COMMERCIAL MORALITY.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXVI, Issue 9452, 24 August 1889, Page 1 (Supplement)

COMMERCIAL MORALITY.

At a Presbyterian Conference a few days ago, the Rev. A. 2.1. McCallum read a paper on the above subject, of which we give the greater portion : —

The .subject which has been given to me to introduce to this conference is one of great importance. As an outsider, I feel that it is a somewhat difficult, if not also a delicate, subject to deal with. But we are not called upon to pry into other men's matters, or to sit as judges of other men's thoughts. Being free from bias of personal interest, and required as teachers of others as well as of ourselves to bo acquainted in some degree with the shoals and quicksands that beset youth's voyage, every Christian minister and every Christian parent will be glad to help in any way to fix the beacon of warning where it is needed, and to cheer those who are striving, spite of winds and currents, to hold on in a right course. "Charity taketh not account of evil; rejoiceth not in unrighteousness, but rejoiceth in the truth." Two important truths must be taken into account. We cannot change human nature, or alter the construction of modern society. As Charles Kingsley puts it, " We can no more mond men by theories than we can by coercion. If any good is to be done, it can only be by teaching men to mend their own matters of their own freewill." There is another thing. The commercial world, like the material world, is formed of different strata. The upper stratum presses on the lower, giving it the shape and hardness it may assume. There are the princely magnates of the mercantile _ world, and the great commercial associations dictating the "prices current" in its remotest marts; and there are the small traders—as the small dust of the balance. Moral influences for good and evil always work downwards. l)r. John Hall, addressing his fashionable congregation in Fifth Avenue, asks the very pertinent, but, as some might think, the impertinent question, " Have the well-to-do people of New York no share in making the vice of the city ?'' And having shown in very plain language how this comes about, he adds, "There is only one tiling that will save the up-town sinners and the down-town evildoers. It is the love of God. When they are brought under this influence by the means of grace it impregnates their whole nature and makes them the salt of the earth." I desire specially to note the OBLIGATIONS OF COMMERCIAL MORALITY TO RELIGION. In the old pagan world we know what commercial morality has for ages been, and y/hat> it is still. The old historian of the

