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THE BARTERING MINDSET

A Mostly Forgotten Framework for Mastering

Your Next Negotiation
BRIAN C. GUNIA

THE BARTERING MINDSET

A Mostly Forgotten Framework for
Mastering Your Next Negotiation

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS

Toronto Buffalo London
© University of Toronto Press 2019
Rotman-UTP Publishing
Toronto Buffalo London
utorontopress.com
Printed in Canada

ISBN 978-1-4875-0096-2

Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetable-based inks.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Gunia, Brian C., 1980–, author

The bartering mindset : a mostly forgotten framework for mastering your next negotiation /
Brian C. Gunia.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4875-0096-2 (hardcover)

1. Barter. 2. Negotiation – Economic aspects. I. Title.

HF1019.G86 2019 332’.54 C2018-905701-7

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing

program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the
Government of Ontario.
I dedicate this book to my two daughters, Vivian and Bridget. May the
bartering mindset help you find opportunities in the conflicts and
challenges that life inevitably presents.
 CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

1 The Limits of the Monetary Mindset

2 The Bartering Mindset
3 Step 1: Deeply and Broadly Define Your Needs and Offerings
4 Steps 2–3: Map Out the Full Range of Transaction Partners and the
Full Range of Their Possible Needs and Offerings
5 Step 4: Anticipate the Most Powerful Set of Partnerships across the
Market
6 Step 5: Cultivate the Most Powerful Set of Partnerships across the
Market
7 Integrating the Bartering and Monetary Mindsets
8 Objections to the Bartering Mindset
9 Conclusions and Applications

Notes

Index
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book is the by-product of an extended and extensive collaboration,

often with people who were no more aware of a book collaboration than I
was. In other words, its ideas originate in countless and often casual
interactions spread across my academic career, many that predated the book
and others that at least ostensibly had nothing to do with it. Accordingly,
any credit for the book’s strengths should be dispersed broadly – much
more broadly, even, than the people mentioned below. (Any blame for its
errors, in turn, should be directed squarely at me.)
In particular, I would like to acknowledge and thank my three doctoral
advisors at the Kellogg School of Management – Keith Murnighan, Jeanne
Brett, and Adam Galinsky. You collectively taught me to think big without
losing focus. Many of the ideas in this book are yours as much as mine.
In addition, I would like to thank my many negotiation students over the
years, at both Northwestern University and Johns Hopkins University. It
was your reflections on countless negotiation simulations – along with my
own difficulty in intelligibly explaining integrative negotiation to you – that
ultimately led me to the bartering mindset.
Much credit is due to my collaborators on negotiation research projects
– you know who you are! Each of you has pushed me to broaden and
deepen my own thinking about negotiation, without which I could not have
completed this project (or many others). Thank you.
In addition, several people were kind enough to talk through the book’s
specific ideas with me. Your questions, comments, and quizzical looks all
found a way into the book. A special thanks to Jeff Gish, David Loschelder,
and Roman Trötschel.
Several others were kind enough to read through the whole book and
offer their detailed comments and suggestions. These include three
anonymous reviewers, Jeanne Brett, Mona Mensmann, Amy Pei, and Tom
Allen. Each of you, in your own way, has dramatically improved the work.
Reading through it, I hope you can spot your fingerprints!
 A big and sincere thanks to University of Toronto Press and especially
Jennifer DiDomenico, who saw early promise in the work and shepherded
this first-time book author through a thicket of considerations and decisions.
Thank you for your consistent support and consistently helpful feedback.
Last but certainly not least, I’d like to thank my immediate family:
Betsy, Vivian, and Bridget; Mom, Dad, Amy, and Abby. Though we talk
about negotiations less often than the others mentioned above, we’ve
negotiated no less often – typically to everyone’s benefit. More importantly,
your constant and unwavering support have been a consistent source of
inspiration and strength. Thank you.
THE BARTERING MINDSET

