Business Education And Accountancy

rsuit has been fostered for untold ages by the traditions of the non-business classes, especially by the educated class. The prejudice against education, on the other hand, has been one of the most lively sentiments of the commercial community itself. The present movement in behalf of business training is making slow headway against the inertia of a great world-society bound together by hereditary ties, which in their inception and use were intended to resist educational progress. These prejudices, however, are doomed; they are dying, but they die hard. PREJUDICES OP THE EDUCATED AGAINST BUSINESS The prejudice against the pursuit of wealth is a bequeathment of antiquity; it is an inheritancefrom an age of social and political servility. A noted French writer, M. Courcelle Seneuil, thinks that the opinion of the ancients in this matter was founded at once upon an economic and a moral error. The moral error consisted in considering all commerce and industry as degrading and unworthy of the dignity of a freeman; the economic error consisted in believing that the grand total of wealth was not susceptible of augmentation or diminution. The first error was a logical sequence of the second. The Roman and the Greek philosophers, whose ideals were drawn from Sparta, considered the sum of worldly wealth as an almost invariable quantity. From this came the idea that any acquisition by an individual or a people was a loss to some other individual or people; by the philo...