The principles and standards that actually obtain in competition constitute in any nation the core of the religion of the people. One might say coöperation of course, but what makes coöperation powerful and what selects the people who shall lead coöperation—what gives it character, dignity and power, is the thing in each man which inspires him to find a way to do or not to do certain things—when he competes.
Competition—the way a man threads his way through the men who compete with him—would constitute the highest, purest test of a man's sense of spiritual values—the real monastery of modern life.
All any man can do, all society can do with some people is either to refuse to compete with them, ostracize them, socially and industrially, or clap them into jail.
There always must be these people who cannot stand in line in a queue and be fair. The Government, the police and the draft have to deal with them. As for the rest of us, competition—fair, manly, sporting competition, keeps us straight, gives us the manlier and nobler virtue, the knowledge of ourselves and others that make coöperation a noble as well as practical course of procedure.
The way a man runs a church or any disinterested enterprise is not to be compared as a test of the man's real spiritual or religious value to the state—to the way he runs an interested enterprise or business.
If I were the rich young man in the New Testament I would not have sold all my goods to feed the poor—as that particular person (being what he was) was advised to. I would hold on to my money—and found a religious order with it. I would make a whip of cords of my money and my brains woven together and would drive out the peddlers, the economic fiddlers, the moral and business idiots out of the Temple. I would do it not by being a pure, sterilized, holy-looking person, but by having more imagination in business, by using higher levels and higher voltage of human motive power in business than they can use, by having more brains about human nature than they have, and by my power to get the public to be religious, i.e., my power as a sheer matter of business, to make the public prefer, as a matter of course, my way of competing in business until it drives out and makes absent-minded, mooning, feeble and shortsighted, theirs.
This is not the kind of thing that I happen to have the natural technique or gift to do—to found a live deep natural religious order like this, but there are thousands of men I know and that other men know in America, who have the natural typical American technique for putting their higher gifts to work in business and who are crowding to the wall men who can only use their lower ones, and the power, the opportunities that go with these men are daily being outlined by events and daily being sketched out before our eyes.
The way to be a prophet and to interpret and establish in a nation is to lead in the business world to-day in establishing principles of competition, which exalt and interpret human nature, free the common sense, the will, the glory and the religion of the people.
The way to be a President, the next four years, is to use the White House and all the resources of the Government to coöperate with and back up this type of American business man.