Honesty Is the Best Policy
A false balance is abomination to the Lord; but a just weight is his delight”- xi. I.
JKOM my youth I have been better acquainted with this verse than any other in the book, because I was wont to read it with much interest when I was a little boy, engraved in antique characters on a mouldering stone over the gateway of a market in the city of Perth. In the times immediately after the Reformation, when the word of God was new to the people, it was much valued. Through the spread of that word the nation had been emancipated from a bondage of many generations, and after the long darkness, men rejoiced in the light. They were not ashamed of their deliverer: all classes felt and acknowledged their obligations to the Bible. In this respect our lot has fallen on worse times: direct appeal to the Scriptures seems to be counted a violation of taste in places of power. When that writing from the law of the Lord mouldered away by age, the magistrates, I suspect, did not engrave it again in their restored market-place. The motto of another city, “Let Glasgow flourish by the preaching of the word,” has dwindled down to “Let Glasgow flourish.” The legend became curt when the age grew carnal. These straws show how the current has been running; but there is reason to hope that the tide has already turned. In the palace of the International Exhibition at London (1862), perhaps the greatest scene of human concourse that has ever been known in the world, texts of Scripture, sublime in themselves and finely appropriate to the circumstances, are written where they may be read by every eye. It is refreshing to observe how the early reformers appealed to the Scriptures as the supreme arbiter in human affairs. It was an evil day for the nation when rulers began to ignore the Bible, and govern as if God had never spoken to men. Rulers and subjects.
buyers and sellers alike should love the Bible: no other law can keep the world right.
The precept is abundantly plain; it requires no exposition. One of the ways in which dishonest selfishness strives to attain its ends is to use false weights and measures in the market. As civilization advances, fewer opportunities occur of successfully accomplishing this trick, and therefore other forms of deceit have crept in and cast into the shade the old-fashioned dishonesty. The modern dealer finds it more possible to cheat in the quality than in the quantity of the article. Dishonesty of either kind, — of every kind, is abomination to the Lord. Justice is His delight, alike in the weight of the goods and their worth. Though an honest man should get no thanks from the world, he ought to count it an abundant reward for all his self-sacrifice that the world’s Judge sees every righteous deed, and delights in it. God claims to be in merchandise, and to have his word circling through all its secret channels; and when this salt is wanting, forthwith they become corrupt. Many men would fain banish God from his world. They are not Atheists: they are willing to meet Him by appointment on the Sabbath, and in the church, on condition that they shall be allowed to buy and sell without Him all the rest of the week. You may as well expect to escape from the air as from His presence. “In Him we live and move and have our being.” The only man who in merchandise is happy or safe, is the man who, while trying to please his customer over the counter, tries also to please God. We ought, in this bustling community, to be aware that unfair trickery in disposing of goods is a sin that “doth most easily beset us.” When a practice becomes common, it ceases to attract attention; and if it be evil, it escapes reproof, by reason of its prevalence. It would be our wisdom to suspect ourselves on our exposed side. It is in a crowd that you are apt to lose your purse, or your good conscience. When you have cleverly concluded a bargain by concealment and falsehood, the loss is not all on one side. The seller suffers more by that transaction than the buyer: he leaves the shop with a damaged article, you remain with a defiled conscience. It is more blessed to give than to receive; and the counterpart is a terrible truth, — it is more cursed to be an intake than to be taken in.
But there is much actual dishonesty where the parties have not
HONESTY is THE BEST POLICY. 100
a deliberate intention to deceive. A man’s judgment secretly leans to the side of his own interest. He has a bias in his own favour, and unless he be both watchful and prayerful, he will enter ere he is aware into the temptation, and give a false tone to his statements without admitting to himself the design of telling lies. This kind of dishonesty is still dishonest. A man may indeed innocently make a mistake, but the innocent mistakes will, on an average, as frequently favour your customers as yourselves. If they are all on your own side, they are not innocent. There is a rule by which we may escape this danger. I have seen a mechanic working with the appropriate tools upon a piece of wood, in order to bring its surface to a perfect level. After he had wrought some time, he took a rule and laid it along his work, bending his head and looking, to ascertain whether the rule and the wood plied to each other along their whole length, or whether daylight appeared anywhere between them. When the work had so far advanced that the rule and the wood touched each other throughout their length, the workman, not yet satisfied, turned the rule round the other way, and looked again. Why 1 He did not trust the rule; there might, for aught he knew, be a slight bend in it; and though the plank and it agreed, both might be uneven. By reversing the rule, he removes all chance of deception. His object is not that the plank should appear, but that it should be straight. Go and do likewise. You lay your rule along the transaction, and the two agree. But one’s heart is deceitful; perhaps it is inclined to yourself a little. Reverse the rule. Put yourself in the customer’s place, and the customer in yours. Would you then like the same representation to be made, and the same price to be paid? This is a method for detecting an unfair bias in our bargains, which the Redeemer himself condescended to supply — “Whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, do ye even so unto them.”
If I speak plainly, even bluntly, against dishonest shifts, it is not that I have any prejudice against trade. I honour merchandise. I place merchants on equality with princes in my esteem. I think the time is coming when their position will be more honourable still. To a greater extent every year, the surplus produce of one country is required to supply the increasing wants of another. This is a great providential arrangement for bringing and binding the nations into one. Merchants are the true ambassadors of nations, conducting their intercourse and interlacing their interests. The longer the world lasts, it will become more difficult for nation to go to war with nation. They are undergoing a dovetailing process, and every year interpenetrating each other with deeper and deeper indentations. Merchants are the engineers and artificers in that mighty process of providence for binding the peoples of the earth together by their interests, and perhaps for preparing among tlrem the way of the Lord. Between east and west, north and south, barbarian and civilized, merchants are the mediators accredited and sent by the Supreme. As the atmosphere touching both, mediates for blessed purposes between the sea and the earth, relieving the sea of its surplus water, and pouring it over the thirsty ground; so the class of merchants mediate between the different countries of the world, making the produce of all the property of each, and the produce of each the property of all.
It is because I see the greatness of merchandise that I strive for its purity. When the truth of God, as a preserving salt, shall pervade the fountain in the merchants’ hearts, the outgoing streams of traffic will be pure, and the whole landscape will wave with the blossoms of love and the fruits of righteousness. Though dishonesty be concealed, its effects cannot be diminished. The world is under law to God. Falsehood, in proportion to its amount, poisons and paralyzes the whole mercantile system. It is a bitterness in the spring which, according to its extent, will infallibly tell in scorching the land with barrenness. The system of nature is constructed so as to fit into truth. The world has been made for honest men; the dishonest rack and rend it, like gravel among the wheels of a machine. But if lies impede the motions of the social system, the social system in its slow and solemn revolutions brings down heavy blows upon the liar’s head.
fairs.