days of the twelve Ciesars, writing of his own time, tells us that common honesty was as much at a discount as social virtue. From the patrician and the prince to the lowest of the publicani, corruption and extortion were not the exception but the rule. When all trade was looked down upon as essentially base, just as the higher classes of Vienna and Paris look on us as a nation of shopkeepers, integrity and honour could not rank very high as social virtues. In Judea itself, at Christ's advent, neither tbo Law of Moses nor the.iron rule of Rome could make men less hypocritical and knavish than the heathen. It was of his own nation that the prophet said : "He is a merchant; the balances of deceit are in his hand." Even the temple itself was turned into an Oriental bazaar by its. chaffering 1 and tricky traffickers, and when the Saviour of the World put them forth of his Father's house, he said they had made the house of prayer a den of thieves, It is to Christianity that the world owes the marvellous transformation we see. There are thousands of mercantile men who are the foremost in trying to extend the religion of Christ, and to make the morality of the New Testament the morality of commerce, directing each transaction, packing every bale of goods, and stamping every bill of exchange. 1 can speak from a little personal knowledge of some such men. It was my lot to be .pastor, for more than a dozen years, of a congregation largely composed of merchants and mon of business. During all that period the name of not one of these mon was ever connected with a single shady transaction. Disaster and ruin came to some of them, as it will sometimes come to the most honourable and upright ; but when all was lostand it was not. little— they still retained honour and integrity, and the esteem of their fellow-men. There are business men in more than one of the great commercial centres of America, whom one cannot but feel it to be a privilege to have known, whose names are held in high honour in the world's busiest exchanges, and as household words in a thousand Christian homes. But do not evil and wrong abound ? Is not that great country the very home of commercial dishonesty and fraud? True, in England, and Sootland, and America, the heads and directorates of banking institutions have been in some instances at fault, and thousands have suffered loss and many ruin thereby. I remember well when the great Bank of California closed its doors amidst a panic, and its too-generous president lost his life the same day, when bathing in the .sea. The amount owing was four millions, but every cent was made good to the depositors of the bank. It is true modern commerce is cursed with rings and cornel's in corn, sugar, flax, and almost every commodity, disturbing the great balance of trade. There are great railway confederacies and mining swindles, and more than 0110 " big steal." Bonanza kings, who have their palaces in European capitals as well jus on Nob Hill, may have their confidential agents (from one of whom I obtained the fact), as working overseers in the Comstock Mines, and their other agencies in the organs of the Press. The " bearing " and "bulling" of shares and stocks has been reduced to a system ; and this system of operating in stocks has beggared and befooled thousands of confident men and women to make some men millionaires, and to enrich the few who are in the secret of the riug, and who pull the wires. There are OTIIER FORMS OF COMMERCIAL MORALITY. The adulteration of food and drink as articles of commerce is a double evil, robbing the buyer and poisoning the consumer. Recent publications and Parliamentary reports show to what extent tea and coffee and alcoholic liquors are adulterated. The manufacture of shoddy goods is a great business, encouraged by the demand for articles of a low price, and the facilities for unprincipled dealing with aboriginal races. Companies are formed with golden promises in the prospectus, but little or no capital in the bank, and when shares are sufficiently inflated, and the promoters receive their bonus, they collapse. There are agencies, by means of which land has been sold at fictitious values ; and there have been occasional insolvencies, in which the compounding bankrupt has escaped from the obligations of honesty. That tho housewife should now and then complain that bobbins contain the- yards of thread marked thereon only in mythical quantities is not to be wondered at. Short measures and light weights were invented long before steam ; and tricks of trade claim an antiquity as old as the days of Jacob, who, in his turn, was cheated by his uncle, as he knew how to drive a hard bargain, even in the matter of a wife. Tho credit system and the sweating system are each productive of its own evils ; and Hood's "Song of the-Shirb" has not ground out its last .sad cadences from the hearts of the poor needlewoman and shop-girl in the slums and garrets of the great cities. And even here, in the fresh and free air of the forest and the gum-field, the evils of the truck system are not unknown, though the law protects the toiler from the rapacity of employers on every iron arid coalfields at home. The abuse of trade marks and labels, and the invoicing of goods so as to evade customs, I believe, are here subjects of legislation. It is a matter of material and of moral importance that far more conscientiousness should be shown in giving certificates, and in making declarations of value. Juries are sworn to bring in a verdict according to the evidence adduced. But prejudices are said sometimes to in- ! fluenco the decision perhaps unconsciously. I may give a remarkable proof of the effect of circumstances as a test of moral rectitude which is found in the records of insurance. A wave of losses by fire seems to have followed the wave of com mere iul depression, ' now fortunately subsiding, Tho total income of 10 insurance companies botween the years 1879 and 1883, over transactions amounting to about 1\ millions, shows an I average profit of only about 1$ per cent. ! The losses of some companies were still more abnormally heavy in certain periods. But, after all, this is an exceptional stato of things. Out of the 100 millions composing the great commercial communities of Great Britain and America we do not hear of the millions who are honestly and toilsomely engaged in supporting themselves and their families. Countless thousands, of such there are, in all Christian lands, farmers | and trades people, and among them many Jews and Roman Catholics, who are as honest as they are industrious. I have purposely avoided almost all reference to our own commercial community. I believe, however, that it will be found to stand as well as any other, though it has been of late subjected to a greater strain. And when we remember all the circumstances and the past mistakes in the financial policy of this young country, we may thank God and take courage. A very few words will , suffice to indicate WHAT WE CAN DO. The Christian Church can but indirectly deal with forms of evil outside of itself. But the salt must not lose its savour. The light is not to be put under a measure. I.A higher Lone of spiritual life will raise and sustain a higher tone of action and practice. Let men feel that they owe themselves to Jesus Christ, " who has died for them," and that the eye of the Great Master is on every act in the shop and at the desk ; on the thoughts uttered in the pulpit, and on words spoken in the Parliament; and business, both public and private, and everything else will at once begin to wear a holier and happier aspect. '2. Perhaps I will be allowed to say that a direct and outspoken mode of speech is called for on our part on all matters affecting practical morality. As parents and ministers we may too easily yield to a conventional reticence on some subjects on which plain and earnest speaking is needed, while vile advertisements are openly sowing poison in the minds and corrupting the morals of youth. The trade of the charlatan —flourishing, perhaps, through the medium of the family paper—and the thriving business of the betting fraternity, goes on under the patronage of Christians and the sanction of the law ! My brothers, it is necessary to make use of plain language as well as practical knowledge, and call a spade a spade." If Mr. Byends is not pleased with our speech, we know that our heavenly Master is pleased. 3. It is of great; consequence to those of us who are parents, and to our children, to geb them placed with Christian employers. Young men have often told me how terribly their moral sense was shocked by the questionable or dishonest practices to which they had to conform. They are speedily informed that they " must not be too scrupulous. Competition is keen. It is the custom, and we have to live." There are many majors of a different stamp; and a high-principled head over the establish-

