Emerson on the credit crisis:
We say, in these days, that credit is to be abolished in trade: is it? When a stranger comes to buy goods of you, do you not look in his face and answer according to what you read there? Credit is to be abolished? Can’t you abolish faces and character, of which credit is the reflection? As long as men are born babes they will live on credit for the first fourteen or eighteen years of their life. Every innocent man has in his countenance a promise to pay, and hence credit. Less credit there will be? You are mistaken. There will always be more and more. Character must be trusted; and, just in proportion to the morality of a people will be the expansion of the credit system. (from "Social Aims," 1876)
Of course, one might point out that it's the extreme and convoluted abstractions from the "faces and character" for which credit is a metaphor ("credit default swaps," anyone?) that have brought so much trouble home to roost for us during the last couple of months. But we love dear old Ralph, pictured at right in an engraving by Stephen Alonzo Schoff, just the same.
