Page:(Commercial character) The Joseph Fisher lecture in commerce, delivered at the University of Adelaide (IA commercialcharac00jessrich).pdf/10

6 the fiercest fighters. It is strange to consider the gradations of trade from retail to wholesale, wholesale to limited liability, and thence to the zenith, to that weird triumph of destructive and constructive intelligence and organizing power, the combine or trust. If the chief aim of the man of to-day is to be to make money—money as a means to sustain life, money to provide comforts, money to furnish luxuries, money to gratify a longing for artistic ostentation, money to deck our women with coloured crystals and costly fabrics, money to enable us to oppress and move our fellows as pawns on the chess board of life—why, let us face the music, and honestly admit not on six days, but on seven, that there is no God but Mammon, and Rockefeller is his prophet. For John D. Rockefeller is the greatest exponent of the art of making money since the days when money meant not houses, land, stocks, bonds, shares of sorts, or any of the manifold pecuniary symbols of to-day, but just cattle. A strange psychological study this same master of millions, a curious illustration of the doctrine of heredity, for I have read that his father was partly gambler, partly quack, possessed with not entirely disinterested views with regard to the proprietary rights of others; and that his mother was a lady with a Puritan upbringing. Mr. Rockefeller himself is a commercial Machiavelli, in whose sight the end, meaning the accumulation of unwieldy hoards, justifies any means to attain it, and is also a pillar of the Baptist Church. My experience of life teaches me that the man who does not make his Sunday professions square with his weekday actions is not necessarily a humbug in his own sight. It was said of Mr. Gladstone that he could convince most people of many