Page:Discipline and the Derelict (1921).pdf/74

 vertised his business and attempted to increase his trade by handing out half pint bottles of whiskey to all thirsty corners. We live in a dry time, so that although these little courtesies are not universally appealing they do in some satisfy a long felt want. I do not suppose the firm whose goods were thus being advertised knew the exact methods which were being employed by their solicitor, but he was known as one of the shrewdest and most successful salesmen on the road. A young landscape gardener who has been out of college for only a few years told me a short time ago that he seldom put in an order for shrubs to carry out the work of park planting in which he is now engaged without one or more salesmen offering to split profits with him to get his order. These dishonest ways of promoting trade are not unknown to many undergraduates, and though they are not universal they are far too common to make it easy to develop healthy business principles.

As soon as the undergraduate begins to do business in college he finds that competition among local merchants and other business men is keen and that a good percentage of them are out for the business and are willing to pay to get it. It is not so strange, then, that the young inexperienced student should fall a victim to the subtle arguments which over-enthusiastic solicitors and business men are willing to present in order to get their orders. "They practically all do it in one way or another," the representative of a big business house said to me not long ago, "and if one wants to do business, one has to come across. It isn't always money, of course, which we put up, but it is the equivalent of money."