75. I do not doubt but that you are already beginning to think it was with good reason I held my peace these fourteen years,—and that, for any good likely to be done by speaking, I might as well have held it altogether!
It may be so: but merely to complete and explain my own work, it is necessary that I should say these things finally; and I believe that the imminent danger to which we are now in England exposed by the gradually accelerated fall of our aristocracy (wholly their own fault), and the substitution of money-power for their martial one; and by the correspondingly imminent prevalence of mob violence here, as in America; together with the continually increasing chances of insane war, founded on popular passion, whether of pride, fear, or acquisitiveness,—all these dangers being further darkened and degraded by the monstrous forms of vice and selfishness which the appliances of recent wealth, and of vulgar mechanical art, make possible to the million,—will soon bring us into a condition in which men will be glad to listen to almost any words but those of a demagogue, and to seek any means of safety rather than those in which they have lately trusted. So, with your good leave, I will say my say to the end, mock at it who may.
P.S.—I take due note of the regulations of trade proposed in your letter just received[VI]—all excellent. I shall come to them presently, "Cash payment" above all. You may write that on your trade-banners in letters of gold, wherever you would have them raised victoriously.
LETTER XIV.
THE FIRST GROUP OF ESSENTIAL LAWS—AGAINST THEFT BY FALSE WORK, AND BY BANKRUPTCY.—NECESSARY PUBLICITY OF ACCOUNTS.
March 26, 1867.
76. I feel much inclined to pause at this point, to answer the kind of questions and objections which I know must be rising in your mind, respecting the authority supposed to be lodged in the persons of the officers just specified. But I can neither define, nor justify to you, the powers I would desire to see given to them, till I state to you the kind of laws they would have to enforce: of which the first group should be directed to the prevention of all kinds of thieving; but chiefly of the occult and polite methods of it; and, of all occult methods, chiefly, the making and selling of bad goods. No form of theft is so criminal as this—none so deadly to the State. If you break into a man's house and steal a hundred pounds' worth of plate, he knows his loss, and there is an end (besides that you take your risk of punishment for your gain, like a man). And if you do it bravely and openly, and habitually live by such inroad, you may retain nearly every moral and manly virtue, and become a heroic rider and reiver, and hero of song. But if you swindle me out of twenty shillings' worth of quality on each of a hundred bargains, I lose my hundred pounds all the same, and I get a hundred untrustworthy articles besides, which will fail me and injure me in all manner of ways, when I least expect it; and you, having done your thieving basely, are corrupted by the guilt of it to the very heart's core.
77. This is the first thing, therefore, which your general laws must be set to punish, fiercely, immitigably, to the utter prevention and extinction of it, or there is no hope for you. No religion that ever was preached on this earth of God's rounding ever proclaimed any salvation to sellers of bad goods. If the Ghost that is in you, whatever the essence of it, leaves your hand a juggler's, and your heart a cheat's, it is not a Holy Ghost, be assured of that. And for the rest, all political economy, as well as all higher virtue, depends first on sound work.
Let your laws, then, I say, in the beginning, be set to secure this. You cannot make punishment too stern for subtle knavery. Keep no truce with this enemy, whatever pardon you extend to more generous ones. For light weights and false measures, or for proved adulteration or dishonest manufacture of article, the penalty should be simply confiscation of goods and sending out of the country. The kind of person who desires prosperity by such practices could not be made to "emigrate" too speedily. What to do with him in the place you appoint to be blessed by his presence, we will in time consider.