BUYING AND SELLING.
4‘-EVERY man has his price," said Sir Robert Walpole,
and he said it of politicians, who alone among mankind profess to be unpaid. But except for these dis- interested persons, one may affirm of the human race that buying and selling enters into almost every action, and is at the root of every occupation. Every man is selling himself for the best price he can command, though we do not express it so when we are civil. We give our services and we receive remuneration, and for the most part we have a genteel contempt for the people who do explicitly buy and sell. Why this should be so is one of the queernesses of human nature,—a puzzle as insoluble as the question why certain forms of buying and selling should rank above others. A man who sells armour-plates looks down on one who makes an equal income by manufacturing cutlery; and the man who earns five thousand a year by selling scissors of his own make counts himself better than the retailer who clears seven thousand. Again, to sell raw materials is always accounted more honourable than to sell the manufactured article ; a Duke may sell pigs, probably every Duke does, but he can hardly deal in bacon. Practi- cally, the world still holds by the old Roman notion that a great man should only invest his money in land and servants or in usury on a large scale. Reason has very little to say in the matter. The most respectable form of selling, one would say, is to sell something that you make yourself— as an artist sells a picture or a writer his book—yet this is the form of trade against which most prejudice existed up to a time within living memory. Byron, always hard up, could scarcely be persuaded at first to take money for his writings. Nowadays we are not so squeamish; we sell the crop of our brains, if we have any, as cheerfully as our great-grandfathers -sold their votes. But the most respectable people are by general admission those who sell, not wares, but themselves. Gentlemen whose high character makes them worth a salary ; lawyers who give their services, that is, their brains and their professional standing, for a fee; doctors who sell their know- ledge to put long names to old ladies' fanciful complaints,— all these people reflect with a singular complacency that they are not in trade. Of course, lurking in a remote background, there is some trace of a reasonable basis for our superstitions. A mN who owns land, let us say, and finds minerals on it, or finds the ordinary produce more than he and his house- hold can consume, naturally sells what he cannot use and -what other people require. There is a difference between him and the man who lives on the margin of two profits, -the retailer whose business it is to sell for more what he -has bought for less. In the shopman's employment there is no kindly touch of nature ; he does not wait upon the great forces of earth and sky ; that mysterious tide, the market, is the only ocean by whose fluctuations he is affected.
he manufacturer is beyond question a good friend to us
if he produces an article which we all want. We pay him no longer for his skill in a craft, but interest on the capital he has sunk and a salary for his supervision. But the middleman is not in favour with humanity ; we forget that the retailer supplies not only capital and supervision, but a knowledge of the market, and even of our own requirements. Women may know what they want when they go into a shop; half the men one meets do not. They go in and state their requirements, generally in a shamefaced, inarticulate fashion, and the shopman's answer is beautifully explicit and luminous. No doubt when a man does know what he wants, his opinion
does not always coincide with the salesman's; but in the end, with a little perseverence and brutality, it is possible to get. let us say, leather leggings instead of cloth ones ; though till the end of our days, whenever we wear them, there may rankle in us an uncomfortable conviction that leather is all wrong.
There is something of a confession in the way we are apt to look on shopkeeping or buying and selling as a man's daily business. People who only traffic on occasion feel the strain upon their honesty ; every transaction has a touch of the gamble ; and we can hardly believe that any conscience can resist for ever. Must there not always be a tendency to over- praise the article that will wear out soonest, to foist off the wares on which gain is the greatest or loss imminent P Imagine dealing in eggs,--things undistinguishable in outward show; frauds only to be detected in musty experience. Besides, nearly every other kind of worker has a tangible result to show and take pride in,—the gardener his flowers, the parson his congregation, the sailor his vessel, and so forth. The tradesman's result is his turn-over. What he creates is the excess of gains over outgoings. That at least is the view of prejudice; in point of fact, probably a man may take pleasure in the attractive looks of his shop-window, and the growth of custom, quite apart from the thoughts of his pocket. They are his result, the outcome of his work, the embodiment of his exertions, and that embodiment is the most interesting thing in the world to a man who likes his work, whether he be a publican or a poet. And in regular business the gambling element is small ; demand and supply can be accurately gauged, unless in the case of perishables like fish and flowers, and where the risk is considerable, a large margin of profit is always, though unwillingly, conceded. The more a man is conversant with selling, probably, on the whole, he is the less disposed to cheat. It is not legitimate business, nor good business, to take more than a certain percentage of profit. To study the real ethics of buying and selling one has to take the more exceptional cases, where habit does not lay its controlling force on the decisions. Connoisseurship is beset with temptations, and it is hard to lay down rules. It is clearly fair to buy a young man's work at its market value, say, a Rossetti, in the Prerapha,elite days, for fifty or a hundred pounds; but to purchase below the known value, say, a Shakespeare quarto from an ignoramus for a crown, is trading beyond reason on another's ignorance. The same considerations apply as in betting. In fair betting a man bays a chance, but when the chance you sell is no chance at all, and you know it, you are swindling. Betting ethics, which are vague, forbid betting on a certainty ; but really the morality of the matter is that a man should get his money's- worth in the way of a chance. Still, if it is not fair to trade on another's ignorance, one may profit in reason by one's own knowledge. For instance, a well-known writer picked up in a twopenny barrow at different times the only two known copies of a Shelley pamphlet. The pamphlet was unsigned, and perhaps not another man in the Kingdom would have identified the book, so that the purchaser almost created the value of what he purchased. In horse-dealing, caveat eniptor is taken in its widest sense ; yet even in buying horses cases may arise where the buyer should not take too good care of himself. No doubt in such bargains, as well as in connoisseur purchases, one has to take into account all the times one is "done," and the professional horse-coper or brie-à-brae dealer makes it his trade to sell not at a fixed price, bat at the largest possible profit, so that the tables may fairly be turned on him.
It is not many of us, indeed, who are exposed to such temptations ; but some people are specially favoured of Mercury ; some are born to buy, some to sell. We have known a lady habitually fleece c,ostermongers in the sale of her fruit and vegetables, yet she herself was constantly buying things for twice their value ; and some people, especially artists with their trained observation, pick up endless bargains, but make a very poor hand of haggling over the sale of a picture. The pleasures of the two acts are very distinct ; that of the buyer is the more generous and imaginative. With many women buying is a passion, and a milliner's shop a place haunted by
cravings which the present writer vaguely realises in a fishing- tackle shop. Flies are so pretty in themselves, and such delight- ful possibilities hang about them ; it is impossible not to buy. A fortiori, when the imagination recognises the true employ.
ment of a ribbon, the ribbon is not to be resisted. As to the pleasure of selling, it needs a dash of the unexpected. One's salary is taken as a matter of course ; by-profits, say from writing, are exhilarating just in proportion to their rarity ; but for a perfect pleasure commend us to the selling of pigs. Pigs come to you little, they live happy, and look happy, they put an end to thrifty apprehensions of waste, for all overplus goes to them to be sweetly converted into cash ; and one day, by no personal exertion of yours, but by the beneficent dis- pensation of providence, they go to return no more, golden sovereigns come home instead, and other piglings replace them, with no wear and tear upon the emotions. To sell a horse, a dog, a pet lamb, a cow even, involves a parting; and we can make no extra charge to indemnify our sensibility. Authors and artists are the only people who can sell their feelings ; half the trade of literature is done in memories and associations ; as Mr. Watson sings regretfully, "We write out all our soul for pence ; Alas, how few !" Yet trade we must, all of us ; and the best bargains, like the worst, are acquitted in the coin of sentiment.
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