A Mostly Forgotten Framework for Mastering

Your Next Negotiation
 1
THE LIMITS OF THE MONETARY MINDSET

On 9 April 2017, shortly before the departure of United Flight 3411,

passenger David Dao was forcibly dragged from his seat, up the aisle, and
off the flight by airport authorities – kicking, screaming, and bloodied.1
Other passengers captured the soon-to-be viral video on their phones,
imploring the authorities to stop their seemingly brutal treatment. As the
world watched, the backstory slowly emerged.
United had determined, after fully boarding the flight, that they needed
to put four crew members into passengers’ seats. They offered passengers
monetary incentives to take a later flight, and three accepted the offer. But
the airline needed a fourth. In the absence of any takers, they randomly
selected Dao, a doctor trying to return home. Learning of his selection, Dao
became increasingly agitated, mentioning his ailing patients and refusing to
leave the flight. From there, the situation escalated and culminated in his
forcible removal and subsequent hospitalization.
In the wake of these events, United’s troubles only multiplied. The viral
video sparked worldwide outrage and condemnation on social media,
especially on the Chinese website Weibo, where it attracted 210 million
views within two days (a major problem, considering the airline’s strategic
focus on Asia). Incensed passengers around the world called for a boycott,
and the company’s stock initially took a $1 billion hit. United’s CEO
seemed to make matters worse, first by saying they had “re-accommodated”
Dao and then by blaming the passenger for his belligerence even while
praising the company’s measured response.
The focal issue in this story was the disputed seat, not the monetary
incentives offered to passengers. Nevertheless, the story embodies what this
book will call the monetary mindset: an I-win-you-lose way of looking at
the world that originates, at least in part, in our daily monetary transactions.
United’s stance embodied the monetary mindset in that its decision-makers
saw themselves as occupying one side of an adversarial relationship with
one other party, Dao, who wanted the opposite of what they wanted. Thus
United saw no alternative to a show of force or a forced compromise on the
monetary incentives. United’s behavior and the world’s reaction reveal the
monetary mindset’s shortcomings. This book will describe a mindset that
can serve everyone better, helping us solve our own problems and meet our
own needs much more effectively: the bartering mindset. By the end of the
book, you should be able to devise a solution to the seat dispute that does
not involve anyone’s forcible removal.
But first, let’s consider the mindset we already have: Think about a
typical weekday, and count the number of times you at least implicitly use
money. How many monetary transactions do you engage in, be they with
cash, credit, or check? Maybe you buy gas in the morning, lunch at work, or
an on-demand movie at home. Maybe somebody else pays you a salary or
some other form of income. And even if you don’t engage in any explicit
monetary transactions, isn’t money all around you – in the ads on the web,
the bills in your mailbox, and the back of your mind when your kids leave
the lights on? Whether we know it or consciously consider it, money is all
around us. For most of us, monetary transactions are ubiquitous.2
And monetary transactions are ubiquitous for a good reason: they help
us satisfy our needs and thereby solve our problems. Fundamentally, we use
money to meet our unmet needs and help other people meet theirs. When
you needed fuel, sustenance, or evening entertainment, didn’t money help
you obtain them? When somebody else needed your skill set or services,
didn’t they pay you for that reason? Anytime we need something from
someone or someone needs something from us – and regardless of whether
that someone is a person or an organization – engaging in a monetary
transaction is an obvious and omnipresent way of obtaining it, albeit not the
only way.3
Even before the days of Adam Smith, the economic benefits of
monetary transactions and the surrounding monetary economy were well
established:4 buying lunch with the same resource your employer just
provided makes life easy. Indeed, monetary transactions are ubiquitous
because they allow us to solve our problems so efficiently. For example, if
we had to scrounge around for something to trade with the cafeteria
manager whenever we wanted lunch, we would undoubtedly live in a
hungrier, poorer, and less pleasant world. So the economic benefits of
monetary transactions and the surrounding monetary economy are not in
question.
Yet an economic analysis of the monetary economy says little about its
psychological effects. This book starts from the premise that the ubiquity of
monetary transactions has an adverse psychological effect: it trains us to
make a particular set of assumptions whenever we have a problem –
assumptions that essentially portray our own needs as directly opposed to
somebody else’s. Assumptions that I call the “monetary mindset.”
Satisfactory as that mindset may be for satisfying our everyday needs
efficiently, it serves us poorly when we apply it to our biggest problems and
most pressing needs. Steeped as we are in the monetary economy, though,
most of us do just that. In sum, while money is not the only way we solve
our problems, it’s such a ubiquitous and useful solution that it steeps us in a
particular mindset – a mindset that can backfire when applied to bigger and
more consequential problems: individual, organizational, and social.

The Monetary Mindset

A mindset is a way of seeing the world. It’s how we think, not what we
think.5 More formally, a mindset is “a psychological orientation that affects
the selection, encoding, and retrieval of information; as a result, mindsets
drive evaluations, actions, and responses.”6 As this definition suggests,
mindsets matter because they color the way we see the world around us –
how we evaluate our situations, as well as how we act within or respond to
them. In general, individuals can adopt mindsets repeatedly (using similar
patterns of thinking across many situations)7 or temporarily (adopting
particular patterns of thinking in particular situations).8
The idea that money can at least temporarily put us into a particular
mindset is well established in psychology.9 For example, physical contact
with or subliminal exposure to money (versus neutral objects) inclines
people to think about themselves as relatively more independent or even
self-interested, which can help them try harder and persist longer on
challenging independent tasks. But it also makes them less caring, warm,
and generous, and it inclines them to cheat and steal. Similar effects emerge
across many cultures and in children as young as three, who cannot even
consciously comprehend the purpose of money.10 Consistent with these
findings, people who presumably consider money and monetary
transactions often – economics majors – tend to anticipate self-interested
behavior from others and act in a relatively self-interested fashion
themselves.11 This last finding is particularly notable, as it suggests money
can activate a chronic and not just a temporary mode of thinking.
Temporary or repeated exposure to money and related concepts, it seems,
tends to make people self-focused and potentially unethical.
In addition, exposure to money changes the way that people think about
solving problems, both individual and societal. In particular, money elicits
“a market-pricing orientation” toward the world,12 in which people endorse
competition among self-interested actors as the appropriate way of solving
individual and societal problems.13 Rather than supporting the more
collaborative, cooperative, and egalitarian approaches to problem-solving
that they might adopt in a family or community setting, people exposed to
money tend to support free-market competition among self-interested
parties, even if it results in inequality.
In other words, exposure to money leads people to apply the relatively
competitive, self-interested lens associated with monetary transactions to a
much broader set of problems – even problems that don’t explicitly involve
money. Expanding on this research, the current book suggests that our
chronic and daily experience with monetary transactions trains us to see
most of our own problems through a monetary lens. Repeated exposure to
money, in other words, trains us to adopt a specific mindset when solving
problems in coordination with other people. In particular, whenever we
need something from someone else, I suggest we tend to make five
assumptions, which are fully appropriate for monetary transactions and
collectively constitute the monetary mindset:

