The Sun.
London, England, 1858-12-28 00:00:00

SIR. BLACK, 11LP., ON TRADING
_MORALITY.

A meeting in connexion with the Scottish Trade
Protection Society was held in Glasgow on Wed-
nesday evening. Mr. Charles Cowan, M.P., pre-
sided ; and was supported by Mr. Black, M.P., the
Lord Provost, and many of the leading inhabitants
of the city.
After some introductory remarks by the chair-
man,

Mr. BLACK, M.P., delivered an address. He
commenced by adverting to the calling of mer-
chants as having ever exerted a greater amount of
influence for good or evil than any other class in the
community, and to the blessings of knowledge and
civilisation, liberty and religion, as following in the
train of commerce. The true merchant, he said,
was but the true man illustrating a particular con-
dition in life. The morality which governed all
other relations should equally prevail in mercantile
life, and neither opportunity nor policy, nor the most
tempting prospects ofgain should allow the merchant
to deviate from the strict line of honesty, and the
same honourable dealing should guide him whether
in the sale of a yard of calico, or of an East India-
man. The true merchant will not try suddenly to
get rich by borrowing money and engaging in
hazardous gambling speculations. Suppose a man
should attempt to borrow a thousand pounds in
order to bet at a horse race, would any prudent man
furnish him with the means, or would any upright
man give him money for such a purpose ? Gamblers
can borrow money only from- gamblers or from
fools. And if borrowing money to speculate on
the chance of a rise in any commodity be not
gambling, by what name shall we call it ? The
principle is just the same, whether we stake money
on the swiftness of a horse, or on the failure
of a crop, or on a rise in the funds. Suppose
a man should borrow money for the purpose
of buying a vast quantity of sugar, and awaiting
an expected rise in its price, and should, without
consulting his creditors, bet the whole sum on a
decrease in the next sugar crop, would not the
lenders be justified in charging him with a viola-
tion of faith in this reckless misuse of their money.
They would be scarcely a shads of difference be-
tween the morality of the two transactions. The
only difference between the commercial gambler
and the horse-jockey. gambler is this—the one
cheats rogues like himself, the other cheats honest
men ; and it is this unmanly impatience, that will
not wait for the reward of honest industry—this
reckless hazarding of borrowed money--which
strews all the paths of commercial life
with the bleaching bones of bankruptcy, and
robs the unsuspecting poor man of his
small but well-earned substance. Well-directed
energy and enterprise are the life of commercial
progress ; but if there is one lesson taught more
plainly than another by the great failures of late,
it is that safety lies in sticking to a legitimate
business. No man—merchant, trader, or banker—
has any moral right to be so energetic and enter-
prising as to take from his legitimate business the
capital which it requires to meet any emergency.
The public-spirited merchant will be ready to assist
in the promotion of undertakings which are likely
to be generally beneficial to the community- ; but
even here he must be limited by prudence. When
a crowd of creditors stand vainly waiting for their
dues, it is little comfort to them to be told, "
one thing must be remembered, and that is,
that the money has been widely spread to aid
important enterprises.' The old maxim, "Be just
before you are generous," comes up at such
times with great force, and *the creditor naturally
asks, " What right has this house to be enter-
prising with my money, apart from their legitimate
business ?" Apologies are sometimes' made for firms
who have failed by recurring to the important ex-
periments they have aided, and the unnumbered
fields of enterprise where they have freely scattered
their money. We are told that individual losses
sustained by those failures will be as nothing com-
pared with the benefits conferred on the commu-
nity by their liberality in contributing to every
public work. Now, a man's relations to a creditor
are vastly different from what they are to what
is called the, public ; and it is no excuse for any
house in their time of failure that if they have
wronged individuals it has been in serving the
public. Sound personal religion is the surest basis
on which mercantile character can be founded ; the
man whose conduct is regulated by the precepts
of Christianity has already adopted the soundest
principles of mercantile policy; he is taught to
be diligent in business, and to avoid those snares
which would involve him in excess, extravagance,
self-indulgence, and ultimate ruin. The religion of
the Bible will impress him with at abiding sense of
his responsibility to his Creator, and his duty to
his fellow-men in all his mercantile transactions.
Nothing, however, can be more disgusting than to
hear a tradesman making loud professions of reli-
gion in order to secure an advantage in the way of
business, or under the cloak of superior sanctity to
shirk his duty, and to overreach his neighbours. It
is humiliating to hear the mercantile conduct of
such men contrasted with the honourable dealings of
men who make noprofession of religion, but are only
remarkable for their profanity and rough out-and-
out honesty. If you wish to test the qualities of
a man's religion, do not follow him to church,
where he must put on the garment of pious observ-
ance, but visit him at his shop or counting-room and
mark the spirit by which he is influenced in his
dealings with his fellow-man. If he regard merely
his own interests, and, in securing his own, invades
the rights of his neighbour, it would be small un-
charitableness to pronounce that men no true fol-
lower of Him who said, "As ye would that men
should do to you, do ye even so to them." Pro-
fessors of religion sometimes seem to think
their religion too pure a thing to be brought
down into the sphere of trade; but a man's religion
is not worthy the name if it be not able to stand
the ordeal of his business life, if it do not accom-
pany him in his daily avocations, and lead him to
sacrifice lust of gain whenever it prompted him
to injure his fellow-man. Mr. Black proceeded
to advert to the desirableness of shortening the
terms of credit both in the wholesale and retail
trade, inasmuch as lengthened credits increased
risks, and had a tendency to show a greater
apparent gain than was actually realised. Petty
expenses and bad debts were too often left out of
view, and an extravagant opinion of the profits of
trade was often entertained not only by the public
but by traders themselves. It was of the utmost
importance, therefore, to keep accurate books and
annually to balance them. Men have sometimes
gone on for years with a vague idea that they
were making money, when, in fact, they were on
the high-road to bankruptcy. As a commissioner
of income tax he had been surprised to find so
many tradesmen who could not give an account of
their income because they did not keep books and
made no annual balance. Perhaps they thereby
thought they would evade payment of the tax to
the full amount chargeable, but in some cases he
should not be surprised if they outwitted them-
selves, and at all events the commissioners did not
accept their apology, and threatened, if they did
not keep regularly balanced books, to take upon
themselves the risk of charging them too high.
Mr. Black then referred to those traders whom he
might call the highwaymen of commerce, who fol-
lowed a reckless, unprincipled determination to
become rich by fair means, if convenient, or by foul,
if necessary. He concluded by saying that it was
one of the ohjects of the society to guard the honest
and prudent tradesman against the risks. to which
he was exposed by the mismanagement of the un-
instructed and the thoughtless, as well as against
the reckless and the vicious ; and he had reason to
believe that the mercantile public had greatly bene-
fited by its agency.

