Business Men Need Education

BUSINESS MEN NEED EDUCATION
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Corporations Create Demand for Educated Men
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JAMES B. DILL'S ADDRESS
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Before Conference on Higher Commercial Education This Afternoon

James B. Dill, the eminent corporation attorney, delivered an address at the Conference on Higher Commercial Education Friday afternoon. His subject was: "What, from the view-point of a Corporation lawyer, can a university contribute to prepare for business life?"

In opening his address the speaker said he would endeavor to demonstrate the proposition that "the business lawyer of today is a business man, specialized along the lines of legal principles."

As his first point he asserted that the theory that a university could contribute nothing to prepare young men for business life was no longer to be entertained. He continued:

"It takes about two years from his graduation for the college man to realize that education is but a preliminary to the business of extracting trade dollars from the emergencies of life.

"Advisedly the term 'trade dollars' is used, meaning thereby the dollar to obtain which a man toils and which he has for value received, distinguishing it from the dollar which has been left him by his father, distinguishing it from the dollar which he may win in speculation or by chance."

Mr. Dill made as his second point
THE CHANGE IN THE ATTITUDE OF UNIVERSITIES.

The conception of college faculties as to what should be included in the university education has within the last 25 years undergone important modification, as shown by the changes of curriculum, the speaker pointed out, a growing recognition being accorded by the faculties to what he termed “commercialism in the best sense of the word"; and he referred to the increasing frequency of the election of laymen to college presidencies always previously filled by clergymen as another significant mark of the recognition of commercialism by the universities.

Here Mr. Dill paid a tribute to the western universities, which he said had taken the lead in this matter and to which much of the credit of the common sense movement was due.

The next point made was that, while the universities were meeting the demand of the business world in preparing educated business men, on the other hand the business world was meeting the universities more than half way in the recognition of the value of a university training as preparatory to a business career. The speaker said:

"The situation of the business world today is summarized in the proposition that there never was a time in the history of this country when the individual dollar was as weak as at the present time, and when the individual man has been as potent an element as he is today."

Speaking of the
REQUIREMENTS OF MODERN BUSINESS.

Mr. Dill said:

"The Corporation movement has tended to create a demand for educated men. It has rearranged men, and not crowded them out. This rearrangement is a blessing, as tending to prevent misplacement of men, to check early in their career those who may have been misplaced and put them in the proper path.

"The corporation movement has eliminated the rich man's sons and relative as a controlling factor in great business companies, because, while in an individual business the father often is willing, if necessary, to sacrifice to a large degree the good of the business to the good of the son, and while, in the second place, he fails to discern as sharply as would others for him the defects of his son or relative, nevertheless, the converse is true in large combinations, because each man scrutinizes the action of the other as possibly tending to impair the value of his own property in the general undertaking and no man is as tender of his associate's son in a corporation as he would be of his own son in a business enterprise under his own absolute control."

The question was often asked, said the speaker, whether the law today is a profession or a business. He asserted that the great orators were disappearing from the legal profession and their places being taken by great thinkers; and the successful lawyer today was not, except in rare instances, a Webster, a Calhoun or a Choate, exercising the compelling charm of eloquence, but rather found his higher sphere and his greater use as a special partner of the business man. He added:

"The successful lawyer of today is not the man who is the last resort of the business man, to whom the business man appeals when he is on the verge of destruction. On the contrary, he is consulted at the outset and throughout the progress of every enterprise of magnitude, that by reason of his special legal experience along business lines he may, primarily, make the undertakings to the business man of more profit than without his assistance, and, secondarily, may avoid the possibility of attack and litigation.

"It is not so much the part of the business lawyer to save the dying business man and the dying business as to keep his client and the business in sound legal health.

"The more nearly the lawyer brings his profession into touch with business methods, the greater will be his success, and the profession is today beginning to realize the fact and to act upon it."

Analyzing the conditions which have created the present demand for corporation lawyers, Mr. Dill said:

"The trend of business is unmistakably toward combination, involving a heavier individual responsibility, a broader sweep of vision – covering the markets of the world – a more complex organization of the business and prompt solution of or decision upon intricate problems, than had ever been required of the business man of the past.

"So complicated has become the conduct of business affairs and so large the volume of business corporations that the corporation lawyer has been evolved, complementing the corporation manager.

"The Corporation lawyer today is the right hand of the Corporation management, an integral part of the body corporate.

"And so it is becoming the rule to find the general counsel an executive officer of the Corporation, often vice president and general counsel, or chairman of the board and general counsel."

The speaker emphasized again the statement that it was the part of the Corporation lawyer to deal with business propositions.

The man essaying to be a successful Corporation lawyer, whose ability was limited to telling people what they could not do, he said, would find himself a failure; the successful corporation lawyer must not be a negative man, but a positive and affirmative man, not only showing the way to accomplish a business purpose, but often leading the way.

He added that no man was fitted to become a good Corporation lawyer unless he had good business common sense and business perception, coupled with a training acquired preferably in the university; and that he must be a practical man first and a theoretical man secondarily.

In the opinion of the speaker the universities graduated many a man they ought never to have allowed to receive a diploma; it was the duty of universities, he declared, to have practical men in their faculties, men acquainted with the necessities of the careers for which they intended to fit the undergraduate.

That it was the business of these practical faculties to counsel the young men, to place them in their proper direction and to discover for many a man what he would otherwise himself regretfully discover later in life, that he was a "misplaced man."

"The world is full of instances of men who have failed in business because they were 'misplaced men'," continued the speaker.

"Few men having come to a realization of the fact that they have started upon the wrong course, entered upon the wrong lines of work, have the courage to turn around and start over again, beginning at the bottom.

"No class of men are more likely to make this mistake than university graduates. The first thing, therefore, that a university education in the hands of practical instructors should do is to stop 'misplaced men' from continuing in the wrong course. It is to keep out of the law school the man who is intended for the ministry. It is to keep the man out of the theological seminary the bent of whose mind leans to the law. The great thing that a university education can do for a man intending to go into business is to start him in the right direction in time."

The final point made by the speaker was that a university could teach a man that
MENTAL LOAFING

was fatal to business success. The university should teach this lesson sharply, and by refusing to graduate such men, and by stopping them early in their careers might save them from the perils which would come to them later. In Mr. Dill's opinion the man who learned to be a mental loafer during his course in the university had acquired more harm than could be counterbalanced by all the education he might have managed to obtain.

"The world is not in want of men modeled after the fashion of the dollar watch, which stopped running when its owner and master stopped winding it.

"Universities desiring to efficiently prepare men for business life should carefully consider the question of the influence of the instructors upon the pupil in after life.

"The vital question to the young man in after years is his character, integrity and strength, mental and moral. Not so much whether he has absorbed so much Greek, Latin or mathematics, but what impress has the instructor and instruction made upon the character, mental and moral, of the university man.

"The business need of the present time is not so much for polished scientists and litterateurs, although they have their places, as for young men of rugged individuality, mental and moral strength.

"In a word, the business interests of today demand, not more polish on the blade, but more temper in the steel."