1 I will be on one side of a transaction (for example, the buyer or seller).

2 I will interact with one party (for example, the seller or buyer).
3 I want one thing (for example, a low price), and they want the
opposite (for example, a high price).
4 The only way for me to get a better deal is for the other party to get a
worse deal.
5 I can avoid conflict by compromising.
 Most of us never consider these assumptions consciously, much less
verbalize them. Yet they’re consistent with the psychological research
above, painting a competitive and individualistic picture of people and their
social surroundings. In addition, a little reflection verifies that most of us
readily adopt the five assumptions when satisfying our everyday needs.
Think back to a recent gas purchase. When filling your car, weren’t you
obviously operating as a buyer, not a seller? And weren’t you obviously
dealing with just one seller, a particular station? And wasn’t it obvious that
you’d prefer a low price and they’d prefer a high price – and that a better
price for you would mean a worse price for the station, making it necessary
to compromise on the posted price? Knowingly or not, you were using the
monetary mindset.
And the monetary mindset efficiently resolved your need for gas.
Indeed, for most of our everyday needs – gas, lunch, or a movie – there’s no
reason to think differently. The potential upside of somehow negotiating a
better deal is negligible. Put on your bargaining hat, and you might find a
way to save a whopping fifty cents on gas, for example. But the potential
downside is sizable, since you’ll probably waste much more than fifty
cents’ worth of time devising and executing the optimal negotiation
strategy. For most of our everyday needs, we gain less by negotiating the
best possible deal than we lose by spending time devising and executing the
best possible strategy. So satisfying our everyday needs through the
monetary mindset makes good economic sense.
Yet a little reflection reveals that most of us don’t restrict the monetary
mindset to our mundane problems and everyday needs. Our daily
experience with money leads us to apply the mindset to much bigger
problems and more important needs: a car to consume the gas, a raise to
buy the lunch, or a home to host the on-demand movie, for example.
Encountering these critical needs less often, few of us know exactly how to
approach them – which assumptions to make. Absent any priors, and seeing
that many of these big and important needs also involve money, chances are
we apply the monetary mindset we know so well.
Consider or imagine a recent car purchase. In making the purchase,
wasn’t it obvious that you were acting as the buyer, not the seller? And also
that there was just one party on the other side, a particular salesperson? And
that he or she wanted a high price (preferably the sticker price), whereas
you’d prefer something lower? And that only one of you could win this
particular battle, necessitating some sort of compromise? I’ve certainly
made those assumptions myself. If you have too, you’ve been using the
monetary mindset to satisfy a very important need.
Unfortunately, none of the five assumptions was particularly accurate.
You were not just on one side of the table, but both: you were probably
selling your trade-in, or at least a lot of hard-earned money. You didn’t have
one counterpart, but many: all of the other dealers in town and on the web,
as well as anyone else selling his or her car. And while you and this
particular salesperson probably had opposing preferences on price, both of
you probably cared about other issues too (for example, features, financing
plan, future business). Chances are, your preferences on all of the issues
were not completely opposed; an agreement on some of them (for example,
a sunroof) might have benefitted you both, or at least benefitted one of you
more than it hurt the other. That being the case, a compromise in the sense
that most people use it – meeting in the middle on a single issue like price –
was neither necessary nor desirable. You could’ve probably devised a trade-
off to make you both happier, making a simple compromise on price
suboptimal. Rather than splitting the difference on price, for example, you
might’ve paid a bit more for the beloved sunroof (or the salesperson
might’ve accepted a bit less in exchange for dealer financing, etc.). Neither
your assumption about the need to compromise nor the other four
assumptions were particularly accurate or helpful.
Indeed, applied to your need for a car, the five assumptions of the
monetary mindset were just plain harmful. Having made them, the likely
outcome was a low price for your trade-in, a high price for your new car, a
suboptimal set of features, and the absence of a desirable financing plan or
discount. In short: an unhappy outcome, and an unhappy customer. The
monetary mindset wasn’t particularly helpful – it actually burned you (both)
badly.14 In this way, the monetary mindset produces poor solutions to many
of our problems, costing everyone dearly. But why, when the same mindset
was so accurate for our everyday needs like a tank of gas?
Well, technically, it wasn’t so accurate for that need either. Going back
to your fuel fill-up, you were technically doing more than buying gas. From
the station’s perspective, you were also potentially “selling” your future
business and referrals. Your community probably features at least a few gas
stations, after all, and this one would probably prefer a steady stream of
future fill-ups at their pumps to an additional fifty cents right now. So might
you. Accordingly, a discussion about the station’s loyalty program could’ve
saved you money right now in exchange for future business – which is more
like a trade-off than a compromise. So the five assumptions of the monetary
