Essays - 1882 Author:Herbert Spencer Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE MORALS OF TRADE. TTTE are not about to repeat, under the above title, V V the often-told tale of adulterations: albeit, were it our object to deal with th... more »is familiar topic, there are not wanting fresh materials. It is rather the less-observed and less-known dishonesties of trade, to whicn we would here draw attention. The same lack of conscientiousness which shows itself in the mixing of starch with cocoa, in the dilution of butter with lard, in the colouring of confectionary with chromate of lead and arsenite of copper, must of course come out in more concealed forms; and these are nearly, if not quite, as numerous and as mischievous. It is not true, as many suppose, that only the lower classes of the commercial world are guilty of fraudulent dealings: those above them are to a great extent blameworthy. On the average, men who deal in bales and tons differ but little in morality from men who deal in yards and pounds. Illicit practices, of every form and shade, from venial deception up to all but direct theft, may be brought home to the higher grades of our commercial world. Tricks innumerable, lies acted or uttered, elaborately-devised frauds, are prevalent—many of them established as " customs of the trade;" nay, not only established but defended. Passing over, then, the much-reprobated shopkeepers, of whose delinquencies most people know something, let us turn our attention to the delinquencies of the classes above them in the mercantile scale. The business of wholesale houses—in the clothing- trades at least—is chiefly managed by a class of men called " buyers." Each wholesale establishment is usually divided into several departments; and at the head of each of these departments is placed one of these functionaries. A buyer is a partially-independent sub-trader...« less