ote 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