THE popular notion of morals is that they constitute a code of action which has its origin and its sanctions in theology or metaphysics, and which contravenes human inelinations and interests. It is therefore believed that morals are the peculiar domain of the preacher, who must try to persuade his hearers to abandon the natural instincts of interest, and to take for their guide motives and objects whose authority is derived from absolute and universal ideas, the product of philosophy or revelation. The man so persuaded, acting from the faiths and motives given to him, is expected to act, often, if not always, without regard to his interests, tastes and inclinations. From this point of view money seems to be little congenial to morals, if it is not always directly hostile. "Money," as the term is popularly and incorrectly used, (as a synonym for wealth or capital,) seems to be the symbol for self-interest. It seems to be separated from all self-sacrifice, all care for others, for the whole, for posterity, for thought, for eternity, by the most sordid care for the material, the immediate, the egoistic, and the perishable.

It is not necessary for our present purpose to analyze this motive so as to show how much truth there is in it. A man absorbed in the care for his own health is just as selfish and immoral as one who is absorb ed in his own wealth. An ambitious man may care for neither health nor wealth, yet develop in the pursuit of power and fame the same sordid egoism. The immorality seems to lie, upon closer inspection, in the undue or exclusive devotion to one set of interests, rather than in the devotion to wealth alone. But the popular notion has other limitations and includes other falsehoods which are still more mischievous. The discipline and education of man comes not from one set of influences alone, but from all which are brought to bear upon him by human life. His morals are his judgments as to what things are wise and right for men, such as men are in this world, such as this world is. Ile gathers and forms these judgments, it may be insensibly, from his

experience of life, from his independent reflections, from tradition and authority, from the suggestions of philosophers and scholars, from the public opinion of his generation, as well as from the absolute and universal ideas to which he gives his faith. There is not a single relation of life which does not exert a moral discipline and produce moral education. There is not an experience of life which does not have its effect upon character, that is upon moral being.

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Of all the experiences which are thus at work, that set of them which is involved in the acquisition of material good is the most universal to mankind, demands the most immediate attention, absorbs the most time. It would be a sorry outlook for the human race, if it were true that these experiences were all the time exerting an influence which the preacher and moralist must regard as immoral. A careful examination will show that such is not the case. The satisfaction of material wants is the first condition of existence for the individual, the family, the state, the church, the school, and every institution which is useful to man. man eager for grand moral results, the impetuous reformer, the impatient philanthropist, fret and chafe at the restrictions imposed by the necessity of satisfying this first condition; but it remains true nevertheless that the capital of any undertaking, however beneficent that undertaking may be is the limitation on its possibilities. For the individual the acquisition or command of capital is the necessary condition of advancement to intellectual good. For the state there is no possibility of activity for the general good without the use of wealth, which the people must produce. Now the truest science simply coincides with the longest and most homely experience, which generations of men have condensed into popular maxims, in teaching that this wealth is only to be procured by means which exert the most wholesome moral influence on mankind,-industry and economy. Combined or coöperative efforts to shorten the road to wealth, whenever they are sound and true, always prove to be only facilities for

industry (to make it more productive), or for economy (to make it more tempting and more remunerative in its first stages). The immoral influences exerted by the pursuit of wealth all lie in the "short cuts" which men seek under impatience at the slow and sober methods of industry and economy. Industry and economy never trained any men to immorality, and the wealth won in that way never demoralized its possessor. Indeed the tendency of things in modern times, with the destruction of class privileges, the extension of liberty, the popularization of education, and the introduction of machinery, is to enhance every day the importance of the economic virtues, industry, frugality, prudence, and temperance, and to increase the penalties of the economic vices, idleness, thriftlessness, improvidence, intemperance, and extravagance; because true and permament success is less and less likely to be attained save by practicing the virtues and avoiding the vices mentioned. Every sound reform which corrects inherited abuses, tends to make success in the pursuit of wealth depend more strictly upon industry and economy. Every instance of bad legislation, and every economic mistake, forms a shelter for idleness, craft and fraud, and enables those who practice the economic vices to live at the expense of those who practice the economic virtues. Hence it appears that the satisfaction of our material wants by the normal methods which are dictated by the facts of human observation and experience, not only is not immoral, but it trains men directly forward to the point at which the moralist or the religious teacher ought to meet them. When he comes to men so trained, with his absolute and universal doctrines, he will not find himself in collision with their observation and experience. Men trained to industry, thrift, and integrity in business, are not cynics or epicureans; neither are they fanatics or enthusiasts. They know that the immediate good is not always the real good. understand patient and persevering effort for a remote result. They want to see the means provided adequate to the effect proposed to be attained, and they want to look beyond immediate results to remoter

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consequences.

