[Speech of Rev. Dr. Noah Hunt Schenck at the 110th annual banquet
of the Chamber of Commerce of the State of New York, New York City,
May 14, 1878. In introducing Dr. Schenck, the President, Samuel D.
Babcock, said: "The loose manner in which the Dinner Committee have
conducted their business is now becoming evident. The chairman has
got considerably mixed on the toasts. You may recollect that the
toast to which Dr. Chapin responded referred to twins [Rev. Dr.
Edwin H. Chapin had spoken to the toast 'Commerce and Capital, twin
forerunners of civilization and philanthropy'], and here is one
that refers to matrimony, and it is very evident that this one
ought to have preceded the other. [Laughter and applause.] Eighth
regular toast, 'Truth and Trade: those whom God hath joined
together, let no man put asunder.'"]
MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN:--It were an ambitious effort to
hold the attention of this distinguished body directly after its ears
had been ravished by the eloquent deliverances of the finished orators
who have just preceded me. In fact, I can scarcely imagine why you
enlist another voice from Brooklyn, unless it be to show that there is a
possibility of exhausting Brooklyn, and you would make it my sad office
to afford you the illustration. [Applause.]
The Chairman said at the beginning that the best speeches were to be at
the last. You have already discovered that this was designed for irony,
for thus far the speeches have been incomparable, but mine is to be the
beginning of the end. [Laughter and applause.]
I know that what I say is true when I charge the Chairman with irony,
for do not I feel his iron entering my soul? [Laughter and applause.] It
is an act of considerable temerity, even though the ground has been so
gracefully broken by the Rev. Dr. Chapin, for a clergyman to rise
before this common-sense body of three hundred business men (unless we
had you in our churches), for you well know that this precious quality
of common sense is supposed to have its habitat almost entirely with
business men, and rarely with the clergy.
I know full well that the men of the pulpit are held to be wanting in
practical knowledge, and that we know but little of the dark and devious
ways of this naughty world. So that, rising here, I feel as if I were
but a little one among a thousand, and yet I would venture to submit
that the clergy are not wholly unpractical. Nay, I sometimes am led to
think that the men of my cloth are the most practical, common-sense
business men in the world. [Laughter and applause.]
There is certainly no class of men who can make so little go so far, who
can live so comfortably on such small incomes, who can fatten on
pastures where the members of this Chamber of Commerce would starve.
[Applause and laughter.] There is no class of men that go through life
in such large proportion without bankruptcy. [Laughter and applause.]
While 25,000 merchants in the United States during the four years from
1871 to 1875 failed in business, with liabilities amounting to
$800,000,000 (I quote statistics from accepted authority), I do not
believe that one-quarter of that number of clergymen failed [laughter
and applause], or that their liabilities amounted to anything like that
sum. [Laughter and applause.] I have seen the estimate that eighty-five
per cent. of merchants fail within two years after they embark in
business, notwithstanding their common sense, and that only three per
cent, make more money in the long run than is enough for a comfortable
livelihood.
Having thus attempted to fortify my waning "Dutch courage" by an
off-hand attack upon my hospitable entertainers, and having in some
sense, even though it be Pickwickian, vindicated my cloth, let me go on
for a moment and cut my garment according to it. [Laughter and
applause.]
I have been asked to say a word upon the wedlock of Truth and Trade, and
advocate the idea that what in the nature of things has been joined
together of God, should not, should never be sundered by man. We know
that Truth is eternal. Trade, thank God, is not. [Laughter and
applause.] Still, so far as time and earth are concerned, trade endures
from first to last and everywhere. God married it to truth with the fiat
that men should eat bread in the sweat of their faces. From that moment
men have been wrangling in every court of conscience and society to
secure decrees of divorce. How manifold and multitudinous the tricks,
dodges, and evasions to which men have resorted to be rid of the work
which conditions bread. [Laughter and applause.] The great art of life
in the estimate of the general, said a great economist, is to have
others do the face-sweating and themselves the bread-eating. [Laughter
and applause.]
But all along the line of the centuries the divine utterances have given
forth with clarion clearness that God would have men illustrate morals
and religion in the routine of business life. And so in all the upper
levels of civilization we observe that society points with pride to the
integrity that is proof against the temptations of trade. The men who
have honored sublime relations of business and religion are they whom
the world has delighted to honor. With but rare exceptions trade,
wherever it has been prosperous, has had truth for its wedded partner.
For the most part, wherever men have achieved high success in traffic,
it has been not upon the principle that "Honesty is the best policy,"
for honesty is never policy, but upon the basis of fidelity to truth and
right under every possible condition of things. The man who is honest
from motives of policy will be dishonest when policy beckons in that
direction. The men who have illumined the annals of trade are those who
have bought the truth and sold it not, who held it only to dispense it
for the welfare of others.
We cannot too highly honor the temper of that generation of business men
who half a century ago sternly refused to compromise with any form of
deceit in the details of traffic, visiting with the severest penalties
those who at all impinged upon the well-accepted morals of trade. The
story is told of a young merchant who, beginning business some fifty
years ago, overheard one day a clerk misrepresenting the quality of some
merchandise. He was instantly reprimanded and the article was unsold.
The clerk resigned his position at once, and told his employer that the
man who did business that way could not last long. But the merchant did
last, and but lately died the possessor of the largest wealth ever
gathered in a single lifetime.
Permit me another incident and this not from New York, but Philadelphia.
One of the Copes had but just written his check for $50 for some local
charity, when a messenger announced the wreck of an East Indiaman
belonging to the firm, and that the ship and cargo were a total loss.
Another check for $500 was substituted at once, and given to the agent
of the hospital with the remark: "What I have God gave me, and before it
all goes, I had better put some of it where it can never be lost."
[Applause.]
Such illustrations as these are not infrequent in the biographies of
those noble men who in days gone by as well as in our own times, have
never divorced truth from trade, but have always reverenced the sacred
relations. I dare venture the remark that the prosperity of a nation is
more largely dependent upon the probity of its merchants than upon any
other one class of men. [Applause.] This because of their numbers, their
influence over so many who are subject to them in business, and their
close relation to, and important control over, the financial interests
of the country.
What a wide area of opportunity is afforded in the counting-room, where
so many students of trade are preparing for the uncertain future!
Accept, I beseech you, the responsibility of moulding the characters of
your young men and so prepare a generation of merchants who shall know
of nothing but honesty and honor, and who will cherish nobility of
sentiment in all their business transactions. [Applause.]
And can you not help the world abroad as well as at home? I believe that
merchants engaged in commerce with foreign nations, have it within the
scope and purview of their business relations to do as much for the
propagation of Christian truth as the Church itself. If your ventures
are intrusted to the direction of men of character; if your agents are
men who recognize in practice the morals of the religion they profess,
you will not only not negative as now, alas! but too often the efforts
of the Church's envoys, by the frequent violations of Christian law, on
the part of those who propose to be governed by it; but through the
illustrations you can send out of Christian consistency--by the living
representatives of our higher civilization, which you can furnish to
remote nations, to say nothing of the voluntary agency in scattering the
printed powers of our faith in all quarters of the globe, how much may
not be accomplished in this and in other ways by your men and your
ships--Trade thus travelling round the world with Truth by her side,
helping each other and healing the nations. [Applause.]