COMMERCIAL MORALITY.

Evening Star, Issue 4030, 26 January 1876, Page 3

COMMERCIAL MORALITY.

In preaching before the late meeting of the Social Science Congress, the Vicar of Brighton enlarged on the increasing deterioration of English trading morality, quoting trenchant passages from Cowper and Tennyson on the subject. At the same time he appeared to be not over-confident of the effect of his homily, for it is to be observed that he only pleaded for a moderate degree of x-espect for the concise command in the Decalogue, contexxting himself with asking for a more perfect honesty in trade, and the xxpholding of a more recognised standard of commercial righteousness. Mr Buskin, more outspoken, in his * Fors Clavigei’a for October, protests that he lives in the midst of a nation of thieves and murderers, that “everybody around him is trying to rob everybody else, and that not bravely and strongly, but in the most cowardly and loathsome ways of lying trade,” and that Englishmen are now merely other words for blackleg and swindler. Not only apparently have Englishmen become demoralised, but their wickedness has risen to such a pitch that it infects all around them. Only the other day a Greek was caught making off with thirty thousand pounds in bonds which he had obtained from some of the innocent and confiding members of the Stock Exchanee, on the strength of a banker’s balance of 5s ; and the columns of the * Times ’ and other daily papers have resounded for more than a week with a hue-and-cry raised by owners of fruit gardens against that model of industry, the “little busy bee,” which is charged with having lapsed into “ways that are vain, ” and to have been pillaging orchards to a disgraceful extent. This is denied by some eminent who suggest inaccurate observation. Several experienced bee-keepers, however, are of the opposite opinion, but plead in mitigation that the bees which have thus abandoned the path of rectitude have had the reward of their industry, in the shape of beer and sugar, withheld by stingy masters, and have only beexx paying themselves as servants so treated will sometimes do.