HONESTY IN BUSINESS.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXI, Issue 453, 25 March 1909, Page 4

HONESTY IN BUSINESS.

For two weeks nearly 10,000 people of Cleveland (Ohio) have boon try tup; 1° live “ lives of religious purity," carrying' out a pledge at meetings held in’all the churches on January 3rd. A large mimher of the expelimenters have confessed their inability to keep their pledge, not because of any lack of desire on their own parts, but because, so they assert, says the Standard's correspondent, present day business conditions make a strictly religious life impossible.

A clerk in a boot shop asserts that many women customers who require large size boots would leave the store in a rage and never return if he told them the correct size ol the boots sold them. “I am compelled,” he says, ‘‘to lie by saying that a size is two or three, when in reality it is a live. Were I to tell the truth I should be discharged,” A women typist says she is forced to assist in propagating a lie by writing on her machine a letter dictated by her employer containing statements she knows to be false.

A telephone operator asserts that frequently she is compelled to say one of her employers is not in when she knows that it is not the truth.

A haberdasher says he is forced to praise the quality of certain materials to customers when he knows the quality is poor, or he would be without work, and his family starving. A chemist’s assistant must sell over the counter poor quality drugs which he knows will not do the work expected of them. A very large part of those who made the pledge asserts that it is not within the ability of an employee to live as a Christian should unless the employer undertakes to pattern his conduct after the Bible. Any person dependent on another for his living, say the Cleveland experimenters, must obey orders, whether they correspond with the Golden Rule or not. Otherwise he must be prepared to face unemployment and bring down suffering on his family. Those who are able to live the truly moral life do not show more fortitude than their fellows, but simply are in a better position to do so.