Eighteen hundred years back, on the plains of Palestine, appeared a carpenter’s son, with a divine mission but a human heart. He preached no cash gospel—He was no prophet in the eyes of the rich. He had His testimonial—He reaped it in the bad man’s deadly hate. Alas! the Hebrew nature is the true and universal one. In Mr. Hudson’s, there is the testimonial of the rich—for the Christ, and those who would follow in His steps, there is the thorny path and the open tomb. Let us not imagine that we are one whit better than the Hebrew. The Hudson testimonial proves a common paternity. Gold has still more charms than God. As Mr. Bright, if not in so many words, but in spirit, says, “Perish Savoy, rather than not trade with France,” so the London merchant and tradesman ignore too often honour and conscience, and morality, for vulgar gain.
It requires great philosophy to get over the effects of City Life. “Let any one,” says Addison, “behold the kind of faces he meets as soon as he passes Cheapside Conduit, and you see a deep attention and a certain feeble sharpness in every countenance; they look attentive, but their thoughts are engaged on mean purposes.” This feeling is perpetuated. Addison remarks of a gentleman of vast estate, whose grandfather was a trader, “that he is a very honest gentleman in his
principles, but cannot for his life talk fairly; he is heartily sorry for it, but he cheats by constitution, and overreaches by instinct.” I heard of such a one the other day—A, a city merchant, married his daughter to B. A proposed that A and B should stock the cellar of the young couple with vine—B agreed—A purchased the wine—got a discount—and charged B full price for his share—yet A was rich as Crœsus. I have seen this grasping displayed by city boys. The writer was once accosted by some little children with a request that he would contribute something towards a “grotto,” on his declining any assistance, he was politely informed that he was no good, as he had “got no money.”
London abounds with Montagu Tiggs, and a genuine article of any kind in any trade, if by any possibility it can be adulterated, by painful experience we know it, is utterly impossibly to buy. In trade, words have long ceased to represent things. We need not dwell at length on the wrong thus inflicted on the community at large, all feel the minor evils resulting from such conduct, and occasionally we hear of sickness induced, or of life lost,—and for what? merely that Brown may get an extra farthing on the rascally rubbish he sells as the genuine article. I fear these are not times in which we may argue for the abolition of death punishments. Such things as these sadly teach us that in London commercial morality is in danger of undergoing gradual demoralisation—that we are in danger of becoming absorbed in the pursuit of material wealth,
careless of the price it may cost—that our standard of morality is not now as it ought to be in a city that boasts its Christian life and light, and that from London the evil circulates all over the British realm.
In proof of this, we may appeal to the occurrences of every day. Our great cities are shadowed over by the giant forms of vice and crime. Like a thick cloud, ignorance, dense and dark, pervades the land. Ascending higher to the well-to-do classes, we find bodily comfort to be the great end of life; we find everything that can conduce to its realization is understood—that the priests and ministers of the sensual are well paid—that a good cook, like a diamond, has always value in the market. M. Soyer, as cook, in the Reform Club, pocketed, we believe, £800 a year. Hood, in the dark days of his life, when weakened by the fierce struggle with the world and its wants, became the prey of the spoiler, and would have died of starvation had not Government granted him a pension. Many a man, in whose breast genius was a presence and a power has been suffered to pine and starve; but who ever heard of a cook dying of starvation? How is it, then, that such is the case, that so much is done for the body, and so little for the mind? that at this time the teacher of spiritual realities can but at best scrape together as much salary as a lawyer’s clerk? We are not speaking now of wealthy fellows who repose on beds of roses, but of the busy earnest men who from the pulpit, or the press, or the schoolmaster’s desk, proclaim the morality and truth without which society
would become a mass of corruption and death. How is it that they are overlooked, and that honour is paid to the soldier who gives up his moral responsibility, and does the devil’s work upon condition that food and raiment be granted him—to mere wealth and rank—to what is accidental rather than to what is true and valuable in life? The truth is our civilization is hardly worthy of the name? We may say, in the language of Scripture, we have not attained, neither are we already perfect. We have but just seen the dim grey of morn, and we boast that we bask in the sunshine of unclouded day. Our commercial morality brands our civilization with a voice of thunder, as an imposture and a sham.
Undoubtedly we are a most thinking, rational, sober, and religious people. It is a fact upon which we rather pride ourselves. It is one of which we are firmly convinced, and respecting which we are apt to become somewhat garrulous, and not a little dull. On this head we suffer much good-natured prosing in ourselves and others. Like the Pharisees of old, we go up into the temple and thank God that we are not rationalists, like the Germans, or infidels, like the French. We are neither Turks nor Papists, but, on the contrary, good honest Christian men. It may be that we are a little too much given to boasting—that we are rather too fond of giving our alms before men—that when we pray, it is not in secret and when the door is shut, but where the prayer can be heard and the devotion admired; but we are what we are—and we imagine we get on indifferently well. We might, possibly,
be better—certainly we might be worse; but, as it is, we are not particularly dissatisfied, and have ever, on our faces, a most complacent smirk, testifying so strongly, to our pleasing consciousness, of the many virtues we may happen to possess, but in spite of all this we need a considerable increase and improvement as regards what is called commercial morality.