AN ABSTRACT of the RegulATION OF BUSINESS MANAGEMENT OF MITSUI GOMEI KAISHA (FIRM OF MITSUI PARTNERSHIP) THE HOLDING COMPANY Art. 1. The Executive Partners shall conduct the business of the Company. In addition they shall supervise the affairs of other Companies of which the Company are the principal shareholders; they shall also endeavour to encourage and promote the establishment and furtherance of mutual good understanding amongst such Companies last mentioned, and also that the Company shall be in good touch with all of them. Art. 3. The Executive Partners shall call for the opinion of Councillors on all matters brought up for discussion. Art. 5. The Executive Partners may appoint Partners, Councillors, Managing Directors, Secretaries, or any employees of the Company as Directors or Auditors of other Companies in which the Company are shareholders. Art. 7. The Company may appoint one General Adviser. Art. 9. The General Adviser is to be elected and appointed from one who has been in the closest touch with the Mitsui family and concerned therewith for almost a lifetime, and one who by his many years' experience and knowledge receives the unanimous trust of all the Partners. Art. 10. The Company shall have three to five Councillors. XXIV A REPRESENTATIVE BUSINESS OF THE NE of the chief differences between the commerce of the sixteenth century and of the twentieth lies in the wonderful and complicated organizations of the present day. Their magnitude makes even the largest of those of which we have been reading seem insignificant. The Phoenicians a thousand years before the Christian era were fearless, progressive and splendid, but we read of no gigantic combination of brain and muscle organized as one house. They traded individually, as did the Venetians and even the great Fuggers of Augsburg, leaving no trace of that ability which selects and teaches others to assist in any remarkable enterprise. To do business in those days was more difficult in many ways, but easier in others. The field was unexploited. The prizes were sought by fewer people. Combined specialization had not become the important factor it is to-day. Merchants were bankers, shipowners, mineowners, coiners of the country's money, as well as makers and traders in merchandise; but in all these channels of activity they themselves transacted the business in their own counting-house, and we have seen how the famous "Golden Counting-House" of the Fuggers in Augsburg received within its spacious walls the emissaries of kings. Governments and merchants were then more closely affiliated. There was less money in the world and less need for money. Commerce was in its infancy. Competition was infinitely less, and the terrific effort to get business which now permeates the commercial world was a thing unknown. Where one Jacob Fugger, Cosimo de Medici, de la Pole or Gresham strove for success we have now literally thousands of keen, clever men as fearless, as progressive and as determined as they. Money not only for the few but for the many is the prize which is sought, and for this prize is the race now perhaps swifter, the battle keener, the game bigger than has been any race, battle, or game since the world began; and commerce in its broader sense is the medium through which this prize is won. And the day of physical adventure is over. The day of the bold Phoenician, the fearless trader who with his caravan threaded his way into unknown lands; the day when the early English merchant-sailor trusted and risked his fortune in one small boat, and sought out markets and trading points in undiscovered corners of the earth-these days are gone for ever. The earth has all been "discovered," its lands and peoples are known, and its oceans charted. The merchant who desires to transact business abroad has at his call every detail of information regarding every country, island, or people. The world is smaller. Steam and electricity, great ships, railways and many recorded experiences have made it so; but as the circumference of this earth has seemed to diminish its commercial undertakings have grown greater. Men of genius and wonderful nerve and determination, who in the Dark Ages would have been conquering princes, have in these later years thrown their ability into Commerce and have conquered, not territory and slaves, but trade and its child, money, from and every part of the world where trade was to be found. any The man of business of the twentieth century differs enormously from the merchant-adventurer of the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in his methods and the tools with which he works. The last hundred years have shown him that one man cannot do it all, and that anyone who attempts to hold within his two hands all the threads of a great business of the present day fails to achieve the greatest success. No one has more than a given number of minutes in every day and year in which he can work, and no matter how great his ability he will soon find his limitations. If, however, he uses that ability in finding and teaching others as capable as himself, or in certain details even more so, the limits to his sphere of operations are hard to set. This ability, therefore, to organize, to breathe into others that fire of enthusiasm, that quality of judgment, that spirit of progress, has long been considered by thinking men of commerce as the final and greatest of all qualities, the test of supreme commercial genius. In an abridged description of trade such as the present, the great Distributing House or Department Store, so called for the want of a better title, may be permitted to represent the modern spirit of organization. It is to the writer the most interesting of all forms of business, and by its constant and necessary publicity it occupies perhaps the most conspicuous place in the public mind. It usually employs the greatest number of people, and must seek employés of the higher grade of intelligence. It frequently, therefore, pays out in salaries and wages a larger sum weekly than any other single business, and is more often approached by those seeking opportunity to work than any other. Its daily transactions are large in volume, its cash handled is very great. It is intimately associated with every family in the community in supplying them with the necessities of life, and thus by force of circumstances enters into the daily life of the city in which it is. We can perhaps best appreciate the magnitude of this modern development when we remember that a hundred years ago the selling of goods at retail had settled into a system of small shops, each confining itself to a particular class of merchandise. The comprehensive trade of the sixteenth century had been divided into small sections, and the smaller the section the smaller was the study, the amount of experience and the capital required. The retail trade of shop-keeping became in consequence a petty and insignificant undertaking, necessitating little risk, little profit and little ability, and so generally was this fact accepted that the name of shop-keeper became a term of reproach and of disrespect. Adam Smith, the great economist, in referring to the public question, wrote: "To found a great empire for the sole purpose of raising up a people of customers may at first sight appear a project fit only for a nation of shop-keepers." Napoleon too is frequently quoted as referring to England as only a nation of shop-keepers," but we can find no authority for putting these words into his mouth. That the expression carried with it a slur is evident, for shop-keeping in those days was not merchantry, the buying and selling on a comprehensive scale, but was small trading, insignificant and extremely unimportant. In all parts of the world this condition existed till about half a century ago, when a few shop-keepers became inoculated with the spirit of enterprise. They grew beyond the little shop by the simple process of addition, and came to recognize the building which was to house the expanding business as something of importance to be thought of and be made better. Then it was that department stores in their early stages began to appear, and from then until now they have continued to develop in every direction, and no man can foresee their final form and size, or say where they will stop. No one who knows the ramifications of these great modern stores can feel for a moment that they have reached their highest point of achievement. The room for improvement is still the biggest room in the world, and all that is now done means a step forward into a new and hitherto undreamed of realm, and to this much of the excitement and interest |