Finance, business and the business of life
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| B. C. Forbes |
Written by B.C. Forbes, business and financial editor of the New York American
From the introduction:
These articles have been written amid the hurly-burly of a busy newspaper office — and doubtless, show it. The responsibility — or blame — for their reproduction lies upon readers in different parts of the country, including numbers of ambitious young men, who have expressed a desire to possess them in book form.
Mr Hearst has kindly given me permission to issue this volume. I desire to thank him not only for this courtesy but for the privilege, during the last four years, of daily addressing, with untrammelled freedom, the largest family of newspaper readers in the country. That the articles have not been wholly useless has been generously testified by both employers and employees, as a few letters here reproduced show.
When the New York American's Business and Financial Department was organized, in January 1912, a definite, straight course of action was mapped out and has not knowingly been departed from. The opening article said: "The need for placing before the American public trustworthy information and sane views on business matters has become urgent, for not only are we rapidly developing into a commercial nation, but the great problems of today and tomorrow, financial, industrial, political, are destined to be settled, not by the capitalists who a few years ago exercised undue sway in shaping the country's affairs, nor by the oligarchy of politicians who lamentably failed to execute the will of the electorate, but by the People, the ordinary citizens — the mechanics, the clerks, the weavers, the farmers, the spinners, the salesmen, the ironworkers, the miners, the railwaymen and other toilers among our ninety-million population.
Commerce today is the supreme consideration of progressive governments. In olden times the likes and dis- likes of ambitious rulers instigated wars; now swords are drawn only on behalf of a business. If unhappily, Germany and Britain should ever declare war it will not be because of royal jealousies, but because of Germany's economic necessity for more land to till and more markets to serve.
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