mindset weren’t really right for this everyday need either. It just wasn’t
worth your time and brain cells to consider them more deeply.
In other words, it didn’t really matter whether you got the best possible
deal on gas. But the bigger the need, the more you stand to gain from a
great deal – and lose from a bad one. The extra few hours and brain cells
spent devising and executing an optimal car-buying strategy, for example,
will probably cost you far less than the massive savings obtained. For our
biggest and most important needs, it’s well worth our time to consider our
mindset carefully. Unfortunately, the confluence of our daily monetary
transactions with the fact that our biggest problems tend to involve money
causes most of us – myself included – to mindlessly apply the monetary
mindset.
The problem gets more serious still when we realize that the monetary
mindset is hardly restricted to our personal problems. It also surfaces in
some of our most serious organizational and political problems. Most
businesspeople can easily recall a situation when they couldn’t get a
colleague to cooperate. Can you? Is it possible your uncooperative
counterpart (or even you) was making one or more of the monetary
mindset’s five assumptions – perhaps assuming you wanted the opposite of
the one thing someone else did, without asking? The United Airlines story
at the start of the chapter, the collapse of mortgage-backed securities, the
wasteland of underperforming mergers and acquisitions, the seeming
deterioration in customer service across industries: look hard enough, and I
think you’ll see traces of the monetary mindset in all of these diverse and
multiply determined examples. In particular, I think you’ll see many people
assuming that many problems involve two parties with strictly opposed
preferences – one winner and one loser. The monetary mindset – a
competitive, fixed-pie way of seeing the world – infuses our organizational
lives, in addition to our personal ones.
And, as anyone who pays attention to politics can tell you, it infuses our
political lives too. Consider the impasse between Mexican President
Enrique Peña Nieto and U.S. President Donald Trump over the financing of
a border wall.15 Mr Trump was elected on the back of a promise that
Mexico would pay for the construction of a border wall, a claim that Mr
Peña Nieto flatly rejected when Mr Trump took office. In retrospect, it
seems clear that each man saw himself as occupying one side of a conflict
with one other party who wanted the opposite of the one thing he wanted
(assumptions 1–3). Mr Trump wanted Mr Nieto to pay; Mr Nieto wanted
just the opposite. In addition, unless one of them found a way to win the
battle at the other’s expense, it seems clear they would eventually have to
compromise, if only to avoid an overt conflict (assumptions 4–5).
But in reality, both parties had many demands other than financing for a
wall, in addition to many other potential enticements to offer – from trade,
to law enforcement, to immigration policy (opposing assumption 1). Both
were implicitly negotiating with many parties – Mr Trump with Mexican
legislators, the American public, and the states involved in a border wall,
and Mr Peña Nieto with the U.S. Congress, Mexican public, and Mexicans
residing in the United States, for example (opposing assumption 2). While
the parties’ preferences on wall financing were probably opposed, they had
a common interest in many issues, such as maintaining robust trade
(opposing assumption 3). Had either party introduced these issues into the
discussion, both would’ve realized that neither had to “win” at the other’s
expense (opposing assumption 4), or else compromise on a mutually
dissatisfactory compromise involving the wall (opposing assumption 5).
Rather, both might’ve made progress on multiple issues of vital importance
to both countries. The monetary mindset was alive and well in this
important political problem. And unfortunately it’s just one of countless
examples.
In sum, we as individuals, managers and leaders, and members of the
body politic don’t use the monetary mindset just to satisfy our everyday
needs. We use it to satisfy needs that are much too big and important for it
to handle. As a result, we either bear the costs of poor solutions ourselves or
battle the people around us in an unpleasant attempt to offload the costs
onto them. Across the personal, organizational, or political spheres, then, it
should come as no surprise that we see such a proliferation of dissention,
distrust, and discord – ultimately leaving many of our most important needs
unsatisfied and problems unresolved. Nor should it surprise us that the
problems that are solved hinge on tenuous and tentative compromises,
reflecting so little of the creativity otherwise brimming across our societies
– and usually leaving all sides unhappy. Nice as the word sounds,
compromise is not the ideal in our most important negotiations – it’s a
disappointing waystation on the road between conflict and real solutions, a
solution that ultimately makes no one happy.16
Pick a major political issue in any nation over the last ten years: chances
are, it’s still festering or at least teetering on the brink of a tenuous
compromise. Watch any cable news channel: chances are, you’ll see
seething dissatisfaction with our social and political stalemates. To be sure,
these issues have numerous and manifold causes – too many to enumerate
or even count, let alone cover in a single book. But take a close look at any
of these issues and I bet you’ll see traces of the monetary mindset –
especially the idea that we and our preferences are always opposed to our
monolithic opponents and theirs. So appropriate for our everyday needs, the
monetary mindset is simply unequipped to satisfy our most important needs
as individuals, managers or leaders, and members of the body politic.

