Bismarck daily tribune. [volume] (Bismarck, Dakota [N.D.]) 1881-1916, 1905-08-14

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organizations rather than point the
finger at the man or men and specify
the wrong. But this is too easy, and it
is too harmless. Our national evils
are personal evils and reform must
begin with educated men and women.
We need, we must have character.
Many men of education, of power,
financial and political, seem to develop
a double-barrelled conscience, one for
business use and another for the in
dividual life. This Is fraud.
I say that the man who attempts to
do business upon one basis of morals
and live as an individual upon another
basis is fraud.
The man who would not cheat in a
$3.50 transaction but would do so in a
million-dollar deal is living on false
basis.
If any man attempts to pluck his
heart out of his living body, hoping to
replace it without becoming a corpse
and staying corpse, he makes a
physical mistake. The man who at
tempts to take his conscience out of
his body as he enters his banking
house, or his business house, or
who, when he attends directors meet.
ings, or syndicate conference, at.
tempts to leave his conscience on the
door step, like a half-burned cigar,
while he attends to business, will find
nothing but a cold remnant when he
returns-a dead conscience
The practice of doing things. r
permitting things to be done by men
In syndicates or as members of cor.
porate aggregation which the individ.
ual would not do in his private life,
upon the theory that syndicate and
corporate morality is one thing, and
individual morality is another, results
In the total suppression OF individual
honesty and morality.
In short, the man who inserts the
plank in his theological belief that
his corporate acts will be judged by
one standard and his individual acts
by another, here or hereafter, makes a
mistake.
No man can have two standards of
morals, one for his individual life, and
the other for his business life without
the inevitable result, that the baser
standard will prevail. As a man is in
his business life, so will he become in
his private life.
The Consequences to Us.
The direct result, the inevitable re-
suit, the logical conclusion of a false
standard of morality in business is the
corruption of our laws and their In
depreciation.
The man who in his business life
shields himself under the fact that he
is but one Of an aggregation, a mem
Der OF a syndicate, an officer of a
corporation, director of trust, the
man, who takes as his code of morals
that which has been publicly an
nounced by many men, viz, that GER
tain things were done because they
were not forbidden by the statutes
that man is sowing the seeds of
socialism, despotism and anarchy.
The man who makes the only metes
and bounds of right and wrong the
enactments of the legislature and the
Interpretation thereof by the courts.
has for his God, his religion, his con-
science and his guide, a movable
standard and the tendency of the
movement is downward.
That man in reality asserts might is
right SO long as it is not forbidden by
statute; that the exercise of merciless
power is justified so long as it has not
been expressly prohibited by human
| law.
Man Is always keen to invent a new
way Of perpetuating a profitable
wrong, and if the wrong to him is a
wrong only when, if and after it has
been so defined by the legislature, he
endeavors to deal with the legislature.
The impairment of our legislature
follows.
II might is right SO long as it is not
forbidden by statute, then if the
statute is in the way the next step is
to get it out of the way.
Statutes are man-made Foundations
and men are human; the majority OF
them are influenced by their environ
ment and their concomitants, hence
power and capital supply the con.
comitants which result in the removal
by legislatures and municipal bodies
of the offensive restrictions.
will not pass by the responsibility
OF the lawyer in these matters.
1t is said that when man retains a
lawyer he retains the lawyers con-
science as well.
Many a lawyer has sunk his individ-
ualism under his retainer T,ass fra-