The Anderson intelligencer. [volume] (Anderson Court House, S.C.) 1860-1914, 1876-03-23
The Leaven of Dishonesty.

Among the characteristics of the times
we are living in, there is one not much
mentioned by the many popularspeakers,
who seem to think the men they speak to
are to be benefited chiefly by being assur-
ed how much wiser and better and more
progressive" they are than any of their
fathers were, who suppose the age is to
be instructed by being Aattered, and that
the country needs to be glorifed rather
than purified; which was certainly not
the way of the old prophets. The charac-
teristic T mean is dishonesty. | am not
discrediting any of the actual modern
Observation-Disclosures, enterprise, inven-
ton, philanthropy. Grant all these, in
large degree. Nevertheless, they do not
bring with them honesty in proportion.
Falsehood and fraud flourish along with
them, and in some cases by the help of
them. From the vulgar sediment of
society up to its highest SUBMITS, there
spreads q tremendous force of selfish
materialism-call it sharpness or call it
crime-by which men reach after and
snatch and call their own, for use or for
show or for boarding, what is not theirs.
It is stolen property, only stolen in
genieusly. and indirectly, and in such
ways that the old forms of law, which
undertook to punish outright robbery,
fail to overtake them. If there is the
least doubt about it, turn to the files of
your public journals, and find one day if
you can when there was not an allusion
to some conspicuous corruption of the
public conscience. Not in a few rare
spots, but in every spot where two or
three hundred people live together, a
part of these people consume, or lay up,
or waste, what belongs to other people,
and what they have managed to get by
some species Of deception. What natural
production of the earth is there, meant
for the sustenance or comfort of man,
that is not adulterated by some degrad-
ing mixture, or shortened in the meas
ure? Do not the devices of Anglo-Saxon
traffic repeat, in faithful exactness, the
devices of the Jew, denounced by the
prophet, making the ephah of the seller
small, and the shekel of the buyer large;
selling the refuse for wheat, and "falsify-
ing balance by deceitp' What line of
mechanical work is there, where the base
material, or the shabby construction, or
the overcharge, does not disgrace the
handicraft? What branch of commerce
without its delusive labels, its broken
promises, its advertising fictions, its post
poned payments, its calculated bank
ruptcies, its hollow contracts? Men who
will not suffer their respectability to be
challenged, look one another in the face,
and with mutual jugglery of knavish
tricks conspire to grow rich by villainy.
The brilliant audacities of the great COM
mercial centres have their lame and
creeping copies, hardly less cruel or
calamitous, back in the little rural viii
lages in sight of graveyards, where sleep
the ashes Of clean handed ancestors, liv-
ing and dying, in their day, in the faith
of a God who has Righteousness and judg-
ment for the habitation of His throne.
Outside the church are financial Ahabs
end social Jezebels. Inside are Ananias
and Sapphira, tacitly agreeing together
to lie to the Holy Ghost, pretending to
give to God, for missions or Bible socie-
ties, a hush-money fragment of what
they have seized from their fellow-men.
Too often there is no Peter with the
courage to search out their sin-"Tell
me whether ye sold the land for so
much ?" The grand difficulty with our
popular piety is, that it is stu trying to
find way, in this nineteenth century of