The business man who constructs, enlarges, and conducts a modern competitive business, performs a good many functions which call for various mental and moral qualities.He must plan the structure of his business-determine its size, the sizes and sorts of premises and plant he will require, the place which he can best occupy; he must get reliable managers and assistants, and a good supply of skilled labour of various kinds.He must watch markets and be a master of the arts of buying and selling: he must have tact in managing employees and a quick eye for improvements in methods of production and of marketing: he must be a practical financier, and must follow the course of current history so far as it affects trade prospects.
If we take the most generalised type of modern business man, the financier who directs the flow of capital into its various channels, or the capitalist who lives by managing his investments, we find the business ability in its most refined form.For these men are the general directors of economic energy, operating through joint stock enterprise.
The human costs of this work of speculation and direction are difficult to assess.Such terms as labour and industry are alien from the atmosphere of these high economic functions.At the same time the strain of excitement, and, at certain seasons, of prolonged intellectual effort and attention, the sense of responsibility for critical decisions, involve a heavy nervous wear and tear.Probably the heaviest human cost, however, is a certain moral callousness and recklessness involved in the financial struggle.
For the paper symbols of industrial power, which financiers handle, are so abstract in nature and so remote from the human fates which they direct, that the chain of causation linking stocks and shares with human work and human life is seldom realised.How should the temporary holder of a block of shares in Peruvian rubber concern himself with the conditions of forced labour in the Amazon forests, or the group formed to float a foreign government loan consider the human meaning of the naval policy it is intended to finance?
Except in so far as they affect the values of their holdings and the price at which they can market the shares, the human significance of the business or political enterprises which are concrete entities behind finance, has no meaning for them.These men and their economic activities are further removed from human costs and utilities than any other sort of business men.In view of the immense human consequences which follow from their conduct this aloofness is a demoralising condition.
So occult and so suspect are many of the operations of financiers as somewhat to obscure the importance of the actual economic services they render to our industrial system.General finance is the governor of the economic engine: it distributes economic power among the various industries, allocating the capital of the saving classes to road-making, irrigation, mining, the equipment of new cities, the establishment of staple manufactures, and the supply of financial resources for various purposes of government.
The finest business instincts, the most rapid, accurate, and complex powers of inference and prophecy, the best balance of audacity and caution, the largest and best-informed imagination, are needed for this work of general finance.It is intensely interesting, and exerts a fascination which is traceable to a combination of appeals.The chief field for high economic adventure, it evokes most fully the combative qualities of force and cunning;it is full of hazard and fluctuation, with large, rapid gains and losses:
it neither requires nor permits close personal contact with the troublesome or sordid details of industrial or commercial life.
Such is the work of the financier and the skilled investor, who found capitalistic enterprises and deal in their stocks and shares over the whole area of the industrial world.It is the most intellectual and, in one sense, the most 'moral' of business activities, involving at once the finest arts of calculation and the fullest faith in human nature.