THE MAILS, &C. SOUTHAMPTON, Monday.__.
The steamship Behar, Capt. Field, left this day with. the
Bombay mail, £155,311 in specie (mostly bar silver), and 30
first-class and 10 second-class passengers, among whom were
Rev. F. Rosie, Colonel and Mrs. Buchanan, Capt. Graves,
Mrs. Colonel Maberly, &c. The Alhambra left this day,
with the usual Peninsular mail and 14 passengers. The
passengers of the steamship Bavaria, which broke down on
her passage from New York, and put into Queenstown,
arrived here on Saturday in the steamship Bittern. Those
destined for Hamburg (64 in number) left this day in the
Hammonia.

GLASGOW ROYAL INFIRMARY.---We learn with
pleasure that the Clips' ty's Minstrels, per their treasurer,
Royalof Milchel 1 '
Infirmarys
ocNerinitellitl'e",o, R 5 out-st of £2O paid to
have
Old, Bond 4 handod
them to
give the City Hall for the Reform meeting last
reL
Tuesday evening. This liberal act is all the more credit-
able a.s it was unsolicited.—Glasgow Morning Journal.
ANOTHER MAN KILLED AT LIVERPOOL.—On
Saturday night, a man, named Bartholomew Doyle, was
found lying• on some steps in Upper Beau-street. On
being taken up his head was bleeding profusely, and after
being taken to a dispensary, where his wound was dressed,
he was taken to the workhouse, where he died on Sunday.
A man named Poppet, who struck the deceased with a
poker on the previous evening, has been taken into custody.
THE PARIS OMNIBUSES.—The following statistics,
respecting the omnibuses of Paris in 1857 are not without
interest :—There are 25 lines in the capital, and the vehicles
on them conveyed not fewer than 55,474,154 passengers.
The line on which the traffic was most active was that from
the Bastille to the Madeleine, 7,681,297 persons having
been conveyed on it ; the next is the line from La Chapelle
to the Barriere d'Enfer, on which 2,793,668 persons were
carried. On the line from Neuilly to the Louvre there
were 2,757,446 passengers and on that from Les Terries to
the Boulevarddes Files du Calvaire 2,757,440. The Cha-
renton line was also much frequented, and on that from the
Barriere des Martyrs to the Pantheon the number of pas.-
sengers was 1,675,008. The line on which the movement
isleast active is that from the Bastille to Pore La Chaise,
only 374,035 persons having been convoyed on it. The
number of omnibuses employed on the ditferen.flines was
410,