-built engine, so one can not get efficiency from a half- 



