Automatic Age

A N D T H E EN D IS N O T Y E T
Deep currents of commercial evolution are as irresistible, if
not so showy, as the dramatic tides of industrial revolution. To the
retaiier of 1895 the department store idea was as ominous as the
chain” plan is to the independent of our times. So the men of an
earlier day viewed with alarm the Hanseatic League, the East
ndia and Hudson’s Bay companies, and the organized merchant
adventurers of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
Yet against all dire forebodings and dismal prophecies the indi­
vidual has survived. The explanation then as now is the same.
Personal relations in trade will continue to be a bulwark against
which large combinations will batter in vain.
Nor does the personal relation apply only to the placid pool of
village life where every man, woman, child and dog is known and
called by name. No, the personal touch is as possible and practical
in the teeming impersonal life of the great city where neighbors
are strangers.
Out of the welter of discussion thirty years ago the most accu­
rate statement was:
And the end is not yet .
Each generation has its dreadful hippogriffs of change. Charles
* • Kettering, of General Motors, once remarked, ‘The average man
doesn’t like change, and the business man hates it a little more
than others.’
But change is the immutable law. The innovations of one age
become the familiar practices of the next. Revision, remodeling,
progress everywhere! The inexorable pressure of the new, the
fresh, the original!
We may defy, we may protest, we may issue ultimatums, we
may pass resolutions— even laws, we may sulk in silence, yet the
world does move and the directing force of human activity is for­
ward. The months of this new year are no more of a problem than
he twelve months of the past.
Human nature is still the same. The grasshopper and the ant
Pyeach their age-old sermons that Aesop wrote down. Possibly
here is some competition in which survival is not to the alert and
industrious. The oyster does not worry about competition.
But the eagle is still our national emblem.”
— M erle Thorpe in Nation's Business.
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