human brotherhood, that forbids this honest, not fraudulent, but honest competition between men's exertions, faculties, and wits. We are indeed to do to others as we would have them do to us; but we ought not to wish them to do anything to us which is inconsistent with the general welfare of the community, with the lawful and necessary stimulants to action. We may have unreasonable desires: we would wish, perhaps, that our rich neighbour should present us with half of his fortune; but unreasonable desires are not the measure of our duties. Not whatever we wish, but what we lawfully wish from others, should we do to them. And lawfully, we can no more wish that they should give to our indolence and negligence the benefit of their sagacity and alertness in making a contract, than that they would give to our poverty the half of that wealth which their superior industry or talent had earned for them. Thus, too, when it is said that we ought to treat all men as brethren, it is true, indeed, so far as that relation is expressive of the general relationships of society. But while there should be a brotherly community of feeling, there cannot be a brotherly identity of interests between the members of society; and, therefore, they are not bound to deal with one another as if they belonged to a community of Shakers or of New Harmony men. We are not to break down the principle of individuality, of individual interests, of individual aims; while, at the same time, we are to hold it in subjection to the laws of sacred honesty and of a wise philanthropy.

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Besides, it is not only expedient and right, but it is inevitable, that individual power and talent should come into play in business. man's sagacity, it is obvious, he must use that is to say, his mind he must use for he has nothing else to go by. He may use it unjustly, to the heinous injury of his weaker neighbour; but still he must use it. So also with regard to the power acquired by a large property, or by a monopoly, it is inevitable that it should be used. To some extent, the possessor cannot help using it. Wealth has credit; and monopoly, usually implying scarcity, carries an enhanced price with it; and such results are unavoidable. Finally, superior actual knowledge may and must be used to some extent. In every department of business, superior knowledge is gained by attention; and it may and must be acted upon, albeit to the hurt or injury of those who know less, or have devoted less time and thought to the subject. A man has made an improvement in some machinery or manufacture, and he is entitled to some reward for the attention he has given to it; the government will give him a patent. A man has been to India or to South America, to acquaint himself with a certain branch of business, and he comes home and acts upon his knowledge, and has a perfect right to do so. He is not bound to communicate his knowledge to his brother merchants who are engaged in the same trade; and, perhaps, his knowledge so much depends upon actual observation and experience, that he cannot communicate it. In like manner, a trader may obtain a superior knowledge of business, and of the facts on which it depends, by a close observation of things immediately around him, and he must act upon it; he cannot employ himself in going about to see whether other men have got the same enlarged views. Nor have other men any right to complain of this. The unskilful painter or sculptor, the ignorant lawyer or physician, might as well complain, that their more distinguished brethren

were injuring their business, and taking all the prizes out of their hands.

I have thus attempted to set forth the claims of individual enterprize, as having a useful, a beneficent tendency. These claims, I have all along implied, are subject to certain limitations; and these limitations are set by the laws of honesty and philanthropy. That is to say, a man may pursue his own interest; he may use his endeavour, sagacity, ability; but, in the first place, he shall not pursue any traffic, or make any contract, to the injury of his neighbour; unless that injury is one that inevitably results from a general and good principle, that is to say, from the healthful action of business; and, in the next place, he shall not pursue his own ends to the extent of committing any fraud.

This last limitation is the one of the most palpable importance, and demands that we should dwell upon it a moment. What then is a fraud in contracts? In order to answer the question, let me ask, what is a contract? A contract is a mutual engagement, to exchange certain goods for other goods, or certain goods for money, and the essence of the engagement lies in the supposed equivalency of the things that are exchanged. This results from the very nature of the case and of the human mind; for it is not the part of a rational being to give more for less. If you bargain away anything to your neighbour, you, of course, seek from him what to you is equivalent. But how are you to judge of this equivalency; of the value, that is to say, of the article offered to you? There are two grounds on which you may judge: you may know the article as well as the seller; you may know as much about it every way as he does. This is ordinarily the case between trader and trader; but between the merchant and the rest of the world this is usually not the case. And here the ground on which you proceed is, that of confidence in the good faith of the seller. You could make up no satisfactory opinion on the value of the article offered to you, if you did not believe that it is what it purports to be, what it appears to be, what the price indicates it to be. If, then, there is any secret defect in the article not apparent to you, or if there is any circumstance unknown to you, materially affecting its value, or if the price set upon it is any other than the market price, there is fraud. Wherever the contracting parties stand in totally different relations to the matter in hand, the one knowing something, some secret, which the other does not and cannot know, there is fraud: the contract is morally vitiated; the obvious conditions of a contract are not complied with; it is well known by one of the parties that the grand condition, that of equivalency, does not exist in the case.

