No purchaser can possibly discover many of the defects in commodities;
he is therefore obliged to depend on the seller for information
concerning them. All this the seller well knows, and if an honest man,
will give the information. Now as no purchaser would buy the articles,
if he knew their defects, except at a reduced price, whenever the
seller does not give this information, and the purchaser is _taken in_,
it is by downright villany, whatever some may pretend to the contrary.
Nor will the common plea, that if they buy a bad article, they have a
right to sell it again as well as they can, ever justify the wretched
practice of selling defective goods, at the full value of those which
are more perfect.

5. A fraud, still meaner, is practised, when we endeavor to _lower the
value of such commodities as we wish to buy_. 'It is naught, it is
naught, says the buyer, but when he hath gone his way he boasteth,' is
as applicable to our times, as to those of Solomon. The ignorant, the
modest, and the necessitous--persons who should be the last to suffer
from fraud,--are, in this way, often made victims. A decisive tone and
confident airs, in men better dressed, and who are sometimes supposed
to know better than themselves, easily bear down persons so
circumstanced, and persuade them to sell their commodities for less
than they are really worth.

Young shopkeepers are often the dupes of this species of treatment.
Partly with a view to secure the future custom of the stranger, and
partly in consequence of his statements that he can buy a similar
article elsewhere at a much lower price, (when perhaps the quality of
the other is vastly inferior) they not unfrequently sell goods at a
positive sacrifice--and what do they gain by it? The pleasure of being
laughed at by the purchaser, as soon as he is out of sight, for
suffering themselves to be _beaten down_, as the phrase is; and of
having him boast of his bargain, and trumpet abroad, without a blush,
the value of the articles which he had just been decrying!

6. I mention the use of _false weights and measures_ last, not because
it is a less heinous fraud, but because I hope it is less frequently
practised than many others. But it is a lamentable truth that weights
and measures are _sometimes_ used when they are _known_ to be false;
and quite often when they are _suspected_ to be so. More frequently
still, they are used when they have been permitted to become defective
thro