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nydus/The Theory of Business EnterprisePublic
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Table of Contents

Chapter X

property. What it conserves, therefore, is the bourgeois \'irtue3 of solvency, thrift, and dissimulation. The nobler and more spectacular aristocratic virtues, with their correlative institutional furniture, are not in any sensible degree fortified by the habits of business life. Business life does not further the growth of manners and breeding, pride of caste, punctilios of " honor," or even religious fervor. (2) The salutary discipline of business life touches the bulk of the population, the working classes, in a progressively less intimate and less exjicting manner. It can, therefore, not serve to correct or even greatly to mitigate the matter-of-fact bias given these classes by the discipline of the machine process.

As a direct disciplinary factor the machine proceBa holds over the business employments, in that it touches larger classes of the community and inculcates its characteristic habits of thought more unremittingly. And any return to more archaic methods of industry, such as is sometimes advocated on artistic grounds, seems hopeless, since business interests do not countenance a discontinuance of machine methods. The machine methods that are corrupt-

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