Let us now look back, for a moment, upon the ground which we have passed over in this preliminary discussion. I have, in the first place, attempted to show that no single suggestion or dictate of conscience, or Scripture, or of generous feeling, or of the law, is sufficient to solve the moral questions that arise in trade. In the next place, I have said that there is a distinction to be made between principles and rules: the principles of moral conduct being clear and certain; the rules only, the specific actions under these principles that is to say, being liable to doubt. I thus wished to set one department of this subject above all question. In the third place, I applied myself to the consideration of rules. And here I attempted to show that while, on

the one hand, it is expedient that ample scope be given to human ingenuity, sagacity, and alertness in business, yet, on the other hand, that they are never to transgress the bounds of philanthropy, honesty, and justice.

Let us now proceed to examine some of the cases to which these general reasonings apply.

I. The first is the ordinary case of buying and selling, i. e. under ordinary circumstances.

And here it is expedient and necessary, that men in their dealings with one another should be put to the use of their senses and faculties. There is a discretion and there is a duty proper, respectively, to the seller and to the buyer. Each of them has his part to act, his business to attend to, and neither of them is bound to assume the duty of the other. In ordinary cases there is no difficulty with this maxim, no temptation to dishonesty, no possibility of deception.

The article is open to inspection; its qualities are as obvious to the buyer as to the seller. The buyer is supposed to know his own business, his own occasions; the buyer is fairly supposed best to know what the article is worth to him, not the seller; and it is for him to decide whether he will purchase, and what he will give. The seller cannot be expected to enter into the circumstances of the buyer, and to ascertain by inquiry what he intends to do with the article he purchases; whether he can turn it to good account, or whether he could not buy more advantageously somewhere else; all this belongs to the province of the buyer, it is his business to settle all these questions. And he is not only best able to decide them, but he is as competent to judge of the quality of the goods which are offered him as the seller, for they are alike open to the inspection of both.

This free action, this competition, we have already said, is to be restrained in trade as in everything else, by perfect fairness and honesty. At that point in our preliminary discussion, the theoretical question about the nature of a contract presented itself; in our present inquiry, the natural and practical question is about price. What is the just price of an article? A man has something to sell; he wishes to deal honestly; the question then is, what shall he ask for it? If he can settle this question, all is plain. How shall he settle it? What is it that determines a price to be just? Evidently not any abstract consideration of value. There can be no such thing as abstract value. The worth of a thing depends on the want of it. Originally, it is true, i. e. in the first rude state of society, men, in exchanging the products of their labour, would naturally estimate the value of each article by the labour required to produce it. But even this estimate, though approaching nearest to it, would not present us with an abstract and absolute value; and it would soon be disturbed by circumstances effectually and beyond recovery. Labour would not be an accurate measure of value, because one man's labour, through its energy and ingenuity, would be worth far more than another man's. That primitive rule, too, inaccurate as it is, would soon, I repeat, be disturbed by circumstances. For suppose that one man had manufactured axes, and another shoes, circumstances would inevitably arise that would give one or another of these articles a factitious value. In the winter season, when protection was needed for the person, and in the summer,

which was favourable to the felling of timber, the value of those articles must be constantly fluctuating; it would be factitious; it could not be determined by the amount of labour. And as we depart farther from those primitive exchanges, we find circumstances, numerous, complicated, and very artificial, which affect value. The wants, fancies, and fashions of society; the state of crops and markets, and of trade all over the world; the variations of the seasons; the success or failure of fisheries; improvements in machinery; discoveries in art; and the regulations of governments-all these things, and many more, conspire alternately to fix and disturb, from day to day, that ever-fluctuating thing called price. It is not any one man's judgment or conscience that can ascertain the value of anything, but millions of individual judgments go to make up the decision. It is in vain to say that such and such things are worth little or nothing; that they are unnecessary or useless, or that they confer no advantage proportionate to their cost-that is not the question. What will they fetch? is the question. You may, in a fit of generosity or a scruple of conscience, sell them for less; but the moment they are out of your hands, they will rise to the level of the market; you have lost the difference, and gained nothing for your generous principle. In fine, the value of a thing is the market price of it. This is the only intelligible idea of value, and the only reasonable adjustment of price. It is certainly most likely to be reasonable; for a multitude of judgments have been employed upon it, and have settled it. It is the legislative voice of the whole world; and it would be as unjust and inexpedient, as it is impossible, to resist it.

