Exchange.
The jack-of-all-trades is a bungler in every one of them. The man who
will do anything well must confine himself to doing a very few things.
Yet while the things a man can produce to advantage are few, the things
he wants to consume are many. Exchange makes possible at the same time
concentration in production and diversity of enjoyment. Exchange enables
the shoemaker to produce shoes, the tailor to make coats, the carpenter
to build houses, the farmer to raise grain, the weaver to make cloth,
the doctor to heal disease; and at the same time brings to each one of
them a pair of shoes, a coat, a house, a barrel of flour, a cut of
cloth, and such medical attendance as he needs. Civilization rests on
exchange.
THE DUTY.
+It is the duty of each party in a trade to give a fair and genuine
equivalent for what he expects to receive.+--Articles exchanged always
represent work. And it is our duty to make sure that the article we
offer represents thorough work. Good honest work is the foundation of
all righteousness. Whatever we offer for sale, whether it be our labor
for wages, or goods for a price, ought to be as good and thorough as we
can make it. To sell a day's work for wages, and then to loaf a part of
that day, is giving a man idleness when he pays for work. To sell a man
a shoddy coat when he thinks he is buying good wool, is giving him cold
when he pays for warmth. To give a man defective plumbing in his house
when he hires you for a good workman, is to sell him disease and death,
and take pay for it. Selling adulterated drugs and groceries is giving a
man a stone when he asks for and pays for bread. If, after we have done
our best to make or secure good articles, we are unable to avoid defects
and imperfections, then it is our duty to tell squarely just what the
imperfection is, and sell it for a reduced price. On no other basis than
this of making genuine goods, and representing them just as they are,
can exchange fulfill its function of mutual advantage to all concerned.
THE VIRTUE.
+Honesty looks people straight in the eye, tells the plain truth about
its goods, stands on its merits, asks no favors, has nothing to conceal,
fears no investigation.+--This bold, open, self-reliant quality of
honesty is what makes it a manly thing, or a virtue. To do thorough
work; to speak the plain truth; to do exactly as you would be done by;
to put another man's interest on a level with your own; to take under no
pretext or excuse a cent's worth more than you give in any trade you
make, calls out all the strength and forbearance and self-control there
is in a man, and that is why it ranks so high among the virtues.
THE REWARD.
+The honest man is the only man who can respect himself.+--He carries
his head erect, and no man can put him down. Everything about him is
sound and every act will bear examination. This sense of one's own
genuineness and worth is honesty's chief reward.
THE TEMPTATION.
+Every one-sided transaction dishonest.+--In fair exchange both parties
are benefited. In unfair exchange one party profits by the other's loss.
Any transaction in which either party fails to receive an equivalent for
what he gives is a fraud; and the man who knowingly and willfully makes
such a trade is a thief in disguise. For taking something which belongs
to another, without giving him a return, and without his full, free, and
intelligent consent, is stealing.
The temptation to take advantage of another's ignorance; to palm off a
poor article for a good one; to get more than we give, is very great in
all forms of business. Cheating is very common, and one is tempted to do
a little cheating himself in order to keep even with the rest. The only
way to resist it is to see clearly that cheating is lying and stealing
put together; that it is an injury to our fellow-men and to society;
that it is playing the part of a knave and a rascal instead of an honest
and honorable man.
THE VICE OF DEFECT.
+The meanest and most contemptible kind of cheating is quackery.+--The
quack is liar, thief, and murderer all in one. For in undertaking to do
things for which he has no adequate training and skill, he pretends to
be what he is not. He takes money for which he is unable to render a
genuine equivalent. And by inducing people to trust their lives in his
incompetent and unskilled hands he turns them aside from securing
competent treatment, and so confirms disease and hastens death.
+The dishonest man a public nuisance and a common enemy.+--He gets his
living out of other people. Whatever wealth he gets, some honest man who
has earned it is compelled to go without. Dishonesty is the perversion
of exchange from its noble function as a civilizing agent and a public
benefit, into the ignoble service of making one man rich at the expense
of the many. It is because the dishonest man is living at other people's
expense, profiting by their losses, and fattening himself on the
earnings of those whom he has wronged, that dishonesty is deservedly
ranked as one of the most despicable and abominable of vices.
THE VICE OF EXCESS.
+It is as important to protect our own interest, as to regard the
interests of others.+--No man has any more right to cheat me than I have
to cheat him; and if he tries to take advantage of me it is my duty to
resist him, and to say a decided "no" to his schemes for enriching
himself at my expense.
One rule in particular is very important. Never sign a note for another
in order to give him a credit which he could not command without your
name. That is a favor which no man has a right to ask, and which no man
who regards his duty to himself and to his family will grant. If a man
is in a tight place and asks you to lend him money, or to give him
money, that is a proposition to be considered on its merits. But to
assume an indefinite responsibility by signing another man's note, is
accepting the risk of ruining ourselves for his accommodation. We owe it
to ourselves and our families to keep our finances absolutely under our
own control, free from all complication with the risks and uncertainties
of another's enterprises and fortunes.
Our own rights are as sacred as those of another. There are two sides to
every bargain; and one side is as important as the other. The sacrifice
of a right may be as great an evil as the perpetration of a wrong.
THE PENALTY.
+Dishonesty eats the heart out of a man.+--The habit of looking solely
to one's own interest deadens the social sympathies, dwarfs the generous
affections, weakens self-respect, until at length the dishonest men can
rob the widow of her livelihood; take an exorbitant commission on the
labor of the orphan; charge an extortionate rent to a family of
helpless invalids; sell worthless stocks to an aged couple in exchange
for the hard earnings of a life-time, and still endure to live.
Dishonesty makes men inhuman. The love of gain is a species of moral and
spiritual decay. When it attacks the heart the finer and better feelings
wither and die; and on this decay of sympathy and kindness and
generosity and justice there thrive and flourish meanness and
heartlessness and cruelty and inhumanity.
+Hereditary effects of dishonesty.+--So deeply does the vice of
dishonesty eat into the moral nature that mental and moral deterioration
is handed down to offspring. The scientific study of heredity shows that
the deterioration resulting from this cause is more sure and fatal than
that following many forms of insanity. The son or daughter of a mean,
dishonest man is handicapped with tendencies toward moral turpitude and
anti-social conduct for which no amount of his ill-gotten gains,
received by inheritance, can be an adequate compensation. Says Maudsley,
"I cannot but think that the extreme passion for getting rich, absorbing
the whole energies of a life, predisposes to mental degeneracy in the
offspring, either to moral defect, or to intellectual deficiency, or to
outbursts of positive insanity." And the same author says elsewhere:
"The anti-social, egoistic development of the individual predisposes to,
if it does not predetermine, the mental degeneracy of his progeny; he,
alien from his kind by excessive egoisms, determines an alienation of
mind in them. If I may trust in that matter my observations, I know no
one who is more likely to breed insanity in his offspring than the
intensely narrow, self-sensitive, suspicious, distrustful, deceitful,
and self-deceiving individual, who never comes into sincere and sound
relations with men and things, who is incapable by nature and habit of
genuinely healthy communion with himself or with his kind. A moral
development of that sort, I believe, is more likely to predetermine
insanity in the next generation than are many forms of actual
derangement in parents: for the whole moral nature is essentially
infected, and that goes deeper down, and is more dangerous, _quâ_
heredity, than a particular derangement. A mental alienation is a
natural pathological evolution of it."