The Monetary Mindset in Negotiation

So maybe you’re convinced that the monetary mindset is unhelpful for

solving our biggest problems and meeting our most important needs. But
why? What is it about the mindset that results in suboptimal outcomes? The
answer involves negotiation.
Whether we realize it or not, any situation in which we need someone
else’s cooperation to satisfy our needs is actually a negotiation.17 Whether
it’s fuel, food, or a new car we need – and whether we think we’re
“negotiating” or not – most of us negotiate every day, several times a day.
One of the fundamental contentions of this book, though, is that the
monetary mindset prompts an unproductive set of negotiation behaviors.
And while these behaviors have trivial consequences for everyday problems
like the lack of fuel or food, they have tremendous consequences for big
and important problems like the lack of a car. In short, the monetary
mindset fails us by prompting us to negotiate poorly, and poor negotiation
behaviors have especially serious consequences for big problems.
Understanding this issue requires a brief journey into the intriguing world
of negotiation research.
 The last fifty years or more have seen a groundswell of negotiation
research. From the beginning, this research has emphasized that people can
engage in two fundamentally different types of negotiation behaviors:
distributive behaviors and integrative behaviors. Distributive behaviors are
competitive maneuvers like making the first offer, engaging in persuasion,
and cultivating a strong alternative. Integrative behaviors are cooperative
maneuvers like building trust, exchanging information, and focusing on
interests instead of positions.18
Distributive and integrative behaviors rest on very different
assumptions, represent very different approaches, and have very different
purposes. People engage in distributive behaviors because they assume that
they and their counterpart are both seeking to claim the largest possible
portion of a single, fixed resource (that is, a “pie”) like money. In other
words, they assume that the resources under discussion cannot change and
simply need to be divided, suggesting that their primary interest consists of
getting a better deal at the other party’s expense.19 So they act distributively
to claim the biggest possible slice of the fixed pie for themselves. And it
often works: people who make the first offer, for example, consistently
obtain a larger slice of the pie, that is, a final price that benefits themselves
more than their counterparts.20
Conversely, people engage in integrative behaviors because they suspect
the pie is smaller than it could be – that the parties could identify more,
mutually beneficial resources to divide if they tried. In other words, they
assume that the resources under consideration need to be grown in addition
to divided, meaning that they and their counterpart have some interests in
common – or at least not entirely in conflict.21 So they act integratively to
maximize the size of the pie before anyone takes a slice. Far from naive
altruism, integrative behaviors reflect enlightened self-interest, as even a
small slice of a big pie is often bigger than a big slice of a small pie. Indeed,
in the absence of integrative behaviors, the pie is often so small that the
parties can’t find a viable deal at all. And integrative behaviors tend to
work: negotiators who make the effort to build trust, for example, tend to
initiate an information exchange that breaks impasses and generates a
bigger profit for both sides.22
 Neither set of negotiation behaviors is sufficient on its own. Negotiators
need to engage in both distributive and integrative behaviors to succeed.23
Yet engaging in both sets of behaviors is far from easy, as each makes the
other more difficult, and people often find distributive behaviors too
tempting to resist. If their counterpart acts distributively (for instance, by
making an aggressive first offer), many people react distributively just to
protect themselves; as one example, they might make an aggressive
counteroffer. And if their counterpart acts integratively (for instance, by
sharing information), many people act distributively out of temptation; as
one example, they might use shared information against the other party in
an aggressive counteroffer. This situation creates a “negotiator’s dilemma,”
in which both negotiators spiral toward distributive behavior, even though
both would benefit from additional integrative behavior.24 The result is a
proliferation of distributive behaviors and disappointing outcomes.
Against this backdrop, more than fifty years of negotiation research and
writing have consistently urged negotiators to go beyond their distributive
impulses by engaging in much more integrative behavior.25 Indeed, the
overwhelming majority of articles have concluded that distributive
behaviors, though necessary and appealing, are completely inadequate for
achieving advantageous outcomes. For example, the foundational book on
negotiations – Getting to Yes – along with the decades of research it
inspired have been making that point persuasively since the 1980s.
Unfortunately, as the 2013 Forbes article “Negotiators Still Aren’t Getting
to Yes” argued, “It didn’t work.”26 In other words, decades of
encouragement to act more integratively have not changed the fact that
most negotiators still rely much more heavily on distributive behaviors,
achieving consistently poor outcomes. In particular, individuals do not
necessarily transfer integrative negotiation skills from negotiation courses
into the real world,27 the assumptions underlying distributive negotiation
have clearly persisted into twenty-first century negotiations,28 and conflicts
in business, politics, and international relations are hardly abating.
But why? Why does the world continue to find integrative negotiation
so difficult?
This book offers one reason. The mindset that people chronically adopt
because of their routine reliance on money – the monetary mindset –
strongly inclines them toward distributive behaviors, as indicated by
evidence presented in the next chapter and throughout. Looking back at the
five assumptions of the monetary mindset, you’ll see that they line up
nicely with the assumptions that promote distributive negotiation behavior.
The monetary mindset paints a competitive, adversarial, fixed-pie view of
the world: a view that it’s “my way or your way,” that two negotiators’
interests are strictly opposed, that whatever’s good for one is bad for the
other. And this view stimulates distributive negotiation behavior. Given the
ubiquity of money and thus the ubiquity of the monetary mindset, it should
surprise no one that distributive negotiation continues to hold such appeal.
Thankfully, distributive negotiation is harmless enough for our everyday
needs, where the benefits of optimal negotiation strategies are low. When
used to satisfy our biggest and most important needs, however, the
monetary mindset and its associated implications for negotiation hold dire
repercussions. Individuals envision themselves on one side of a transaction,
opposing one other party who wants the opposite of the one thing they
want. They act competitively if not aggressively, trying to win if they can
but compromise, disappointingly, if they must. In other words, they see
themselves as combatants seeking to claim the biggest possible portion of a
fixed pie, not collaborators seeking to maximize everyone’s interests at the
same time. Fifty years or more of negotiation research have labelled this
approach “distributive” and shown that it doesn’t really work, at least not
on its own. And when the stakes are high, the consequences are dire.
So what kind of mindset might support integrative behaviors?
Unfortunately, most of us just don’t have one. And that’s just the problem.
That’s why Getting to Yes and the research it inspired “didn’t work,”
according to Forbes – why even the best negotiation courses or the most
successful negotiation experiences still don’t result in much sustained
integrative behavior in the real world. That’s why most of us, myself
included, still find it extremely hard to act integratively in most
negotiations. Absent a mindset that supports integrative behavior, we fall
back on the mindset we have – the monetary mindset – along with all of the
distributive behaviors it stimulates. In short, the monetary mindset fails us
for our biggest problems and most important needs because it strongly
inclines us toward an insufficient and often counterproductive set of
distributive negotiation behaviors. The negotiation behaviors we really need
to display – integrative behaviors – require a very different mindset, and
most of us just don’t have one. Figure 1.1 illustrates the situation.

