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

COMMERCIAL MORALITY IN AMERICA

AND IN ENGLAND.

(From the New York Nation.)

An gc an ful exposure" of the moral condition of
the mercantile classes in England, as illustrated by
the trade frauds and banking frauds and railroad
frauds which have been so numerous of late, ap-
peared recently in the London Spectator. It was a
frightful picture, but it was a picture of a kind
which the condensation required by periodical
writing has of late made very common, in which
all mention of modifying and redeeming facts, or
counteracting agencies, is omitted. The mere
enumeration of the repulsive phenomena of any
society or of any crisis—such, for instance, as Dr.
Mackay used to present to the readers of the Lon-
don Times during the late war—may be in every
respect accurate, and yet may suggest very false
inferences. To maize out a list of the frauds in
the commissariat or quartermaster's department
for example, and of all the desertions which were
revealed in any one year of the war, and yet say
nothing of the sacrifices made during the same
period by individual towns to fill their quotas, or
of the operations of the sanitary commission, or o
the magnitude of the temptations to which COu-
tractors or employes were exposed, or of the diffi-
culties of organisation and accountability- in a
service organised as ours was, would be at pre sent
a very false notion of the condition of American
society during the war. So also—although every
word said by the Spectator of the dishonesty of the
English business-world might doubtless be sup p orted
by fifty hard facts—the whole picture of Eltiglish
society presented by it is nevertheless, we think,
misleading, inasmuch as we are told nothing of the
agencies which are working against this dishavesty,
or of the condition of that large portion of the) com-
munity which necessarily has no share in tha grey
mercantile frauds.

The picture, however, derives a large portion of

its interest from the fact that on the surface it
seems applicable to all the great commercial. com-
munities of the world as well as to England --to all
of them, at least, in which trade is based on the
principle of competition. Nevertheless, there are
certain reasons why it is more nearly true of Eng-
land than of any other country, or perhaps we
should say than of this country, for this is the
only country in the world with which Eng-
land, commercially considered, can be fairly com-
pared. In France and in Germany and Italy
the principle of competition is not nearly so
active, which is another way of saying that the men
are less enterprising and more contented, though
perhaps less honest at bottom than Englishmen or
Americans—that is, they may cheat more readily,
but they cheat spasmodically and on a small scale,
rarely generally acd systematically. Such frauds
as have been revealed in England of late, in which
the management of railroads and other joint-stock
enterprises has been, year after year, a kind of jug-
gling process, skilfully conducted for the spoliation
of stockholders, are things from which most French-
men or Italians would recoil, as from taking the
command of a seventy-four or charge of an astro-
nomical observatory. If such gigantic swindles are
less frequent in this country than in England, it is
not for want of enterprise or ability. The necessary
skill and courage abound here ; in fact, abound
here far more than in England. Moreover, the
moral basis of American society is very similar to
that of England. If the state of religious and
moral ideas by which life in either country is re-
gulated be carefully overhauled, it will be found
very similar on both sides of the water. The
religious and moral training of men and women
in the two countries is nearly the same in all

- - _
classes ; amongst the classes who, in England,
do most of the swindling, they are almost exactly
the same. Yet there is no question whatever that
the state of things which has been revealed in Eng-
land by the exposures of the last two years not only
does not exist here, but cnnuot exist, even supposing
the commercial morality of Americans to be no
higher than that of Englishmen.
Foremost amongst our re,isons for coming to this
conclusion is one which will probably be questioned
by seven readers out of ten on the other side of the
water at least, and that is, that wealth does not st tnd

so high amongst the prizes of life in America as it does
in England, and therefore the pursuit of it is not so
eager, and the mass of men engaged in the pursuit
of it are not so unscrupulous. It is quite true that

a far larger proportion of the population is eng toed
in the pursuit of wealth here than in England, and a
far larger proportion think and talk of nothing else.
But on the other hand—and it is from this point of
view that we must look at the matter in order to get
at the moral results of wealth-seeking—the number
of persons absorbed in the pursuit of wealth in Ame-
rica is very much smaller in proportion to the
number and variety of ways in which wealth is to
be won than it is in England. The resources of this
country and the number of its fields of industry are
far greater than those of England—great enough
to employ and reward the energies of tenfold the
population now employed upon them, putting aside
altDgether any increase of resources or fields of
industry from new discoveries or inventions. This na-
turally, whilst stimulating people to the highest pitch
of exertion, makes the acquisition of a fortune
seem very much less of an achievement here than it
does in England or anywhere in Europe. We have
no statistics in hand bearing on this subject, and we
doubt if any exist that can be depended on. The
income tax returns are very fallacious, for various
reasons. There is one test, however, which is of
considerable value, particularly as it is not a pre-
pared one, and that is the number of American tra-
vellers in Europe. There are very few of them who
are not possessors of accumulated property, and,
taking distance and expense into account, we think
it is fair to estimate their number as bearing the
proportion to the number of the English travellers of
three to two. Wherever money is easily made, not
only is a fortune of itself a comparatively small
prize, but hope is very strong. These two facts of
themselves are a constant check on unscrupulous-
ness—that is, on systematic and combined unscru-
pulousness on the part of organised bodies of men,
such as has been revealed in the management of
English joint-stock companies. Great frauds, like
highway robbery, are the phenomena of a society in
which the struggle is very desperate, and in which
ease and luxury and social consideration are very
hard to win.
Not only, however, is wealth a greater prize in
England than in America, owing to the greater
difficulty in acquiring it, but it there puts within
the reach of its poseessor certain social distinctions
which are here unknown. Everybody knows that
in England the ambition of the successful trader or
speculator is not simply to acquire wealth, but by
means of his wealth to escape from the class in
which he was born and enter that of the landed
aristocracy. He therefore, as soon as he can retire
from business, either gets into Parliament or buys
a landed estate, or both, and sends his sons to
Eton or Harrow, and tries to marry his daughters
to men of family or rank. In nine cases out of ten
this game is not very successful ; but
.the one case
in which it is successful is amply sufficient to cause
it to be tried in the other nine. Now it would be
difficult to give an American an idea of the attrac-
tions the position of a country gentleman with the
entree of " London society" has for the British
trader and his family. It contains for them all the
happiness that can be had on this side of the grave,
and some, perhaps, which they often despair of
finding on the other side. Therefore, when an
English commercial man is running the race for
wealth, he is not striving, as the American is,
simply for a journey in Europe, a large house, fast
horses, and plenty of fine furniture, snug fortunes
for his daughters, the means of setting his sons up
in business, a place on boards and charitable com-
mittees, and a little extra consideration amongst
other business men ; he is trying to lift himself
into a completely new worldto,
enrol to surrhisonam und him-
and
self with new associations, e
that of his remote descendants in another order of
society, and to acquire for himself a portion of the
deference which is paid to those who wear famous
names or can boast of long descent. This is natu-
rally a tremendous prize : it affects the imagination
as few prizes have ever done, and it is only in Eng-
land that it is offered. On the Continent there is
nothing like it, 'There the nobility 113 either a close