We must, therefore, hold fast to our distinction that the acquisition of material good by industry and economy, belongs to the moral order, while it alone has any economic guarantees of success. We must look to our economic mistakes for the explanation of the immoral products, as well as for the explanation of the economic penalties, of the pursuit of wealth.

So much we have said conceding something to the popular misuse of money as a synonym for wealth or capital. Some illustrations of the general doctrine are offered if we look at money in its narrower sense of the medium of exchange. Stability of value is one of the essential qualities of a good money. We know of nothing which has an absolutely stable value. We are driven to choose between good and better. We must regard it as a great advance in money if we can find anything more stable in value to use for that purpose than the things which we have been using; we must regard it as a backward step to sink down to the use of a material having less stability of value than the most stable known. If capital which is loaned is measured, as to its value, by money, and then if the value of money changes before the capital is repaid, the borrower pays back either more or less capital than he obtained. If fluctuations in the value of money take place from natural causes there is this injustice, but there is no help for it. It must be counted amongst the ills and risks of life. If the government or a clique make use of legislation to adopt for money something which is liable to great fluctuations in value, they expose the community to these evils in a great degree, and make them a factor in all exchanges. If they adopt for money any sort of printed papers or notes which have no value as commodities, then these notes owe their value in circulation to the principle of monopoly. The community wants a certain number of "dollars" to do its business with. If the notes are supplied for not more than that number of dollars they will circulate at their nominal value. If more are issued, they will circulate in proportion to their number as compared with the number of dollars wanted. The management of their value is therefore

as suits him best, he and all will prosper together, and because of each other's prosperity; and that they want nothing of the money save to measure each man's earnings and savings as accurately as possible. Such is the education which the paper system gives. It is not strange that public opinion is found to be flaccid and vitiated when it comes to attempting either economic, politieal or moral reforms. The active generation changes every fifteen years. The men now forty years of age, in the prime of life, have had no experience of anything but the paper system. If they have not traveled or studied history to a sufficient degree, then they have no conception, even in theory, of other methods of industry and business than those which the paper system develops. Every man is subject to these influences of the community and generation in which he lives. No philosophy will enable him to break out of them entirely, and no other influences act so deeply upon the individual character as those which come from the accepted faiths of the community in which he is educated.

It would therefore be a great error to suppose that a money of fluctuating value is an evil only because it puts into the hands of some men opportunities, by arbitrarily increasing the amount of the currency, to transfer capital from those who have earned and saved it to those who have only borrowed it. It corrupts public opinion as to methods of business; it puts the community under fictitious relations to the natural conditions of acquiring wealth; it destroys men's clear perception of the value of industry and economy; it inculcates the sophistries of the gambler; it substitutes for the self-interest of the industrious producer, the selfishness of the robber. Will not these tendencies produce moral fruits? Will they not corrupt individual and national character? They cannot fail to do it; and the history of any paper money epoch, in any country, shows that a moral deterioration is a certain consequence. There is not simply decay in good sense and sound judgment, but also in the distinction of mine and thine, in the conception of rights and duties, in the notion of what is true and real as distinguished from what only seems. The

standards of honor which rest distinctly on what is true, as distinguished from false pretence, decline until honor is considered only an empty sound. The highest standard of honesty is "law-honesty," and it is only an exaggeration when even arithmetic is impugned, and it is declared that 92-100. Why not? A bit of paper never is a dollar. We call it so, and find that a conventional fiction to that effect can be made to operate so as at least to conceal the more glaring untruth from superficial observation. Only those who are trained to observe the facts, or those who are situated at the proper point for observation, can see how the falsehood is forced to pay toll to the truth, or how the toll is collected from those who have yielded their faith to the falsehood. The falsehood breaks down at last, as all falsehoods do; but then it exerts its most baneful effects when its devotees rise up and declare that the only trouble is that the falsehood was not big enough, or that we did not stick to it as we ought. If that is true, then why not swear that 92-100 and stick to it, and go on? The logic is perfect, if the premiss be granted; but the premiss is that "a lie well-stuck-to is as good as the truth.”

