Greenland, and betray her to the next who comes in. We pretend to
ourselves and our neighbors that there is nothing which we so much
esteem as the simple friendships of life, and the straight-forward
love and hearty good will of the honest hearts around us, yet when
the rich and the titled are near, we are gladdened and flattered,
and look with supercilious contempt upon the humble friendships
which we affected to cherish supremely. In our conscience and
judgment, we appreciate the genuine values of social life, and we
profess in our language to hold them in just estimation, but in
our life and practice we honor that which is fictitious and
conventional, apprehending in our conscience and judgment that we
are acting a lie. Socially I cannot but believe that there is far
more of truthfulness in humble than in high life. The more nearly
we come down to hearty nature, and the further we go from, the
artificial and conventional, the nearer do we come to truth. Truth
is indeed at the bottom of this well, and not in the artificial
wall that rises above it, nor the buckets that go up and down as
caprice or selfishness turns the windlass.

Business lying is, after all, the most universal of any. It is
confined to no age and no nation. Solomon understood the world's
great game when he wrote: "It is naught, it is naught, saith the
buyer: but when he is gone his way, then he boasteth;" and from
Solomon's day down to ours, buyers have depreciated that which
they would purchase, and then boasted of their bargains. When two
selfish persons meet on opposite sides of a counter, there rises
between them a sort of antagonism. One is interested in selling an
article of merchandise at the highest practicable profit, and the
other is interested in obtaining it at the lowest possible price.
Of the small, cunning lies that pass back and forth over that