CHAPTER XXVI. CHARACTERISTICS OF BUSINESS LIFE. THE essential and unchangeable element of all business, both ancient and modern, is barter. In this respect we do not differ from the rudest savages. Our barter is more complicated, has to do with vastly more articles, and is facilitated by our currency; but, like the trade of the earliest nations, it is still the exchange of one product of industry for another. If we want specimens of the old jog-trot methods of barter, we have only to go through the bazaars of Egypt, where many hours are spent in coming to terms about the simplest transaction. If we want specimens of the modern way, let us turn into a stock-broker's office where a telegram arrives ordering £50,000 of stock. In order to acquit yourselves well in this modern market, you should take notes of the characteristics of the world in which you will have to do your buying and selling. The market is very much crowded. There are plenty of sellers, plenty of buyers, and plenty of goods to be sold. Business is not now the leisurely old-fashioned kind of exchange which it once was. There is hardly time for a pinch of snuff in the pauses of conversation, and remarks on the state of the weather are considered superfluous. It is to be hoped that the pernicious habit of adjourning to the nearest publichouse to discuss a bargain over glasses of ale is passing away. Such slow methods are not favoured. This change is deprecated by many; but, on the whole, it is a good one. It is better to be briskly engaged in work than to dawdle through the day's engagements. When a thing can be done in six words, why waste sixty? The danger is that we may try to crowd too much into business hours, and waste nervous energy and ruin health. But whether the change is for the better or for the worse, it is a fact, and should be looked in the face. Business now means keener competition with others than it once did. Monopoly has received its death-blow. Free trade has made all the nations our competitors. The tradesman must be on the alert. He cannot afford to be idle or unconcerned. He is not in a position to keep incompetent hands in his establishment. The new state of things is a call to all to better themselves. There is a new and a fierce struggle for existence, in which the weak, the incompetent, and the indolent must go to the wall. Energy is the first necess.ty in a business life, whatever the position which is filled. The times call loudly for competent men. If this be so, business education is a prime necessity. How far the elements of this education could be introduced at school, both among boys and girls, is a question well worthy of consideration among reformers. Of course all school education is a preparation more or less direct for the shop and the office. Yet the preparation is too abstract. If boys could play at shop; if they could keep imaginary ledgers; if they could draw, accept, and discount bills on one another, and go through a few of the ordinary processes of common commercial life, they would not find the world so strange to them when they first enter upon it. When however that world is entered upon, the real education begins. It is by remembering this that a young man prepares himself for the actual contest of life. Some seem to think that business methods will soak through the pores of their skin. But these methods are as hard to learn as the propositions of Euclid, and the mind should be thoroughly given to the process. The apprentice U |