Already swindling is tolerated in this profession:
how many way-bills overcharged, erased, altered! how many stamps
counterfeited! how much damage concealed or fraudulently
compounded! how many lies as to quality! how many promises given
and retracted! how many documents suppressed! what intrigues
and combinations! and then what treasons!
The commission-merchant--that is, the merchant--that is, the
man--is a gambler, a slanderer, a charlatan, a mercenary, a
thief, a forger. . . .
This is the effect of our antagonistic society, observe the
neo-mystics. So say the commercial people, the first under all
circumstances to accuse the corruption of the century. They act
as they do, if we may believe them, simply to indemnify
themselves and wholly against their inclination: they follow
necessity; theirs is a case of legitimate defence.
Does it require an effort of genius to see that these mutual
recriminations strike at the very nature of man, that the
pretended perversion of society is nothing but the perversion of
man, and that the opposition of principles and interests is only
an external accident, so to speak, which brings into relief, but
without exerting a necessitating influence, both the blackness of
our egoism and the rare virtues with which our race is honored?
I understand inharmonious competition and its irresistible
eliminating effects: this is inevitable.
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