Chapter 06: Trading Cities 05

In this trade city lies a wretched place—the filthy, polluted Mercantile District. It is crammed with goods and goods only, and it glitters like gold in its own dark way.

It is a curious spectacle of modern life that every man in the city has to trade with another man. Everyone has a place and at least a bit of money to make such trades, and the work is for the most part a grudging one. Trade is the city's real world, and the street businessmen are its priests. They provide inspiration and wisdom and pure credit to almost every man that walks along.

Of course, it is partly a ruse—the mere hoodlums of the night, whose currency consists in drinks, fashion, dangerous words, and revelations of vice—but it is necessary work. And the traders themselves are priests—they recite, reprove, accept and conceal, and save for themselves the reasons for doing or not doing things. They form the religious orders and crackdown on the deviants, although they themselves are far from saints. All of these modern religions are reflections of the sadistic power of money.