A will practically have all he can do, so far as B is concerned, to fulfil in the letter and in the spirit his economical obligations to him, without troubling himself to see whether B is going to vote the same party ticket that he himself votes, and without confounding either B's poverty or prosperity with his own obligation to be polite to him at all times and to pay him promptly his weekly stipend. So long as B renders in letter and in spirit what he has agreed to render, and A returns in the same way what he has promised to return, the less either thinks and talks and acts about the other in all the other relations of life, the better hope of good success to both in this relation. Church relations and social relations and political relations are all of consequence in themselves; but when any of these begin to get mixed up with labor-relations, there is soon a muss and a mess. Incongruous things, things no way vitally connected with that, often come in to disturb and destroy a simple matter of mutual renderings. (a) The first practical remedy for difficulties arising under this first head, is a clearer separation in the mind of both parties to a trade of what really belongs to Buying and Selling from what belongs to all other departments of activity. More common sense is needed at this point, more simple analysis, more daylight, more personal independence, more introspection as to motives, more power in making distinctions, and a more practical separation of what is clear and fixed from what is complex and obscure in human relations. Metaphysics may yet lie in cloud-land, Ethics may not yet have drawn its outer and interior lines so strong and deep as it will, Sociology also is a vast field of complexities, but truth to tell Economics has no mysteries to speak of. I buy and sell for my own advantage, which proves in the nature of things to be for the equal advantage of my compeer. It is my business and my compeer's business and every other man's business who buys and sells, to pick that action out in its motive and result from the great mass of dubious actions, and to set it up in its own light, to rejoice in it as the clearest thing in social action, to claim it as God's own plan so far forth for our comfort and progress, and then to see to it that no preposterous hand mixes it up with perplexities or theologies or other abominations--muddying with a tentative pole the stream of our clear brook! In this country at least, in its ignorance of common things and common science, the pulpit often fulminates against the gains of exchange as "materialism," and mixes up buying and selling with "worldliness," and only half permits its deluded hearers the privileges of the market, and illustrates again in modern times such teaching as is denounced to St. Timothy,--"_some swerving turned aside to vain babbling, desiring to be teachers of the Law, understanding neither what they say, nor whereof they affirm_."