IN New York City a wholesale house recently sold a bill of goods to a retailer to the amount of $1,550, and secretly gave to the purchasing agent of the retail firm $75.00 as a bribe for favoring them with the order. The retail firm found out that the transaction was made in this way and refused to pay the bill and also refused to return the goods. The matter was carried into the courts and the stand that the retailers had taken was confirmed. Thus the wholesale house was out the entire bill of goods, the costs of the trial, and also the money paid as a bribe to the agent of the retail firm.
This one case would not be particularly significant were it not for the fact that the custom is quite general among many wholesale firms and agencies to pay bribes to the purchasing agents of retailers to get them to favor their houses with their orders. In this way the purchasing agent gets a salary from the house that employs him and also gets his commission from the firms that sell him goods. The pernicious influence of such a system should be apparent to any one.
There is scarcely a nook or cranny of the business world that has not been pervaded by the bribe-giver and the bribe-taker. And nothing can more completely take away the manhood of an individual than to become a party to such transactions. It is nothing short of straight-out robbery. And it is the meanest kind of robbery at that, for the individual being robbed is one that has placed the utmost confidence in the honesty of the one that is doing the robbing. This sort of robber masquerades in the clothing of respectability and claims to be an honorable and upright man; in this guise he ingratiates himself into the confidences of his employer and then deliberately and coolly proceeds to rob him.
The greed for gain, the love of money, the desire to get rich quickly so that money can be expended extravagantly, are the crying evils of this day. And men and women who think should see how the various methods by which money is obtained are driving true-hearted integrity and honesty away from the people of this generation. And it should never be lost sight of that just such conditions as these are abundantly described in the Bible as the conditions that would prevail in the time just preceding the second coming of Christ.