First, I will speak of the actual moral condition of Boston, as indicated by the morals of Trade. In a city like Rome, you must first feel the pulse of the church, in St. Petersburg that of the court, to determine the moral condition of those cities. Now trade is to Boston what the church is to Rome and the imperial court to St. Petersburg: it is the pendulum which regulates all the common and authorized machinery of the place; it is an organization of the public conscience. We care little for any Pius the Ninth, or Nicholas the First; the dollar is our emperor and pope, above all the parties in the State, all sects in the church, lord paramount over both, its spiritual and temporal power not likely to be called in question; revolt from what else we may, we are loyal still to that.
A little while ago, in a sermon of riches, speaking of the character of trade in Boston, I suggested that men were better than their reputation oftener than worse; that there were a hundred honest bargains to one that was dishonest. I have heard severe strictures from friendly tongues, on that statement, which gave me more pain than any criticism I have received before. The criticism was, that I overrated the honesty of men in trade. Now, it is a small thing to be convicted of an error—a just thing and a profitable to have it detected and exposed; but it is a painful thing to find you have overrated the moral character of your townsmen. However, if what I said be not true as history, I hope it will become so as prophecy; I doubt not my critics will help that work.
Love of money is out of proportion to love of better things—to love of justice, of truth, of a manly character developing itself in a manly life. Wealth is often made the end to live for; not the means to live by, and attain a manly character. The young man of good abilities does not commonly propose it to himself to be a noble man, equipped with all the intellectual and moral qualities which belong to that, and capable of the duties which come thereof. He is satisfied if he can become a rich man. It is the highest ambition of many a youth in this town to become one of the rich men of Boston; to have the social position which wealth always gives, and nothing else in this country can commonly bestow. Accordingly, our young men that are now poor, will sacrifice every thing to this one object; will make wealth the end, and will become rich without becoming noble. But wealth without nobleness of character is always vulgar. I have seen a clown staring at himself in the gorgeous mirror of a French palace, and thought him no bad emblem of many an ignoble man at home, surrounded by material riches which only reflected back the vulgarity of their owner.
Other young men inherit wealth, but seldom regard it as a means of power for high and noble ends, only as the means of selfish indulgence; unneeded means to elevate yet more their self-esteem. Now and then you find a man who values wealth only as an instrument to serve mankind withal. I know some such men; their money is a blessing akin to genius, a blessing to mankind, a means of philanthropic power. But such men are rare in all countries, perhaps a little less so in Boston than in most other large trading towns; still, exceeding rare. They are sure to meet with neglect, abuse, and perhaps with scorn; if they are men of eminent ability, superior culture, and most elevated moral aims, set off, too, with a noble and heroic life, they are sure of meeting with eminent hatred. I fear the man most hated in this town would be found to be some one who had only sought to do mankind some great good, and stepped before his age too far for its sympathy. Truth, Justice, Humanity, are not thought in Boston to have come of good family; their followers are not respectable. I am not speaking to blame men, only to show the fact; we may meddle with things too high for us, but not understand nor appreciate.
Now this disproportionate love of money appears in various ways. You see it in the advantage that is taken of the feeblest, the most ignorant, and the most exposed classes in the community. It is notorious that they pay the highest prices, the dearest rents, and are imposed upon in their dealings oftener than any other class of men; so the raven and the hooded crow, it is said, seek out the sickliest sheep to pounce upon. The fact that a man is ignorant, poor, and desperate, furnishes to many men an argument for defrauding the man. It is bad enough to injure any man; but to wrong an ignorant man, a poor and friendless man; to take advantage of his poverty or his ignorance, and to get his services or his money for less than a fair return—that is petty baseness under aggravated circumstances, and as cowardly as it is mean. You are now and then shocked at rich men telling of the arts by which they got their gold—sometimes of their fraud at home, sometimes abroad, and a good man almost thinks there must be a curse on money meanly got at first, though it falls to him by honest inheritance.
This same disproportionate love of money appears in the fact that men, not driven by necessity, engage in the manufacture, the importation, and the sale of an article which corrupts and ruins men by hundreds; which has done more to increase poverty, misery, and crime than any other one cause whatever; and, as some think, more than all other causes whatever. I am not speaking of men who aid in any just and proper use of that article, but in its ruinous use. Yet such men, by such a traffic, never lose their standing in society, their reputation in trade, their character in the church. A good many men will think worse of you for being an Abolitionist; men have lost their place in society by that name; even Dr. Channing "hurt his usefulness" and "injured his reputation" by daring to speak against that sin of the nation; but no man loses caste in Boston by making, importing, and selling the cause of ruin to hundreds of families—though he does it with his eyes open, knowing that he ministers to crime and to ruin! I am told that large quantities of New England rum have already been sent from this city to California; it is notorious that much of it is sent to the nations of Africa—if not from Boston, at least from New England—as an auxiliary in the slave-trade. You know with what feelings of grief and indignation a clergyman of this city saw that characteristic manufacture of his town on the wharves of a Mahometan city. I suppose there are not ten ministers in Boston who would not "get into trouble," as the phrase is, if they were to preach against intemperance, and the causes that produce intemperance, with half so much zeal as they innocently preach "regeneration" and a "form of piety" which will never touch a single corner of the earth. As the minister came down, the Spirit of Trade would meet him on the pulpit stairs to warn him: "Business is business; religion is religion; business is ours, religion yours; but if you make or even allow religion to interfere with our business, then it will be the worse for you—that is all!" You know it is not a great while since we drove out of Boston the one Unitarian minister who was a fearless apostle of temperance.[36] His presence here was a grief to that "form of piety;" a disturbance to trade. Since then the peace of the churches has not been much disturbed by the preaching of temperance. The effect has been salutary; no Unitarian minister has risen up to fill that place!
This same disproportionate love of money appears in the fact, that the merchants of Boston still allow colored seamen to be taken from their ships and shut up in the jails of another State. If they cared as much for the rights of man as for money, as much for the men who sail the ship as for the cargo it carries, I cannot think there would be brass enough in South Carolina, or all the South, to hold another freeman of Massachusetts in bondage, merely for the color of his skin. No doubt, a merchant would lose his reputation in this city by engaging directly in the slave-trade, for it is made piracy by the law of the land.[37] But did any one ever lose his reputation by taking a mortgage on slaves as security for a debt; by becoming, in that way or by inheritance, the owner of slaves, and still keeping them in bondage?
You shall take the whole trading community of Boston, rich and poor, good and bad, study the phenomena of trade as astronomers the phenomena of the heavens, and from the observed facts, by the inductive method of philosophy, construct the ethics of trade, and you will find one great maxim to underlie the whole: Money must be made. Money-making is to the ethics of trade what attraction is to the material world; what truth is to the intellect, and justice in morals. Other things must yield to that; that to nothing. In the effort to comply with this universal law of trade, many a character gives way; many a virtue gets pushed aside; the higher, nobler qualities of a man are held in small esteem.
This characteristic of the trading class appears in the thought of the people as well as their actions. You see it in the secular literature of our times; in the laws, even in the sermons; nobler things give way to love of gold. So in an ill-tended garden, in some bed where violets sought to open their fragrant bosoms to the sun, have I seen a cabbage come up and grow apace, with thick and vulgar stalk, with coarse and vulgar leaves, with rank unsavory look; it thrust aside the little violet, which, underneath that impenetrable leaf, lacking the morning sunshine and the dew of night, faded and gave up its tender life; but above the grave of the violet there stood the cabbage, green, expanding, triumphant, and all fearless of the frost. Yet the cabbage also had its value and its use.