Buyers and Sellers
‘It is naught, it is naught, saith the buyer; but when he is gone his way, then he boasteth.” — xx. 14.
VERY large proportion of man’s intercourse with man is occupied by the acts of buying and selling: nation buys from nation separated by the sea, — citizen from citizen separated by a street. In the progress of civilization the commercial relations of states are gradually rising above the political in importance and power. Fleets and armies may, by a sudden blow, derange the course of commerce for a time, but its accumulated waters soon acquire a momentum sufficient to carry away all artificial impediments, and clear or make a channel for themselves. The many rivulets of domestic trade obey the same laws as the majestic rivers of international commerce. Buying and selling on every scale, from the pennyworth of the poor widow to the precious cargo of a merchant prince, have in time past flowed like rivers, and like them will continue to flow. It is not in the power of men to stop or turn either class of streams. Those circulations that are necessary to the world’s well-being are placed by the almighty Ruler beyond the reach of man’s capricious will and meddling hands; neither our own body nor the body of the earth is dependent on our thoughtfulness for the flow and re-flow of its life-blood. In like manner, though in measure less complete, commerce holds direct of the universal Lawgiver, and spurns the behests of parliaments and kings. It determines its reservoirs in the interior, traces its own channel along the plain, curving now to this side and now to that without giving an account of its ways, and at last chooses its own outlet on the ocean. Each of these circulations maintains a life after its kind; and it is good for man that, alike in the momentum of their flow and the degree of their occasional deflection, they obey other laws than his.
The chief effort of the first Napoleon, in the latter years of the great war, was to intercept the flow of commerce into Britain by his celebrated Continental System, and so compel us to capitulate, like a garrison whose supply of water is cut off. The scheme failed, notwithstanding the vast resources employed in its behalf, and the extraordinary energy with which it was prosecuted. The commerce of nations is of the nature and dimensions of a mighty river, — no embankments made by man can arrest its course. The increase of commerce in our day is a happy omen for the future of the race. Next to the spread of the Truth in power, buying and selling are the best antidotes to the spirit and practice of war.
The passing and repassing of merchandise through some of the greater arteries of the world’s commerce is a sight eminently fitted to arrest and occupy alike the imagination, the intellect, and the heart. The stream of carts and trucks and boats through the heart of a great commercial emporium, is as sublime as rushing rivers or floating clouds; through its prosaic crust the true poet’s eye can see a pure and healthful current witnessing the beneficence of God and bearing blessings to men. Some silly people of other countries have sneered at Britain as a nation of merchants; they may as well sneer at the waters which bear our merchandise, or the winds which waft it on. We could sit easy under the taunts of strangers for the quantity of our buying and selling, if we had no cause to reproach ourselves on account of its character. The nation’s trade is the nation’s honour; the dishonest tricks that mingle with it constitute in that matter our real, our only disgrace. Commerce is a noble occupation, — be it ours to keep its mighty current pure.
The exchange of commodities in its minuter details occupies a very large proportion of the time and attention of neighbours when they meet. Let a farmer, for example, take in this light a note of a week’s transactions; he will find that most of his meetings and conversations were connected with buying or selling. On the one- hand are a numerous class from whom he obtains his supplies by purchase; and, on the other, a smaller class to whom in larger transactions he disposes of his produce by sale. His business with each is a bargain. The community is not divided into two classes, — one of buyers and another of sellers; the interests of all are much more completely interwoven than would be possible under such an arrangement. Each class and each individual is a buyer and seller by turns. He who sells bread buys clothes, and he who sells clothes buys bread. This intermixture binds society together. It is in some measure analogous to the chemical and mechanical admixture of constituents which secures the solidity and cohesion of stones or timber.
Buying and selling, then, constitute in a great measure the point of contact for individuals as the particles which make up society in the mass; and it is of the utmost importance that there should be softness and cohesiveness, not hardness and repulsion, on both sides at the meeting-place. If suspicion and dishonesty prevail there, the peace of each will be marred, and the strength of the whole diminished. Truth and trustfulness will bind us into one, and union is strength: the soundest commonwealth is a commonwealth of honest men.
Throughout the Proverbs reproofs frequently occur directed expressly against the unjust balances of the dishonest seller: the sentence now before us uncovers the disingenuous pretences of the untruthful buyer. The blame of existing evils does not all lie at the seller’s door. Allowing, for the moment, that he is guilty of all the tricks which the public so readily and so indiscriminately impute to him, the question remains, To what extent did the community of buyers, by their own tortuous conduct, produce in the seller the vice by which they suffer and of which they complain 1 The case by its very nature precludes the possibility of a precise analysis, but perhaps we would not greatly err if we should assume, in a general way, that nearly half of the mischief belongs to the buyer.