Figure 1.1 Mindsets and Negotiation Behaviors

The Bartering Mindset

We need a better mindset. Our most important personal, professional, and

political problems depend on it. They demand a more productive way of
thinking about the world – a complementary way of understanding our
problems that makes integrative negotiation behaviors at least possible, if
not probable. Since the monetary mindset comes, at least in part, from our
chronic monetary transactions, we need to look elsewhere – that is, to a
different type of economic transaction. In particular, we need to take a
closer look at bartering: a form of economic exchange in which people
directly trade the goods or services they have for the goods or services they
need.29
Where in the world (quite literally) does bartering occur – or did it?
Bartering certainly still occurs in certain corners of the modern world. The
rise of the “sharing economy,”30 for example, has created a variety of
opportunities for people around the world to exchange their goods or
services directly through couch sharing, food swapping, and time banking.
Consider the Couchsurfing website,31 which allows people to sleep on
strangers’ couches but also strongly encourages them to share their own
couches later. Similarly, participants at food swapping events make and
trade food through bilateral exchanges. Most interestingly, time-banking
services allow members to directly or indirectly exchange their time. So a
contractor might perform five hours of home repair for an accountant. The
accountant could then “repay” the time by preparing the contractor’s taxes –
or someone else’s. If the latter, then the time bank would owe the contractor
five hours of another party’s time.
Bartering also persists in a variety of other circumstances that have little
to do with the sharing economy.32 For example, some individuals or
businesses barter today to reduce their tax bills or circumvent trade
restrictions (sometimes on questionable legal grounds). In addition,
businesses often barter as part of their cross-border transactions, frequently
at the insistence of foreign governments, while governments often barter
with each other, particularly when exchanging defense technologies. And
bartering still flourishes among individuals who lack cash – for instance, in
developing economies or countries with unstable currencies and/or
recessionary conditions; recent examples include Spain, Greece, and
Argentina. Most familiar to many people is the bartering that still occurs in
family or community settings, even in developed Western economies.
We’ve all bartered by agreeing to help a friend move in exchange for a
subsequent six-pack, for example, and our kids barter almost automatically
when they exchange their Christmas presents with siblings. Particularly in
close-knit and/or rural corners of the developed economies, community
members may barter routinely within the confines of the community – for
example, by shoveling a neighbor’s snow now in explicit or implicit
anticipation of the neighbor mowing their lawn occasionally in the summer.
Bartering is far from dead to the modern world.
And yet, as implied by the subtitle of this book, it’s far from the norm
either. Most people buying this book necessarily live in a modern monetary
economy. And in modern monetary economies, most people necessarily
engage in far fewer bartering than monetary transactions daily, and far
fewer bartering transactions than their ancestors did in the distant past.33
Indeed, while bartering was once the predominant form of economic
exchange around the world,34 only a relatively small number of
geographically isolated groups like the Lhomi of Nepal appear to use
bartering as their primary mode of economic exchange today.35 In sum,
bartering as a predominant form of economic exchange was much more
prevalent in the past (hence my predominant use of the past tense). And it’s
in that sense that bartering is “mostly forgotten” today.
The historical trend away from bartering, along with the economic
benefits of the monetary economy, have long led economists and
commentators to regard bartering economies as “primitive.”36 An 1894
book on money, for example, introduced bartering by saying, “Before the
appearance of money in the world, exchanges of commodities were made in
a very crude way.”37 A more recent article indicated that barter is
“associated with a marginal, primitive world defined by the absence of such
things as money.”38 And a recent book indicated, “Before money there was
barter, a slow and uncertain method of exchange. One party might not want
what the other offers, or the offers may not have equivalent values. Money,
however, is a reliably valuable, divisible, and portable form of wealth.”39
Accurate as this economic portrayal of bartering may be, it says little
about the psychology of bartering. In contrast to the “primitive” hypothesis,
the confluence of anthropological, psychological, and negotiation evidence
underlying this book suggests that the difficulties of bartering economies
actually required their inhabitants to use a highly sophisticated mindset to
satisfy their needs: the bartering mindset. Economically primitive as
bartering may be, I hope you’ll walk away understanding that it rests on
remarkably sophisticated psychology.
The idea that the psychology of bartering differs markedly has
precedent: anthropologists like Caroline Humphrey have noted that “barter
… is radically different from the monetary mentality.”40 In addition, the
psychological research on money that I’ve described often contrasts the
effects of handling money with the effects of handling objects like those
traded in a bartering economy (for example, buttons). It shows that people
who handle objects often feel more connected, interdependent, and
egalitarian, displaying more warmth and generosity.41 This evidence hints
at the idea that bartering may lead people to think differently.
 Still we know little about what the differences might be or how they
might relate to any of our modern problems and associated negotiations.
This book seeks to uncover the features of the bartering mindset, arguing
that it’s not just different from the monetary mindset – it’s better for the
purpose of engaging in integrative negotiation behaviors. Since most of us
barter so irregularly, I portray the bartering mindset as mostly forgotten.
Since most of us still barter on occasion, though, I also portray it as mostly
(rather than completely) forgotten. And it’s a good thing we haven’t
forgotten it completely, as we’ll need to remember the psychology of
bartering to understand and apply it to the modern, monetary world.

