“Still, I would rather not venture upon it first,” said the lawyer. “Professor, what should you say was the first principle of business?”
“Buying in the cheapest market and selling in the dearest,” the professor promptly answered.
“We will pass the parson and the doctor and the novelist as witnesses of no value. They can’t possibly have any cognizance of the first principle of business; their affair is to look after the souls and bodies and fancies of other people. But what should you say it was?” he asked the banker.
“I should say it was an enlightened conception of one’s own interests.”
“And you?”
The manufacturer had no hesitation in answering: “The good of Number One, first, last, and all the time. There may be a difference of opinion about the best way to get at it; the long way may be the better, or the short way; the direct way or the oblique way, or the purely selfish way, or the partly selfish way; but if you ever lose sight of that end you might as well shut up shop. That seems to be the first law of nature, as well as the first law of business.”
“Ah, we mustn’t go to nature for our morality,” the minister protested.
“We were not talking of morality,” said the manufacturer; “we were talking of business.”
This brought the laugh on the minister, but the lawyer cut it short: “Well, then, I don’t really see why the trades-unions are not as business-like as the syndicates in their dealings with all those outside of themselves. Within themselves they practise an altruism of the highest order, but it is a tribal altruism; it is like that which prompts a Sioux to share his last mouthful with a starving Sioux, and to take the scalp of a starving Apache. How is it with your trades-unions in Altruria?” he asked my friend.
“We have no trades-unions in Altruria,” he began.