Now, I think that I have said enough to justify my belief that these great problems of our social life are not of a kind to be settled off-hand by violent or radical legislation. They are not to be settled by any one scheme or by any one plan. The only way to approach them is by careful and conscientious thought, a minute examination of the facts at first hand and a rigid determination to act toward corporations and business interests in general in the same spirit of unswerving honesty that you would wish to display to a comrade or to a friend and that you would wish to be displayed toward yourselves. You will find that honesty is the royal road to success in commercial life, and it is also the royal road to all reform in our communal life. Do not go out
into the world with any expectation that you will be required to surrender the ideals that you have formed in your youth, or that you will be asked to choose between honor and success. Those ideals will be the greatest capital with which you can be endowed. They will attract to you everything that makes life desirable and without them you can have neither self-respect nor the respect of others.
And as a last word let me recommend you not to be carried away by those gusts of prejudice and passion that sweep periodically through the community. There is a contagion in these things that it is hard to resist, and so much that to-day passes for thought is not thought at all, but merely the automatic, unreflecting acceptance of wild theories that are enunciated with so much force that they seem to be almost axioms. Your study of history will show you that the world has always been subject to these waves of emotion, that are sometimes religious, sometimes political, and seem for the time to carry everything before them. We are passing through such a period now, a period of intense unrest, of revolt against conditions that we ourselves made, against methods that we ourselves created and sanctioned. I advise you to look askance upon every movement that in the language of the day is called popular. Do not accept a theory or a doctrine because it is popular, but on the other hand do not reject it for that reason. Do not permit yourselves to be carried off your intellectual feet by indignation or by protest. Demand of every political theory that it stand and deliver its credentials, and before you allow it to pass into the realm of your adoption, see to it that you understand it in all its bearings and that you have traced its results so far as is possible to your foresight; let the final test be one of human justice and of honesty, and then with courage use your power to aid in the formation of public opinion, remembering that public opinion is after all the great controlling force.
Transcriber's Note.
The typographical error “resistent” has been corrected. Variations of hyphenation from the original document have been retained.