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BUSINESS MORALITY.

our apprehension strange enough; but cunning and tyranny have never been wanting in pretexts, apologies, and casuistical arguments for the enforcement of their demands. There are perhaps many practices of law, even in our own country, which might strike a stranger as not less iniquitously absurd than the tax of the "tooth-money" in the East. There is a marvellous casuistry in the art of cheating, and we should be almost afraid to trace the catspaw principle through society. We have heard it gravely argued that the morality of Christianity is one thing, and business morality is another. It is perhaps not quite so easy as some people suppose to draw a sharp line of distinction between. honesty and dishonesty. Through a private telegram a merchant hears that a particular article has dropped in the market, so he sells off his stock; or perhaps it may be some large company, so he gets rid of his shares. This is all considered fair in business. On the other hand, if, by the same medium of a private telegram, he hears of the loss of ships, and insures them after the intelligence has reached him, this is considered theft. The one is a legal and the other an illegal use of the catspaw; but before the golden rule and moral code, it would be very difficult to draw a distinction between the two. These are of those views of society which are not pleasant, but they seem also so prevalent as practices that it would be a folly indeed to close the eyes upon them, and avow ourselves insensible to their existence.

It is a mournful thought, but a true one, that men in society seem to emerge perpetually, whose business it is to attempt to underrate others, and over-reach for themselves. It was so from of old. The very law of trade is given by Solomon, "It is naught, it is naught, saith the buyer but when he is gone his way, then he boasteth." Or, as the old Spanish proverb says, "He who underrates a thing buys it;" and the Tuscan proverb, "Fraud squats under a good bargain;" and a Latin proverb says, "But where is the yolk?" It was said of persons who reserved to themselves the best part of anything of which they had the distribution; and the parable is, that a man dreamed that he had found an egg. He went to some soothsayer to consult him as to the interpretation of his dream, and the soothsayer told him that it portended he should find a treasure, the white of the egg representing silver, the yolk, gold. The event corresponded with the interpretation, and the man took to the seer some of the pieces of silver. "Ah, but," said he, "what has become of the yolk?" And so the saying became proverbial. Molière must have had something of this character before him in his "Physician in Spite of Himself," when he exclaims, "I can't do better than stick to doctoring all my life. I find it's the best trade going; for whether we succeed or whether we fail, we are paid just the same. A shoemaker, when he makes a shoe, must not spoil a piece of leather without paying for his boggling; but we may spoil a man without it costing us anything. Mistakes count for nothing with us, it is always the fault of him who dies, and no one ever heard people complain of

THE ROMANCE OF A BUNDLE OF BLACK LETTER. 151

the doctor who killed them." And so the old proverb is true, "The grave covers many a doctor's mistake." "A bargain is a bargain," covers many a transaction at which no tradesman could blush, and over which no lawyer could quibble, but which never could find a sanction in equity.

Walking through the streets of Norwich the other day with a dear friend well known there, we passed one of those quaint old haunts, half book, half curiosity shops, concerning which our friend told us a story. There, only a short time before, one of those cunning hunters who know the value of so many things, had detected in his explorings among the dusty old shelves, a bundle of black letter in an old worn leather cover. He inquired into the price of it. Well, the tradesman scarcely knew; he had been told it was valuable-perhaps the purchaser knew the value of it better than he did. How much might he think it would be worth? Well, purchaser hardly knew; he had a taste for that kind of thing. The seller must be able to know what he had given for it, and be able to set a price upon it. No, he was not; he hardly knew how he came by it. It was in a quantity of old rubbish. He had been told it was valuable by some people who seemed to know. Would he give a pound for it? It seemed a great deal, he admitted. The pur ́chaser would gladly have given one, or many pounds for it; but the price was ultimately fixed at fifteen shillings. The purchaser took his prize away with him to London. He was well known in the old city, and often boasted after of the lucky transaction of that morning. He sold that worthless-looking bundle of black letter for one hundred and fifty pounds. It was a complete and original copy of one of Caxton's first impressions. Now, would he not have been a foolish man had he returned to the seller any portion, say a third, of the spoil? It would have been a most untradesmanlike proceeding; nor would it have been well had he manifested any great anxiety to gain the treasure, by giving instantly the sum suggested; in fact, the dealer of the old curiosity shop became an admirable catspaw. We often wonder whether Equity will ever come back either to the Church or to the world. We do not know where she lives now, or we would cheerfully go some distance out of our way to call upon her and solicit her return. her and solicit her return. Is her residence anywhere on this earth at all? Twelve inches make one foot, and sixteen ounces our ordinary pound; twelve pence make one shilling, and twenty shillings make a sovereign; and these weights and measures seem all right enough; but how hypothetical they all look when we come to weigh them against real value. So that while we are engaged in crying "Oh, fie!” “Oh, dear, what a naughty person!" "Oh, how very wicked!" as we discover our neighbour's delinquencies, we have to watch ourselves very narrowly, or, with a most engaging ease, we enact the part of the monkey, contriving to keep half an ounce out of the sixteen, or a penny out of the shilling. This is the social and political economy of the catspaw.

