[1] The test was scripted by Herbert J. Taylor, an American from Chicago, as he set out to save the Club Aluminum Products Distribution Company from bankruptcy.
He explained: The first job was to set policies for the company that would reflect the high ethics and morals God would want in any business.
What was needed was a simple, easily remembered guide to right conduct - a sort of ethical yardstick- which all of us in the company could memorize and apply to what we thought, said and did.
Twenty years later, by applying the Four-Way Test, the company repaid its debts and generously paid its shareholders.
Never changed, the twenty-four-word test remains today a central part of the permanent Rotary structure throughout the world, and is held as the standard by which all behavior should be measured.