“Ay! ye come to that, after all, Ernest. Didn’t ye say a while ago that the mainspring of this work was self-interest? Well, ye was wrong. Self-interest is only the balance-wheel; the mainspring is love of our neighbor. We couldn’t keep things going a day but for that. The root of the whole business was Christian charity, and the branches partake of the same life.”
“You have simply helped the growth or lessened the friction by making one’s neighbor’s interests identical, for the most part, with one’s own,” said Ernest Clare.
“As they should be. As long as men are individuals they will have individual interests; but one man’s food and clothing were never meant to be gained at the expense of his neighbor, as we can see when the matter is carried to its ultimate conclusion.”
“As how, for instance?”
“Well, in the case of shipwrecked mariners, or them dirty cannibals that ate one another for pleasure,” said the priest. “Sure, aither of them is only the main principle of our modern civilization stripped of its glittering adjuncts.”
Mr. Clare did not answer. There was a glance in his eye and a quiver at the corner of his mouth, very like amusement; yet he realized in the depths of his great loving heart the awful truth of the picture which his friend had drawn in such quaint colors.
“I think,” he said at last, “that I had rather not be a cannibal, that is—rich.”
The carpenter’s shop, tin-shop, jeweller’s, dry-goods, shoemaker’s, and other shops, were all on the first floor, facing upon some one of the four streets that bounded “Prices.” Above these were the dressmaker’s and milliner’s establishments; but there was little here to notice or describe, as the one distinctive feature of each separate business was, that it was owned by the company and managed by salaried workmen. There was one buying agent for the collective establishment, whose business was to fill the orders, transmitted, through the executive committee, from the heads of departments. These, therefore, while they had plenty of work, had little or no anxiety. Their salaries were secure, and their only care the business of the day. Literally, they took no thought for the morrow.
“We find our shops are very popular among the rich folks at the North End,” said Father McClosky; “they say we give good weight and good measure, and every article just what it professes to be, no less. A man—sure, it’s a Christian he calls himself; and he has a fashionable shoe-store up-town, and was mad at us for under-selling him—and says he to me, ‘So you have adopted the maxim “Honesty is the best policy.” How do you find it works?’ says he. ‘Maxim,’ says I; ‘that’s no maxim at all,’ I says; ‘it’s aither a fact or a lie, and mostly the latter,’ says I; ‘but it ought to be the universal fact that it is with us,—sure, I mean universally the fact that we find it,’ says I.”
“And so it will be, some day.”