Objectives and Non-Objectives of This Book

Let me be as clear as possible on what this book is trying to do – and not

do. Starting with its non-objectives, this book will not encourage you to
barter more! Nor will it teach you how to barter more effectively. Why?
First, several popular primers (for example, No Cash? No Problem!)42
already do both; one even offers ninety-three “inside secrets” on bartering.
Second, since you’re reading the current book, you probably live in a
modern monetary economy. And whether you like it or not, many of your
most important problems and pressing needs probably still involve money.
Thus, I don’t see a purely bartering-based approach, bereft of any monetary
considerations, as particularly realistic – or helpful.
So this book will not try to inject more bartering activities into the
monetary world. Just as important, it will not try to inject more money into
the bartering world. The fact that you helped your friend move for a six-
pack, that your kids exchanged their Christmas presents, or that you
ploughed your neighbor’s driveway – all without the expectation of money
– is fully appropriate in the associated family or community settings. To ask
your friend, your kids, or your neighbor to pull out their wallets would be
downright inappropriate.
So what will the book actually do? Its primary purpose is to help you
master your modern negotiations, many of which inevitably involve money.
I will not encourage you to spend your negotiations bartering. But I will
encourage and meticulously train you to apply the bartering mindset – the
way that people in the full-blown bartering economies of the past
prototypically thought about their problems – to your modern negotiations,
even the ones involving money. By the end of the book, you should be fully
equipped to master your modern negotiations by remembering a mostly
forgotten mindset. Put differently, you’ll find yourself starting to devise
better solutions to big problems like United’s seat dilemma, your own need
for a new car, and even the Mexican-U.S. border wall dispute – solutions
that don’t involve everyone walking away in dissatisfaction or disgust. By
the end of the book, I hope you’ll agree that our predecessors’ way of
thinking is just as relevant for the modern world – and potentially even
more useful than our own monetary mindsets.
In sum, this book seeks to resurrect the bartering mindset for the
modern reader, reminding you of its essential features and training you to
use it in your modern negotiations. Ultimately, the message is simple: An
“old” way of thinking can help us master our “new” and often money-laden
negotiations. Or, put differently: bartering offers a better metaphor for
negotiation than money. Through numerous practical examples and
exercises, the book will immerse you in the bartering mindset, helping you
to translate it for the monetary world. By the end I think you’ll find yourself
equipped to engage in a diverse set of integrative negotiation behaviors –
some new, some known. Indeed, if the book succeeds, you’ll see yourself
using numerous new strategies that improve your negotiation outcomes. At
the end of the process, though, you’ll also find yourself deploying some of
the same integrative negotiation behaviors that books like Getting to Yes
and numerous negotiation articles have recommended. The key difference?
You’ll actually have the right mindset to use them. In other words, your new
mentality should allow you to display those behaviors in practice, not just
in theory, effectively replacing the unhelpful question mark in figure 1.1
with the bartering mindset. My sincere hope, then, is that Forbes may
someday update their 2013 article about Getting to Yes with another article
indicating that “thanks to the bartering mindset, it did work.”