mentis a blessing which parents and young men and young women cannot too nig y value.

INFLUENCES UNFAVOURABLE to a high commercial morality need not be enumerated. Over-trading and under-pay-ment, and short payment of wages an salaries, and the desperate haste to be rich, may all have their share. But there is one more serious still. 1 to the absence of all religious and moral instruction in our national schools. hen everything relating to the existence aud government of a God of Truth and Righteousness is tapa in the training of the minds of our children, and all the moral influences of the Book of Books are systematically excluded from their instruction, are we to hope that they will grow up with reverence for truth and integrity ? An education that forms all minds in one mould, and, so to speak, without the straw of moral truth that makes the solid bricks of enduring character, we may indeed raise up a race that can be governed like sheep, but not one that will be able to govern themselves. It has been the moral training of young Scotchmen, not their mental superiority, that has placed so many of them in positions of trust abroad and in the path to honour and success. To this little-understood power New Zealand will also have to owe her future superiority, with her noble army of shopkeepers, bankers, and statesmen, whom no one needs be afraid to trust.

GAMBLING. Every form of gambling is an evil that takes the heart of honesty out of religious and perhaps to some extent commercial life. The facilities afforded in all places and on all occasions of staking money begets and fosters a reckless spirit of speculation chat soon reduces all trade to a desperate game of chauce. It is " tails you lose, heads I win !" What begins with the turf and the cheap facilities for reckless betting and §harp practices furnished by its acconpaniments, ends, as we now and then see, in gambling in stocks — ruin, dishonour, and suicide. An eminent member of the English Bar has said that " there is no more surer way in modern life of losing money than gambling in stocks and I gtve a still stronger statement, on the authority of Judge Baron Dowes, in giving his charge in a sad case of this very kind : " This system of gambling in stocks has not only led to great losses, but to great crimes." The case referred to was one in which two young men, employes of the bank, had embezzled large sums belonging to the Provincial Bank of Ireland. The money first used by the teller of the bank was his own. Unfortunately for him one .speculation was a lucky one. He entered into speculating in shares further, and, as in such cases, he-was bound to lose. With a small salary, he found himself several pounds to the bad. The result wts that in an evil moment he helped himself to some of the money of the bank, and bought more stocks in the hope that he might be able to pay it back. But instead of his making a profit, the shares fell, and ho was not able to replace the money he had token. The money made at first went to meet losses—went into the pockets of brokers. Another clerk in the bank, also on a small salary, was drawn into these desperate acts, trusting to what the gambler always trust to, a lucky turn, till they realised that gambling on the Stock Exchange was as fatal as gambling in the fashionable " hells" of IJomburg and Monaco. Our earnest, sympathetic' words, I trust, may be helpful to some, and they can bo hurtful to none. The Church of Christ is sot like a city on a hill, where its own examples cannot be hid. The old law is the new commandment, and its golden rule is love to men. It bids them do to one another as they would be done to. "Ye shall have no unrighteousness among you in word or deed, in measure or in weight," When we have done our best, done what we could, it is not much, but it is not lost.

lie must speak Whose word leaps forth to its effect, Who calls for things that are not, anil they come.