We talk of catspaws as though puss were simply the stupid tool in the

152

"THE CAT IS FRIENDLY, BUT SCRATCHES." hands of the monkey; but another class of proverbs shifts the character of the monkey to the claws of the cat. The Spanish says, "The cat is friendly, but scratches; " also another Spanish proverb, "The words of a saint and the claws of a cat," which, says a friend, is not complimentary to the saint. That somewhat severe judge of human nature, Mr. Samuel Slick, in a quotation made by Mr. Kelly in his " Proverbs of all Nations," says: Always judge your fellow-passengers to be the opposite of what they strive to appear to be. For instance, a military man is not quarrelsome, for no man doubts his courage; but a snob is. A clergyman is not over strait-laced, for his piety is not questioned; but a cheat is. A lawyer is not apt to be argumentative; but an actor is. A woman that is all smiles and graces, is a vixen at heart. Snakes fascinate. A stranger that is obsequious and over-civil, without apparent cause, is treacherous. Cats that purr are apt to bite and scratch. Pride is one thing, assumption is another. The latter must always get the cold shoulder, for whoever shows it is no gentleman. Men never affect to be what they are, but what they are not. The only man who really is what he appears to be, is a gentleman." Nay, the cat has often passed, both in proverb and parable, for a sly and dangerous enemy; hence that proverb, "Who will bell the cat? The mice held a convocation to deliberate on the best means of avoiding their great enemy, the cat. One of the sapient little creatures carried a resolution amidst universal acclamation, that the cat should wear a bell round her neck, to give notice of her approach. Good; but an old mouse raised the difficult question, "Who will put the bell round the cat's

neck?"

To announce a danger, is to dispel it. Mr. Defoe, in his interesting "History of the Devil," quotes some chapters to the dissipation of that old popular superstition which represented that personage as appearing always with a cloven foot, which he naturally thinks would really be a very great advantage to mankind, the mischief of it being, that Satan more usually walks about without the cloven foot. Says Defoe: "People might as well oblige him to set a bill upon his cap, as folks do upon a house to let, and have it written in capital letters, 'I am the Devil!"" He conceals his agency, as the cat, beneath the velvet, conceals the cruelty of the claw. The Spanish describe legal transactions beneath the proverb, "The quill of a goose and the claw of a lion." Beneath a proverb like this may be summed up the whole scheme of that arch system of political chicanery which goes by the name of Machiavellianism. This is the doctrine of "The Prince," that work by which Machiavelli is best known, and which has transmuted his name into a verb active, and made it synonymous with the cunning which conquers by over-reaching, and deceives in order that it may effectually subdue; and such, indeed, seems to be the basis of the Italian character. Thus he says, "To rise from a middling station to splendid fortune, cunning is more availing than force." Again he says: "It is asked, Is it better to be loved than feared? One should wish both, but it is necessary to make a selection; it is safer to be

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THE TRUE STORY OF THE MOUSE-TOWER.

153

feared than to be loved." In the next chapter he tells us that a prince, as he must act the part of a beast sometimes, should make the fox and the lion his patterns." And he goes on to show how the lion's strength should be eked out by the fox's cunning. To enforce such principles as these, this great writer exercised his genius; in fact, his whole scheme, as we have said, is the enunciation of the philosophy of the catspaw in the hands of the monkey.

