While 25,000 merchants in the United States during the four years from 1871 to 1875 failed in business, with liabilities amounting to $800,000,000 (I quote statistics from accepted authority), I do not believe that one-quarter of that number of clergymen failed [laughter and applause], or that their liabilities amounted to anything like that sum. [Laughter and applause.] I have seen the estimate that eighty-five per cent. of merchants fail within two years after they embark in business, notwithstanding their common sense, and that only three per cent, make more money in the long run than is enough for a comfortable livelihood.

Having thus attempted to fortify my waning “Dutch courage” by an off-hand attack upon my hospitable entertainers, and having in some sense, even though it be Pickwickian, vindicated my cloth, let me go on for a moment and cut my garment according to it. [Laughter and applause.]

I have been asked to say a word upon the wedlock of Truth and Trade, and advocate the idea that what in the nature of things has been joined together of God, should not, should never be sundered by man.  We know that Truth is eternal.  Trade, thank God, is not. [Laughter and applause.] Still, so far as time and earth are concerned, trade endures from first to last and everywhere.  God married it to truth with the fiat that men should eat bread in the sweat of their faces.  From that moment men have been wrangling in every court of conscience and society to secure decrees of divorce.  How manifold and multitudinous the tricks, dodges, and evasions to which men have resorted to be rid of the work which conditions bread. [Laughter and applause.] The great art of life in the estimate of the general, said a great economist, is to have others do the face-sweating and themselves the bread-eating. [Laughter and applause.]

But all along the line of the centuries the divine utterances have given forth with clarion clearness that God would have men illustrate morals and religion in the routine of business life.  And so in all the upper levels of civilization we observe that society points with pride to the integrity that is proof against the temptations of trade.  The men who have honored sublime relations of business and religion are they whom the world has delighted to honor.  With but rare exceptions trade, wherever it has been prosperous, has had truth for its wedded partner.  For the most part, wherever men have achieved high success in traffic, it has been not upon the principle that “Honesty is the best policy,” for honesty is never policy, but upon the basis of fidelity to truth and right under every possible condition of things.  The man who is honest from motives of policy will be dishonest when policy beckons in that direction.  The men who have illumined the annals of trade are those who have bought the truth and sold it not, who held it only to dispense it for the welfare of others.