Have you ever thought of a very peculiar situation in the theorizing by scholars? That little or no provision has been made for action, doing, accomplishing, administration? The one vital flow of effort necessary to progress, even to existence, has not been brought into any of the philosophic systems in the two or three thousand years of effort.

It was at Harvard in the period 1878–1907 that a start was made along a new line. This was the conception and elaboration of a philosophy that provided a place for action, even for business administration.

Few aspects of business show greater change within the past hundred years than does advertising. The reader accustomed to the advertisements of the modern day is immediately struck, when he starts turning the pages of a pre-Civil War paper, by the deadly uniformity and limited appeal of the earlier advertising technique.

An occasional iconoclast among the earlier merchants only serves to accentuate the impression that a departure from the accepted forms of the period made a business man suspect in the eyes of his associates.

Herewith are reproduced a picture and a quotation—two sources of information on the ships of the first great commercial sea-empire known to history. The home of the empire was Phoenicia on the east coast of the Aegean. Its people were Semites. Just off the Great Road of the caravan traffic between Egypt and the fertile lands of the Euphrates, the Phoenicians took to boats instead of camels. At first cautiously paddling in their crude dugouts from headland to headland, they in time built larger and more adequate boats, which enabled them to make the Aegean their market. In time, also, they planted colonies farther west, which became rich and strong long before Rome had risen to strength. The Periplus of Hanno, which tells of exploring down the west coast of Africa with a view to planting a colony, is a great story of adventure. By the sixth century B. C., the commerce of the Phoenicians embraced the far reaches of the known world.

The business man has to adapt his business constantly to changing conditions. It must have seemed to the American importer of British goods in the first half of the nineteenth century that there were nothing but changing conditions. Nathan Trotter, of the Philadelphia firm of Nathan Trotter & Co., began doing business as a freight-renting importer of British leathers, woolens, and metal goods in the period before the War of 1812. Those were the days when an importer earned an importer's profit. Supply could not keep pace with demand; shipments came in the spring and in the fall, and payments were correspondingly concentrated. The risk involved, particularly in price changes over so long a time between order and receipt of goods, and the interest on capital invested entitled him to an importer's profit.