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Previous article FreeBack CoverPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThe Price of FalsehoodsJames Fisk, Jr., was still more original in character. He was not yet forty years of age, and had the instincts of fourteen. He came originally from Vermont, probably the most respectable and correct State in the Union, and his father had been a pedler who sold goods from town to town in his native valley of the Connecticut. The son followed his father’s calling with boldness and success. He drove his huge wagon, made resplendent with paint and varnish, with four or six horses, through the towns of Vermont and Western Massachusetts; and when his father remonstrated at his reckless management, the young man, with his usual bravado, took his father into his service at a fixed salary, with the warning that he was not to put on airs on the strength of his new dignity…..Personally Fisk was coarse, noisy, boastful, ignorant, the type of a young butcher in appearance and mind…. A story not without a stroke of satirical wit was told by him to illustrate his estimate of abstract truth. An old woman who had bought of the elder Fisk a handkerchief which cost ninepence in the New England currency, where six shillings are reckoned to the dollar, complained to Mr. Fisk, Jr., that his father had cheated her. Mr. Fisk considered the case maturely, and gave a decision based on a priori principles. “No!” said he, “the old man would n’t have told a lie for ninepence;” and then, as if this assertion needed some reasonable qualification, he added, “though he would have told eight of them for a dollar!” The distinction as regarded the father may have been just, since the father held oldfashioned ideas as to wholesale and retail trade; but in regard to the son this relative degree of truth cannot be predicated with confidence, since, if the investigating committee of Congress and its evidence are to be believed, Mr. Fisk seldom or never speaks truth at all.[Henry Adams, Historical Essays (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1891), 323–25]Originally featured on the December 1989 (vol. 97, no. 6) back cover Previous article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Journal of Political Economy Volume 130, Number 8August 2022 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/721829 Views: 208Total views on this site © 2022 The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.