The Sun.
London, England, 1868-01-30 00:00:00

corporation, which cannot be opened with a golden
key, or else there is nothing inside of it answering
in social and political weight and dignity to the
English county family.
The moral effect upon English society of the state
of things we have been describing is, of course, exe-
crably bad. It gives money an importance in Eng-
land such as it possesses in no other country on the
globe, and inflicts on poverty a stigma such as no
where else attaches to it. It makes all distinction
of little or no value, certainly of no permanent va-
lue, without that of wealth. The successful author or
artist or orator may shine for a season, but unless
he has a fortune at his• back he may count
confidently on obscurity or on loss of real consi-
deration, or on having all social or political advance-
ment denied him or made very difficult for him. It
is the common belief in Europe that it is the
custom of Americans to estimate everything i❑
money, and it is a belief for which there is,
unfortunately, too much foundation. But there
is, perhaps, no country in which men are less
esteemed merely for the possession of wealth, and
in which other sorts of distinction exact so much
respect—not even France. We doubt if any
country can produce as long a list of poor popular
idols, orators, poets, historians, essayists, lecturers,
and politicians. Many of them may be very sorry
idols, it is true, but this is due simply to defects of
mental culture and not of moral tone. The idols
owe the worship they receive to the popular respect
for talent or genius; and it is a worship on which
the " social position" of the idol exercises no in-
fluence whatever.

One other cause of the prevelance of systematic
swindling in England—we are not now talking
of the small frauds of the shopkeepers—is the
want of what is called " knowledge of business" on
the part of the great mass of the population. There
is in England, as in every aristocratic country in
which there is at the same time a large mass of ac-
cumulated capital, a very large body of persons be-
longing to what may be called the " gentle class,"
but to which there is here nothing to correspond—.
daughters and younger sons of good families, half-
pay officers, professional men with small fortunes,
independent of their professional incomes ; people
such as those whom Hawthorne describes as
forming so large a proportion of the inhabi-
tants of Leamington. They all have money to
invest, and are entirely dependent en their in-
vestments for their means of livelihood, but they
are brought up in an ignorance of " business," pro-
perly so called, of its processes, conditions, and of
everything relating to accounts, not only rare in
America, but of which few Americans can form any
idea, and it is an ignorance which, instead of feeling
ashamed of, they hug and glory in, as the mark of
a certain social position. In this class there are,
moreover, thousands of women not only ignorant of
business themselves, but having no male relative who
is Much, if any, less ignorant. Their incomes are
apt to be small, but they rarely attempt to in-
crease them, and when they do, as in seasons of
great speculation like the last three or four
years, are pretty sure to fall among thieves.
The investments of this class in railroads and
joint-stock companies of various kinds particu-
larly banks—are enormous, and they furnish a prey
to fraudulent directors and operators such as no
rogues probably ever lighted on before, and such as
rogues in this country never meet with. It is only
in their simplicity and helplessness that we can find
the explanation of the fact that the directors of large
numbers of the English railroads have been able to
go on, year after year, submitting " cooked" state-
ments and accounts, which the public and the
stockholders felt satisfied were cooked, without
knowing how to bring the knaves to justice.
The Economist mentioned recently the case of one
road the directors of which mean to be honest,
but who, knowing well that the public will not
believe a word they say, have been forced to
solicit a determined enemy, Lord Cranborne,
to become their chairman. We need hardly say
that no directors could play a prolonged game of
fraud. here. When one of our great industrial
Bedouins wants to perpetrate railroad or other
joint-stock jobs, he has to begin by buying up the
stock himself ; after that he can, of course, play what
tricks he pleases. If he left it in the hands of the
community, he would find himself, as soon as his
combinations began to work, followed up by a thou-
sand eyes as keen as his own. Half the widows
even, amongst his intended victims, would know
enough to expose him, and not one but would have
a son or_brother or friend whom no balance sheet or
report could deceive.
The moral value of the wide diffusion of " busi-
ness knowledge," of familiarity with its conditions,
requisites, and tests, and of the habits of mind
which successful business men possess, cannot, we
think, be overrated. The rarity of them in English
society we look upon as one great cause of the appa-
rent rottenness of the English mercantile world.
The very great diffusion of them here we look on
as one of the greatest safeguards of American so-
ciety, as the great cause of what we bthelniewvneritdo bine
a fact, that there is no country in
which the amount of fraud bears so small
a proportion to the amount oftrust.llogues
abound only where dupes abound, and
igno-
rance is the soil out of which duptese
The weak point of American society is n
indis-
position to visit knaves with heavy social penalties
—but of this we have no space to speak now.