#kindleberger

The most virtuous merchants tell you with the most candid air this word of the most unrestrained immorality: 'One gets out of a bad affair as one can".

The line separating moral from immoral acts is now less fuzzy than it once was. One way that modernity is distinguished from backwardness is morality. In early stages of development, codes provided for honor and trust only within the family. Nepotism was efficient in these cir-cumstances since strangers virtually had a license to steal. In 1720 a firm could buy a man’s services but not his loyalty; to be a clerk was an invitation to start a new and competitive business at a time when embez- zlement and fraudulent conversion were not regarded as crimes.

Swindles differ from ordinary robbery in that they abuse a trust. Daniel Defoe thought the stock-jobber cheat 10,000 times worse than the high- wayman because the swindler robbed people he knew—often his friends and relatives—and ran no physical ‘risque.’