President Eliot on Corporations

President Eliot delivered an address on "The Ethics of managing Large Corporations" at the banquet of the Merchants Club of Chicago last Saturday evening.

Beginning with the importance of ethics in the conduct of every of everyday affairs President Eliot pointed out the evil of over-capitalization which, because of its effect on the state of mind of wage earners is one of the main causes of the existing industrial unrest. The promoting of companies, he said, should be rewarded for is skill and success in proportion to the amount of skill required to develop a new enterprise and to the gravity of the risks to be run, as well as in proportion to the amount of money invested in it. And directors in any business corporation ought to be men who understand the business of that corporation and not men who sell their names to a boar of whose work they know nothing.

Salaries of recent times overpay their recipients. The excuse for them has been that in conducting a large business the right man is cheap at any price and the wrong man dear at any price. Publicity is the best remedy for all evils of corporation management, provided that there is an honest and strenuous public opinion which will reform these evils.

In conclusion President Eliot said that corporations should provide their employees with those external conditions which will promote health, cheerfulness, and vigor in the working people. No corporate expenditure, he said, could be more productive or more profitable towards the improvement of the National character.