Fruits of Honesty.

T

REV. JAMES W. COLE, B.D.

HE bane of the business life of to-day is the constantly growing disposition to get money without earning it.

Money is not merely a medium of exchange, but it is also

a commodity like wheat, or corn, or iron, yet men who would die of shame if caught stealing wheat or corn do not hesitate to steal money whenever the chance presents itself. They would scorn to steal a bushel of wheat from their neighbor, and insist upon giving him full value for it, but to get money from him without paying dollar for dollar is quite another thing. To overmatch him in a bargain, why, that is trade. But why is it more a sin to steal wheat than to steal dollars? And he steals dollars who gets them of his neighbor without having earned them, or who does not give for them a full equivalent.

There is an almost insane desire abroad among men to get riches, not by the old-fashioned and slow steps of industry, perseverance, and economy, but by the quick road of speculation, regardless of whether that speculation is a legitimate and just one or not. There is such a thing as a righteous venture in a business transaction,-as when a man forecasts the prospective demands of the market of next month or next year, and arranges for the profits to meet his side of the transaction, supplying the honest wants of the community in an honest way. He buys at a fair price, and sells at a fair advance on the cost. He enriches himself by supplying the needs of the public, and not by plundering it. An honest man will not take bread out of the mouths of others to put it in his own. When he sells goods, he does not sell his soul with them. He consults his conscience in the

countingroom quite as often as in the prayer meeting. He could swindle within the statutes, and get rich, but he will not do it. Happily for the race, there are yet such men, and such just methods of trade, but the tendency of the times is to be more and more dissatisfied with such honest ways of getting money. Young men vote them slow, and instead of climbing the successive rounds of the ladder of industry to reach the fortune at the top, they wish to go up by the quick, audacious elevator of the stock-speculator.

It is not yet accounted a reputable thing to be a Simon-pure gambler in business circles. Public opinion through its statutes has decreed that the gambler must ply his trade of plundering, if at all, in secret. He must get his hundreds, or his thousands, from his fool-victims behind tiled doors and carefully screened windows, subject to the accident of a swoop-visit by the police. For, forsooth, his business beggars children, and has on it the anathemas of wronged, deserted, robbed, and heartbroken wives and mothers. But the broker's boards and the stock exchanges, with their make-believe sales of things they do not own, their socalled purchases of things they never intend to have or pay for; who "bull" and "bear" the securities of honest folk; who can only make profits by constantly keeping values disturbed, and the business world in convulsions of uncertainty; whose constant effort is to induce mercantile men to become dissatisfied with slow and honest methods, and enter upon buccaneering expeditions to frighten bona fide owners of property to part with it at enormous sacrifices, that they may by securing it reap a rich (even if iniquitous) profit; why, such enterprises as these are carried on in the broad face of day, and protected by law, and accounted highly honorable business! But, pray, wherein do they differ from the old time gentry of the road, who were wont to present a pistol at your head, instead of a law book, with the same demand, "I have the power that gives me the right, now your money or your life"? Can you define the distinction? Are not the men who get up corners in wheat, or who combine to raise the price of the necessities of life to the

poor, as really highwaymen as the green-baize men of loaded dice and cunningly devised card? The one robs his victim because he has the skill to do it, the other robs his because the law gives him the power to do it. Both overreach and plunder. To protect either by law is to put a bounty on fraud, and proffer a premium for the demoralization and ruin of the public. There are men now operating in Wall street, New York, and in Chicago, and Boston, and many another city, who are rated at a score or more millions in cash, or its equivalent, and who have gained it all within a score or less of years, by just this kind of piratical stock-gambling and cornering of the markets. And lo! are they not all honorable men?

