The Book of Business Etiquette | Page 2

without boasting. It would be a great pity if he
were not.
Without trying to settle the question as to whether he is good or bad
(and he really can be pigeon-holed no better than any one else) we have
to accept this: He is the biggest factor in the American commonwealth
to-day. It follows then, naturally, that what he thinks and feels will
color and probably dominate the ideas and the ideals of the rest of the
country. Numbers of our magazines--and they are as good an index as
we have to the feeling of the general public--are given over completely
to the service or the entertainment of business men (the T. B. M.) and
an astonishing amount of space is devoted to them in most of the
others.
It may be, and as a matter of fact constantly is, debated whether all this
is good for the country or not. We shall not go into that. It has certainly
been good for business, and in considering the men who have
developed our industries we have to take them, and maybe it is just as
well, as they are and not as we think they ought to be.
There was a time when the farmer was the principal citizen. And the
politician ingratiated himself with the people by declaring that he too
had split rails and followed the plow, had harvested grain and had
suffered from wet spells and dry spells, low prices, dull seasons, hunger
and hardship. This is still a pretty sure way to win out, but there are
others. If he can refer feelingly to the days when he worked and
sweated in a coal mine, in a printing shop, a cotton, wool, or silk mill,
steel or motor plant, he can hold his own with the ex-farmer's boy. We
have become a nation of business men. Even the "dirt" farmer has

become a business man--he has learned that he not only has to produce,
he must find a market for his product.
In comparing the business man of the present with the business man of
the past we must remember that he is living in a more difficult world.
Life was comparatively simple when men dressed in skins and ate roots
and had their homes in scattered caves. They felt no need for a code of
conduct because they felt no need for one another. They depended not
on humanity but on nature, and perhaps human brotherhood would
never have come to have a meaning if nature had not proved
treacherous. She gave them berries and bananas, sunshine and soft
breezes, but she gave them trouble also in the shape of wild beasts, and
savages, terrible droughts, winds, and floods. In order to fight against
these enemies, strength was necessary, and when primitive men
discovered that two were worth twice as much as one they began to join
forces. This was the beginning of civilization and of politeness. It rose
out of the oldest instinct in the world--self-preservation.
When men first organized into groups the units were small, a mere
handful of people under a chief, but gradually they became larger and
larger until the nations of to-day have grown into a sort of world
community composed of separate countries, each one supreme in its
own domain, but at the same time bound to the others by economic ties
stronger than sentimental or political ones could ever be. People are
now more dependent on one another than they have ever been before,
and the need for confidence is greater. We cannot depend upon one
another unless we can trust one another.
The American community is in many respects the most complex the
world has ever seen, and the hardest to manage. In other countries the
manners have been the natural result of the national development. The
strong who had risen to the top in the struggle for existence formed
themselves into a group. The weak who stayed at the bottom fell into
another, and the bulk of the populace, which, then as now, came
somewhere in between, fell into a third or was divided according to
standards of its own. Custom solidified the groups into classes which
became so strengthened by years of usage that even when formal

distinctions were broken down the barriers were still too solid for a
man who was born into a certain group to climb very easily into the one
above him. Custom also dictated what was expected of the several
classes. Each must be gracious to those below and deferential to those
above. The king, because he was king, must be regal. The nobility must,
noblesse oblige, be magnificent, and as for the rest of the people, it did
not matter much so long as they worked hard and stayed quiet.