The counts of the indictment against the seller are numerous and varied, but the one with which we are more immediately concerned here is, — He asks for his article a larger price than it is fairly worth, and if he cannot get what he first demands, he will sell it at a much lower price, rather than not sell it at all. Well, this is your complaint: assuming it to be true, and not justifying his conduct, we raise the other question, — How far are you, the buyers, guilty of inoculating the sellers with that vice ]
By expecting dishonesty in the seller, you produce it. The piece of goods is displayed and examined; you desire to purchase it, and ask the price. If from your knowledge of the article you think it too high, and determine not to give so much, it is perfectly competent and fair to offer a lower price; but when you demand an abatement, simply in order to bring the seller down, not based on a judgment as to the worth of the goods, you endanger both his conscience and your own. This kind of demand will be made upon the seller equally whether he asks at first ten shillings for the article or five. It is not a legitimate judgment regarding the bargain at all, but a morbid appetite to bring down the price. This occurs not once or twice, but many times every day. Conceive yourself in the seller’s place. This blind and uniform demand for an abatement presses upon him from successive customers, like the continuity of a stream. He perceives that the people who make it are not competent to form an opinion on the value of the goods; he perceives that their aim is to bring him down from the price which he has first announced, whatever it may be; he perceives that the satisfaction of the buyer is not regulated by the real advantage of his bargain, but by the difference between the price that was first asked and that which was ultimately accepted. The pressure thus brought to bear upon the seller to turn him aside from the line of righteousness is very strong. ‘It is true he ought to withstand the pressure; but it is also true that his customers ought not to subject him to its dreadful strain. If he yields to the temptation, his method is short and easy: he asks a higher price than the goods are worth, and then pleases the purchaser by letting it down.
The cunning buyer, when the price is named, addresses himself vigorously to the work of depreciating the article. Proceeding by rhyme rather than by reason, he reiterates some unvarying formula, like that which the text has preserved in a fossil state since Solomon’s day, — “It is naught, it is naught.” When he has kept the dealer under the clack of this mill for a sufficient length of time, he offers a price, perhaps the half or two thirds of that which was at first demanded. His offer is accepted: he shoulders his prize, believes the goods are excellent and cheap, and goes home chuckling over his achievement. He imagines he has circumvented the dealer: the dealer, being one degree more cunning, has circumvented him. At every step of this miserable process, buyer and seller are fellow-sinners, and fellow- sufferers. If the public say to the merchant, Ask only one price, and we will cease to beat down; the merchant may reply to the public, Cease to beat down and I will ask only one price. Trust begets honesty, and honesty begets trust.
We are well aware that the art of higgling is in a great measure antiquated now: the mine has been well-nigh wrought out, and the diggers are trying other veins. The old, base, undisguised see -saw process of knaves and fools going into each other, the one asking a double price, and the other pleased with a bad bargain because he has screwed it down, has fallen now into the lower and more vulgar strata of commercial life. In the higher spheres of trade, sellers and buyers alike would be ashamed in the present day to begin, in this form, the reciprocating series of deceit. I rejoice over the advancement which has been made. I believe that a large proportion of it is a real gain, and is due to the diffusion of sound principles: I am not so sanguine, however, as to believe that the root of the evil has been destroyed. When the more healthful public opinion of the age prevents it from sending forth its branches in one direction, it will push them out in another. The forms of its manifestation will vary with time and circumstances, but a great amount of distrust and dishonesty, reciprocally generating each other, still hangs over the border line where men meet to make bargains, rendering it a comparatively waste and withered region — a region where grace finds it hard to live and grow.
In the days when England and Scotland were rival kingdoms, and their barbarous peoples animated by hereditary feuds, a traveller found, as he approached the border on either side, a wide, uncultivated, unproductive territory. The soil was as generous, and the sky overhead as fair, as in other portions of the country; but the inhabitants on either side occupied themselves with alternate raids, and each ruthlessly devastated his neighbour’s land. The two parties contrived to make matters nearly equal one year with another: the balance was kept even by the impartial desolation of both. At this day, too, the interests of English and Scotch on both sides of the border line are maintained on a footing of perfect equality. Neither obtains any advantage over the other: yet waving corn-fields touch the separating rivulet on either brim. There is no belt of barrenness. The labour of our forefathers in lighting against each other was more than lost. Peace can make neighbours equal as well as war, and give them all their crops beside.
A state of warfare makes a barren border. Mutual suspicion between buyer and seller makes the two equal by wasting both. Trust on the one side and Truth on the other would make bargaining morally as pleasant and as profitable as any other exercise in life. Righteousness at the point of contact would do for the parties what peace on the border has done for contiguous kingdoms: it would at once weld the two into one, and preserve intact the interests of each.
Might the analogy be pursued yet another step? The shortest and surest way of preventing a devastating hostility on the borders, is to embue the hearts of the borderers on both sides’ with loving loyalty to one rightful King. When independent and hostile tribes are brought under complete subjection to the prince, they cease to wage war against each other. Those who are under law to Christ, will not try to overreach their neighbours in a bargain.