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Updated: June 25, 2025
The free men, if you could have understood it, they are the wise men; the patient, self-denying, valiant; the Nobles of the World; who can discern the Law of this Universe, what it is, and piously obey it; these, in late sad times, having cast you loose, you are fallen captive to greedy sons of profit-and-loss; to bad and ever to worse; and at length to Beer and the Devil.
To such readers as have reflected, what can be called reflecting, on man's life, and happily discovered, in contradiction to much Profit-and-Loss Philosophy, speculative and practical, that Soul is not synonymous with Stomach; who understand, therefore, in our Friend's words, "that, for man's well-being, Faith is properly the one thing needful; how, with it, Martyrs, otherwise weak, can cheerfully endure the shame and the cross; and without it, Worldlings puke up their sick existence, by suicide, in the midst of luxury:" to such it will be clear that, for a pure moral nature, the loss of his religious Belief was the loss of everything.
In his mind's eye he could still see the red-ink figures on the profit-and-loss statement Sinclair, his father's manager, had presented at the end of that year. The old man appeared to divine the trend of his son's thoughts. "Yes, Bryce, that was a disastrous year," he declared.
She was too deeply materialized, poor woman, by her long and enforced bondage to that arithmetical demon Profit-and-Loss, to retain much curiousity for its own sake, and apart from possible lodgers' pockets.
This alarming commercial tangle is so well understood in Paris, that unless a merchant is involved to a large amount he accepts a failure as total shipwreck without insurance, passes it to his profit-and-loss account, and does not commit the folly of wasting time upon it; he contents himself with brewing his own malt.
He fought most fiercely against the conclusions of political economy, "the dismal science" which, he said, affirmed that men were guided exclusively by their stomachs. He protested, too, against the Utilitarians, followers of Bentham and Mill, with their "greatest happiness principle," which reduced virtue to a profit-and-loss account.
There is no question of time, or of profit, of solvency or insolvency. The profit-and-loss account in the long run always balances. In our astronomic age there are probably vastly more dead suns and planets strewing the depths of sidereal space than there are living suns and planets.
A man is right and invincible, virtuous and on the road towards sure conquest, precisely while he joins himself to the great deep Law of the World, in spite of all superficial laws, temporary appearances, profit-and-loss calculations; he is victorious while he co-operates with that great central Law, not victorious otherwise: and surely his first chance of co-operating with it, or getting into the course of it, is to know with his whole soul that it is; that it is good, and alone good!
The credit of Grandet of Saumur, the hopes he diffused by means of des Grassins in the minds of all concerned, facilitated the transactions. Not a single creditor proved recalcitrant; no one thought of passing his claim to his profit-and-loss account; each and all said confidently, "Grandet of Saumur will pay." Six months went by.
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