The frauds, false oaths, breaches of trust and pretentious swindles which shock the public mind when they are discovered, are all natural consequences of the great circulating falsehood. If the government or a bank can so violate the distinction between truth and falsehood that it shall have no effect, and that a lie can be made to prosper, why should not every one else do it? The only important thing is to secure "confidence." The distinction between commercial credit and the confidence of the "confidence man," is lost sight of. It would be easy to prove this by quoting from some of the eager arguments with which we have been assailed during the last two or three years. The writers and speakers pass from true mercantile credit to that faith which is the basis of swindling apparently without any perception of the difference.

Against such educational influences the moralist and preacher keep up a hard and losing fight. Every man and woman is forced to make exchanges and to use money.

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In doing so they are engaging in the struggle for existence the widest, longest, deepest, and closest interest of life. In that interest the greatest fact of all is value. It is a fact or reality of the sternest order. Truth and falsehood in regard to it are divided by just as sharp a line as in regard to any other fact. It is easier for us to deceive ourselves about value than about many other things, but our delusions are no more true on that account. A value money educates all who use it to know what value is, and it performs the true function of value, which is to distribute products equitably amongst the producers. A fictitious currency trains all who use it to error and confusion in regard to value; it obscures the pure, clear truth of value; it violates equity in distribution, and teaches people to believe that this equity must be sought by artificial interferences. They then set out in pursuit of the chimera equality, under the name of equity. When error springs from such deep roots, and its moral results are only secondary, assaults upon the immoral consequences which use only the usual moral arguments, must needs be weak. The range is too long. The moralist affirms the immorality of all falsehood, and he is right; because the material and immaterial welfare of man, his salvation, in short, depends upon the correctness of the conception he forms of his relations to all the facts of life. The moralist, furthermore, declares that the lines of truth and falsehood never meet or converge, but that they go on diverging towards infinite woe on the one hand, or infinite bliss on the other. Our conceptions of woe and of bliss may change, but the moral truth here asserted cannot be questioned; although to one educated under false standards of value and false theories of value in all the practical affairs of life, it may well seem like empty declamation.

If, instead of an entirely fictitious currency, we take the case of one which is liable to great fluctuation, the inferences are all still the same. They differ in degree but not in kind. The community cannot then become the seat of honorable, harmonious and prosperous industry. Its different industrial groups will still be forced to jostle each other in their efforts to come in the

way of the chance profits offered in one case, or to avoid the equally chance losses inflicted in another. Steady industry and correct foresight will still be fruitless, and gambling luck must rule over all.

These are economic errors, and the economist, in his own sphere, insists that they waste and destroy wealth; but that is not all. They undermine individual and national character. The conception of national honor fades until it has no distinctness. National promises lose their sacredness. People become so much accustomed to technical and artificial distinctions which blur over truth and equity and honor that they are glad to find standing ground of the same kind for obscuring national honor. They are no longer shocked even at the notion of an intentional and unnecessary bankruptcy, which to an intelligent business community ought to be the worst abomination. That delicacy of feeling or instinct which knows no rules, which shows the man of honor what he cannot do, whether it will pay or not, and which is the only sure mark of a righteous man, is lost. How, then, can we expect that national honor will develop vigor and force? A moral question is a question: What ought we to do? We ought to keep all our promises according to their spirit and meaning, as we and the promisees understood them when they were made. It is undeniable that there is such a moral question involved in the choice of financial policies now offered to this country, and that such is the answer to it. The fact that some deny that there is any such question only shows how deep is the demoralization which has been wrought by financial errors in the past. A permanent cure can be effected only by correcting the economic errors out of which the evils grow. Even then it will be necessary for time to work its long and slow educational effects, training up another generation by other methods to other convictions. Moral arguments have their best use in unfolding and exposing to the people the true significance of the doctrines and faiths into which they have drifted, when these are tested by the permanent standards which embody the long traditions of the human race as to what is permanently wise and right. W. G. Sumner.