Honor and money

« - For a few years now, we have been witnessing a shift in consciousness. Morality changes. Morality is like the banks of sand of rivers; it is sometimes here and sometimes there, rises in the mountains above the current of manners and instincts, forms impassable obstacles in certain points; then suddenly all is flattened and the human wave begins to flow freely, barred further by the moving dune.

The immense financial disaster of recent times has just proved in a definitive way (which we had suspected for a few years now) that probity is disappearing. Hardly are we hiding ourselves today from not being an honest man, and there are so many ways of accommodating consciousness that we no longer recognize it. Stealing ten sous is always stealing; but to make a hundred million disappear is not to steal. Directors of vast financial enterprises make daily, to the knowledge of the whole of France, operations which all prohibit them, from the regulations of their societies to the most vulgar good faith; they do not consider themselves less honorable. Men to whom their functions and the mandate they have, and the very provisions of the law, forbid any trading, are convinced of having traded shamelessly, and, when it is proved to them, they laughingly foothold, and are quit to eat in peace the millions that gave them illegal operations! When it comes to the fritter of the agioteurs, it is his duty to lack consciousness, and almost a glory to put in the naive. The current of speculation has passed on ancient probity and scattered its mountain of sand. »

The full text is presented with an index. Each of the chapters is illustrated. A dictionary of explanation of the main "difficult" words of the text is also integrated (glossary). It is possible to read or to listen to the texts, each of the chapters offers a music or an acoustic atmosphere of introduction.