So obvious is this, so clearly is it set forth in the wisdom of the race, that at first thought it seems surprising that anyone could be led into believing a trade-lie. But it is obvious that the test of a competent liar is that he gets himself believed; like the endless struggle between the gun-maker and the armor-plate maker, is the struggle between the trader and his victim. The trader is aided by the fact that an impulse towards constructiveness has been planted in the human heart, which breeds a repugnance to dishonesty. So there are ideals and aspirations, religions, loyalties and patriotisms; there are the Christs and Galileos of history, the Parsivals and Don Quixotes of legend. As the trader himself puts it, there is a sucker born every minute. The trader kills a silly sheep, and puts the skin over his wolf’s hide; so we have religious institutions and ethical systems, philanthropic endowments, professional codes, political platforms; we have honors, offices and titles, proprieties and respectabilities, graces, refinements, etiquettes and standards of good taste. Many of these things begin naively and in good faith; but in a society given up to commercial competition, and dominated by systems of greed, they all become trade-lies, and are used as weapons in the war of the classes. CHAPTER IX THE CLASS LIE In the stage of economic evolution where the savage exchanges a fish for a cocoanut, the balance of advantage in the trade may be equal. The fisherman may need the cocoanut as badly as the cocoanut-gatherer needs the fish. But as soon as we come to the stage where tokens are accepted, there begins a shifting of the balance of advantage; for the reason that the seller comes to specialize in the selling of one thing, whereas the more complex the society, the more different things the buyer must buy, and so he remains an amateur as to each. Moreover, the sellers learn to combine; they form partnerships, firms, corporations, alliances, leagues, associations, parties, classes; the buyer, on the other hand, remains unorganized and helpless. He is the consumer, who takes what he can get; he is the proletarian, who has only his chains to lose; he is that plaything of the competitive process, that jest of the trader through the ages, the general public. “The public be damned,” said a great seller of railway transportation, and his phrase has become the corner-stone of capitalist civilization.