Now, it is not necessary to be either a gambler or a skinflint in order to amass a fortune. No man needs to strangle his conscience or harden his heart in order to gain a dollar, or a hundred thousand of them. He may be eminently successful pecuniarily without his money having the curse of his neighbor upon it, or the condemnation of him who hath warned us, "He that oppresseth the poor to increase his riches shall surely come to want," and "He that getteth riches, and not by right, shall leave them in the midst of his days, and at his end shall be a fool." Business can be carried on with astonishing monetary success by rendering a just and fair equivalent for every dollar it takes in. "A great cloud of witnesses" proves that. The great majority of those entitled to be considered the representative business men of this country for the past hundred years have been honorable, sagacious, and honest traders, whose success enriched the world as well as themselves. They prospered through causing others to prosper. There are benedictions, not reproaches, on their wealth, for their business has not been based on selfishness, and developed in greed, but has been so conducted as to prove that success in commercial lines is not opposed to one's highest advancement in goodness, and truth, and honesty.

Who of all the business men of his time was held in higher esteem than Boston's great merchant, Amos Lawrence, who

during his lifetime gave away in charities over seven hundred thousand dollars additional to the fortunes he left by will to his relatives? He was the soul of honesty. Those who knew him said of him, "His integrity stands absolutely unimpeachable, without spot or blemish." His history as a merchant from first to last will bear the strictest scrutiny. He seemed ever to have a reverence for right, unalloyed, unfaltering, supreme; a moral perception and moral sensibility which kept him from deviating a hair's breadth from what he saw and felt to be his duty. It was this that constituted the strength of his character, and was one of the great secrets of his success. It was this that secured him, when a young man, the entire confidence, and an almost unlimited use of capital, of some of the wealthiest and best men of that day. "His daily actions were guided by the most exalted sense of right and wrong, and, in his strict sense of justice, Aristides himself could not surpass him. He was a living example of a successful merchant, who, from the earliest period of his business career, had risen above all artifice, and had never been willing to turn to his own advantage the ignorance or misfortune of others. He demonstrated in his own case the possibility of success, while practicing the highest standard of moral obligation."

When a lad of fourteen years he was apprenticed to a merchant of his native town of Groton, Mass. "A sensible and pious father, aided by a prudent mother, had trained the child to become the future man," and, because of his integrity, he was soon intrusted with the chief control of the store. When twenty-one years of age, he went to Boston with his fortune of twenty dollars in his pocket, and took a position as clerk in the establishment of and was soon offered a partnership in the firm, but he thought their methods of business were not strictly honest, and refused the offer. In a few months the firm failed, and he then began business for himself on credit, in a small way. Shortly after, his brother, Abbott Lawrence, came to him as an apprentice, and, at the expiration of the indenture, became his partner, and the firm of A. & A. Lawrence

was known throughout the country for fifty years as one of the largest and soundest of mercantile houses. He was the chief founder of the manufacturing cities of Lowell and Lawrence (the latter named after him, as well, also, as Lawrence University and town in Kansas); he aided scores of young men to gain an education, and to start in business for themselves, and like his brother merchant, John Thornton, became known far and wide for deeds of benevolence, as well as for his great integrity of character.

In a letter to a young man just starting in life, he gives this as the first secret of his success: "In the first place, take this for your motto at the commencement of your journey, that the difference of going just right, or a little wrong, will be the difference of finding yourself in good quarters, or in a miserable bog or slough, at the end of it. To this simple fact of starting just right am I indebted, with God's blessing on my labors, for my present position, as well as that of the numerous connections. sprung up around me. As a first and leading principle, let every transaction be of that pure and honest character that you would not be ashamed to have it appear before the whole world as clearly as to yourself." A second reason for his great success was his thorough familiarity with his business. "Supply and demand were as familiar to him as the alphabet. He knew the wants of the country, and sources of supply." Concerning this, he said, "The secret of the whole matter was that we had formed the habit of promptly acting, thus taking the top of the tide; while the habit of some others was to delay until about half tide, thus getting on the flats, while we were all the time prepared for action, and ready to put into any port that promised well.” A third reason was a constant and careful supervision of his affairs. As to this he writes, "Among the numerous people who have failed in business within my knowledge, a prominent cause has been a want of system in their affairs by which to know when their expenses and losses exceeded their profits." A fourth reason he assigns was economy. "Most of the young men who commenced at that period failed by spending too