Money Hungry A Brief Study of Commercial Immorality in the United States

An excerpt from the beginning of CHAPTER I(N.B.: This book was originally published in 1908): THE recent exposures of commercial immorality existing in high places, and the wide difference of opinion which exists concerning the degree in blameworthiness of the acts revealed, point to the conclusion that a rigidly correct attitude in business, and a clear understanding of what constitutes it, are far less prevalent in the community than is generally supposed. Large numbers of people are presumably honest in thought and in conduct, but there is no established and universally accepted code of correct business behavior-more particularly with respect to the finer shades of commercial integrity. Instead, there prevail only vague notions concerning the correctness of many acts which lie between the extremes of acknowledged theft and indubitable honesty. Recent revelations have disclosed crimes new neither in kind nor, altogether, in degree-for the same practices, although often exposed, have existed for many years in all their variety. But the general spread of commercial immorality among all classes of our people is of such comparatively recent occurrence that the writer has felt constrained to isolate and examine the causes to which it may be referred, and, if possible, to discover and point out the correctives which in time may be expected naturally to assert themselves, as well as those which society itself obviously should provide and apply. Towards loose commercial morals there has grown up a tolerance on the part of a cynically lenient public which has steadily sapped the char acters of men in positions of trust. It can hardly be denied that among men of this class, as well as among those whose responsibilities are less, the decay of probity has not only become epidemic, but is infectious as well. Those who are first affected seem easily to corrupt their associates, until loose interpretations of trust become habitual in the case not alone of individuals, but of widely extended industrial and financial circles. The recent increase in the size and number of aggregations of capital, which men of relaxed morality regard as belonging to their individual owners only in an abstract sense, has furnished to such men a ready opportunity for the gratification of those predatory instincts which are inevitably coincident with the decline of personal integrity. An examination of the prevalent forms of corruption will show that these embrace what may be termed intermediate degrees of vice, some of them approaching more closely than others to that fully developed form known to the law as larceny. While most of them escape the statutes' definition of criminality, nevertheless, in greater or less degree, all are native to that shady hinterland of crime into which the hand of the law scarcely as yet has shown sufficient cunning to reach.