Political history is very much the story of catspaws; statesmen have devised a thousand pretexts for the taxing of their subjects. As the traveller goes up and down the Rhine, and as at Bingen he recollects the old story of the "Mouse-tower," a tower which, if not sufficiently attractive in itself, is made quite famous by the grim verses of Southey; and as, lower down, he passes the ruins of Katzenelbogen, few realize the meaning of the cat and the mouse story there. The truth is, the Mouse-tower was the "tower of taxes," from the old German word for tax. Those old Barons of the Rhine permitted no boat or vessel to pass along without levying a muss, or tax; until, a little lower down, was reared another fortress, the "cat's-elbow" (katzenelbogen),a punning phrase, implying the determination to destroy the power and rapacity of the mouse. But the history of the Middle Ages is full of instances in which, by clever manipulation of words, the people were strangely defrauded; and it has always been a great thing, in the clever use of the catspaw, to contrive to re-baptize and to sanctify words. Thus, for instance, robbery, which seems a plain enough word, call it chivalry, what a very different idea it conveys. Certainly, we have ideas of what we call chivalry-a high-spirited scorn of low, base, mean actions; but the story of Chivalry was the story of plunder, and beneath the shelter of this sonorous and high-sounding term the castles on the high roads of the Middle Ages became the seat and centre of every fraud and crime. An Archbishop of Metz having built a castle, and being asked how he could garrison it, and support the men necessary for the garrison, simply pointed to the four roads which unite the neighbourhood. Thus in that day, highway robbery was hallowed by giving it knightly furniture, and calling it by another name. There were certain phrases used, such as "passage money," and "transit duty." The same thing has continued; and often it has been the case that over some evil custom, some atrocious injustice and wrong, has been spread the white vest of some holy-looking word; and beneath that, it has not merely been the case that the wrong has been permitted, it has even seemed a beautiful and very lovable thing. Look round; it is in this way we make catspaws of words. "When the Devil prays, he wishes to deceive you." Men who attempt thus to conceal their purposes, do they really deceive themselves? Do they think there is no Infinite Eye which perceives? This we cannot say; but certain it is, that, by a clever sleight-of-hand of words, the multitudes have ever been deceived; and patriotism, religion, freedom, and a thousand other such words, have been made vehicles for the most stupendous crimes; while some have a more melodramatic character;

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REYNARD THE FOX.

and "We must have a proper regard for our respectability," and "We can't be expected to fly in the face of society," become subterfuges-the first, for plunging into debt, disgrace, and difficulty, and the last for every kind of personal servility and cowardice.

The most famous illustration of the catspaw principle in life, is in the great German fable of "Reynard the Fox;" and there are many who suppose that this apologue presents a fair view of life and human nature in general, as Mr. Froude seems to think in his exposition of the parable, and the triumph of Reynard. "The world," says Mr. Froude, "said to him, 'Prey upon us, let your wit open us; if you will only do it cleverly, if you will take care that we shall not close upon your fingers in the process, you may devour us at your pleasure, and we shall feel ourselves highly honoured.' Can we wonder at a fox of Reineke's abilities taking such a world at its word?" So runs the old saw :

"Doubtless the pleasure is as great

In being cheated as to cheat."

So runs the philosophy of catspaws. We must again refer to Mr. Froude, for his paper is quite a discussion of this subject, and at many points it seems to be dreadfully true. "There is no one," he tells us, "who would not in his heart prefer being a knave to being a fool." He seems also, on the whole, to think that goodness in this world is a foolish kind of thing. "We value, we are vain of, proud of, not what we have done for ourselves, but what has been done for us. Whom do we choose for the county member, the magistrate, the officer, the minister? The good man we leave to the humble enjoyment of his goodness, and we look out for the able, that is the clever man, or the wealthy; and, of the wealthy, the man who with no labour of his own has inherited a fortune, ranks higher in the world's esteem than the father who made it. We take rank by descent; those who have the longest pedigree, and are farthest from the fountain, are the noblest-The nearer the fountain, the fouler the stream.' The first ancestor, who soiled his fingers by labour, was no better than a parvenu." This is all dreadfully written, but it is not satire, it is fearfully true; let those who take exception to it inquire of their own hearts what is their estimate of, and treatment of, men in society? It is the perception of this hard truth which gives such fearful potency and pungency to the satirist's views of life. In his heart, and in certain of his pages-that fine chapter, for instance, in "Vanity Fair," entitled, "In which Two Lights are Put Out,”—Mr. Thackeray felt a better and deeper truth; but all his works abound in estimates of life, and descriptions of it, especially from that point of view just indicated. In his introduction to "The Newcomes," he indulges in an apologue, in which, Æsop-like, he makes all his dramatis personæ beasts, and then vindicates the lesson derived from each character against the Solomon who remarks, "There is scarce one of these characters he represents but is a villain; the Fox is a flatterer; the Frog is an emblem of impotence and envy;