The way of honesty, then, in the ordinary course of traffic, seems to be very clear. The terms on which we are to buy and sell, are established for us by a very obvious rule. In a general view, we may say, that conscience has nothing to do with affixing a price: that is determined by a thousand circumstances and a million voices. The trader must buy at the market price, and he must sell accordingly. Ile does not determine the price, but the suffrage of a whole city, or of twenty cities, determines it. All that conscience has to do with price therefore is, not to go beyond the usage of the market: and for the rest, the rule is, to make no false representation, and to conceal no latent defect.

In this view, the moral course in almost the entire business of trade seems to be exceedingly plain; and certainly it is most grateful to reflect that it is so. He that runs may read. No man needs to carry with him, in regard to most of the transactions of business, a disturbed or a doubtful conscience.

But still cases will arise for a nicer casuistry. The market price is indeed the rule; but there is monopoly that makes a market price, and there is superior information that takes undue advantage of it. These are the cases that remain to be examined.

II. The next case then to be considered in the morals of business, is monopoly. This may arise in two ways; intentionally, from combination on the part of several traders, or a plan on the part of one; and unintentionally, where it falls out in the natural and unforced course of trade. It is from confounding these two cases together, perhaps, that a peculiar prejudice is felt in the community against monopoly. That a man should set himself by dexterous management to get into his

possession all the corn in market, in order to extort an enormous price for it, is felt to be oppressive and wrong. But there is often a monopoly, to a greater or less degree, resulting from simple scarcity; and in this case, that enhancement of price which is so odious is perfectly inevitable; nay, it may be even beneficial; for high prices lessen consumption, and may prevent famine. But at any rate, high prices in a time of scarcity are inevitable. Even if all the corn or all the coal were in the hands of one man, and he should sell the half of his stock to the wholesale dealers at a moderate rate, and hold the remainder at the same rate to keep the price down, still, I say, the moment the article left his hands, the law of scarcity would prevail and raise the price. Monopoly therefore compels, and of course justifies an enhanced price. The same principle which applies to every other commodity, applies to that commodity called money. And it is only from the habit of considering money not as a commodity, but as a possession of some peculiar and magical value, that any prejudice can exist against what is called usurious interest; saving and excepting when the interest goes beyond all bounds of reason and humanity. The practice of usury has acquired a bad name from former and still occasional abuses of it: but the principle must still be a just one, that money, in common with everything else, is worth what it will fetch.

This, I know, is denied. It is denied, especially, that money is, or is to be regarded, like other commodities in trade. It is said that money is the creature of the government; that the mint, when stamping it with the government impress, stamps it with a peculiar character, and separates it entirely from the general condition of a commodity. It is said, too, that the common representative of money-that the banknote, that credit, in other words-is exposed to such expansion and contraction, and management and conspiracy, that it is peculiarly liable to be used for the injury of the necessitous and unwary.

Let us separate this last allegation from our discussion for a moment, and consider the question alone, as it affects the use of money in the form of bullion. And I know of no better way of considering questions of this sort, than to resolve them into their simple forms, by going back to the origin of society, or taking for example a small and isolated community, at least we come to the theory of the question by this means, and can then consider what modifications are required by more artificial and complicated interests.

Suppose then a community of a hundred families, cut off from the rest of the world, engaged in the various callings of life, accustomed to barter, but not accustomed to the use of money. Suppose now that a gold-mine were discovered. The metal is found to be very valuable for various purposes; and, like every thing else, it takes its value in the market; an ounce of it is exchanged for so many bushels of corn or yards of cloth. But the permanent and universal value of this metal, and its being so portable and indestructible, would, ere long, very naturally bring it into use as a circulating medium; the farmer would know that if he sold corn for it, he could buy cloth with it in another part of the district, and would be glad thus to be saved the trouble and expense of transporting the produce of his farm to the distant manufactory. In this exchange, the lumps of gold of course would be weighed, and it would be natural to stamp the weight upon each lump.