False weights were found in the ruins of the oldest city that has yet been exhumed. And false weights will probably be consumed when the earth drops into the sun and the heavens are rolled together like a scroll. Ancient records and ancient statute books are full of evidence that every new plundering device--from capitalistic and labor monopolies, secret rebates and majority owners swindling minority owners, down to adulterations and crooked scales--was familiar to our ancestors of the plateau of Iran before the migrations. Vice is the old inhabitant; virtue is the newcomer, the immigrant, received with reluctance and compelled to fight for every inch of ground he gains. As for specific testimony as to past ages, we have the testimony of all the old writers that the mercantile classes, the business men, were “without honor,” mean of soul, oppressors of their employés, robbers of their customers. We happen to know, also, that as for the other classes--the proud kings and haughty nobles and the rest--they certainly had a very quaint interpretation of that word “honor” when a murderer, a tyrant, a gambler, a practitioner of every vice that rots its slave and ruins its victims could yet be a “gentleman of unsullied honor.” And we know, finally, that only with the rise of the business men to influence and authority did the standard of honor become what all the world now recognizes as “ideal.” The very Biblical phrases in which honesty is enjoined are altogether commercial, are the language of the business world, of business men. There are two vital facts about our new industrial civilization which its critics neglect: First--It has created an unprecedented and infinitely great number of opportunities to dishonesty of the kinds that are, to as yet but slightly enlightened human nature, potently tempting. Second--It has created new conditions of the moral, as well as of the material, relations of man to the masses of his fellow-men which are as yet imperfectly understood and constitute a debatable ground for even the fairest and rigidest consciences. Men now see that large action of any kind involves large evil as well as large good; and the balance of right and wrong is not easy to adjust, except in the tranquil studies of critics and theorists.