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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Firm of Nucingen by Honore de Balzac: his mind that the silk merchants were oppressing him; he put honesty
out at the door and rubbed oil on his fingers. He still brought back
weight for weight, but he sold the silk represented by the oil; and
the French silk trade has suffered from a plague of 'greased silks,'
which might have ruined Lyons and a whole branch of French commerce.
The masters and the government, instead of removing the causes of the
evil, simply drove it in with a violent external application. They
ought to have sent a clever man to Lyons, one of those men that are
said to have no principle, an Abbe Terray; but they looked at the
affair from a military point of view. The result of the troubles is a
gros de Naples at forty sous per yard; the silk is sold at this day, I
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