Organization of This Book

Let’s walk through the organization of the book so you know what to
expect. To immerse you in the bartering mindset, chapter 2 will define
bartering and walk you through a thought experiment about a man named
Keith living in an idealized bartering economy, as portrayed by a
combination of anthropological research and economic theory. This process
will reveal the five key assumptions of the bartering mindset, which
contrast sharply with the five assumptions of the monetary mindset. Finally,
chapter 2 will link the assumptions of the bartering mindset to a five-step
process you can follow to translate that mindset for, and apply it to, the
modern world.
Using an extended example about a struggling small business, chapters
3–6 will then walk you through the five-step process in detail, offering a
tangible template to help you satisfy the needs in your own life. Chapter 7
will round out our discussion about applying the bartering mindset by
addressing a critical detail: how to integrate it with the monetary mindset
that comes so naturally – and that will certainly come naturally to your
negotiation counterparts. Chapter 8 will then seek to answer some important
questions that you might still have about the bartering mindset – nagging
issues that might prevent you from embracing it completely. Chapter 9
concludes with a brief summary and set of scenarios intended to test your
knowledge of the bartering mindset, reveal its immediate relevance, and
help you start applying it right away.
A couple of important notes before commencing the journey. First, to
get the most out of this book, I would encourage you to actively engage
with the exercises and examples. For example, chapters 1–7 end with a
mini-case about job negotiations; to benefit from this book (and your next
job negotiation), I would suggest you actively engage with the example,
especially by answering the questions I pose. In addition, in the chapters
using the extended example about the struggling small business (3–7), I
would ask you to imagine yourself as the protagonist, making the same
kinds of choices he or she must make along the way. Doing so will not only
make the book a lot more fun; it will also train you to implement the
mindset. In sum, tempting as it might be to skip portions of the book or
passively consume it, I would encourage you to be an active consumer. The
more active your engagement with the bartering mindset, the more
complete your immersion in a new way of thinking – and the more
thoroughly you’ll be able to deploy it in the modern world.
Will it be worth your time? Persist through the book, and I think it will.
By the end you’ll be better able to engage in integrative negotiation – and
thus better able to satisfy your biggest needs and solve your most important
problems. In the process, and as a side benefit, you’ll also learn to do some
things that many negotiation books tend to gloss over: methodically prepare
for your negotiations, manage multiparty negotiations, creatively engage
with the world to find value where there was none, and treat negotiation as
a proactive form of problem-solving.
In sum, I know you’ll find the book useful. And I suspect you’ll realize
in the process that, as economically primitive as bartering may be, the
bartering mindset is anything but. As a direct result I think you’ll leave with
both the desire and the ability to make that mindset your primary approach
for satisfying your most important needs – becoming a master negotiator by
deploying a mostly forgotten mindset.

Summary of Key Points from This Chapter

1 In the modern monetary economy, most of us engage in frequent

monetary transactions to satisfy our needs and solve our problems.
2 Our chronic monetary transactions immerse us in a monetary mindset,
which we apply to many of our problems.
3 But when the stakes are high, the monetary mindset produces poor
outcomes, exacerbating personal, organizational, and political
problems.
4 That is because the satisfaction of high-stakes needs requires
negotiation, and the monetary mindset encourages purely
distributive negotiation behaviors, which are insufficient and often
counterproductive.
5 Bartering activities and the bartering mindset that permeates them can
prepare us to engage in the integrative behaviors necessary for
success in modern negotiations.

Exercise: Job Negotiation and the Monetary Mindset

This and the following six chapters conclude with a mini-exercise that will
help you move beyond the monetary mindset and master the bartering
mindset in your own life. A few notes before commencing the journey. The
example concerns your current job and especially your perceived need for a
salary bump. Given the direct focus on money, this may seem like a strange
setting to explore the bartering mindset. But since the goal is applying the
Exploring the Variety of Random
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daytime, and kill and carry away as many persons as it possibly can.
More frequently, however, a midnight attack is organised. When the
enemy are supposed to feel themselves tolerably secure, a vigorous
attempt is made to crush them altogether. Some dark night the
inhabitants of the doomed village suddenly awake to find themselves
surrounded by armed men who have scaled their walls, and set fire to
their houses by throwing in among them a number of blazing stink-
pots, which also confuse by their fumes and smoke. Then rise to
heaven the yell of fury and the shriek of despair. Quickly the fighting-
men seize their spears and gingalls, but, distracted by the surprise
and by their blazing houses, they are soon shot, pinned down with
those terrible three-pronged spears, or driven back into the flames.
Little or no mercy is granted to them. Terrified women seek to
strangle their children, and themselves commit suicide; but as many
of these as possible are saved, in order that they may become
servants to the victors. Where the golden evening saw a comfortable
village and happy families, the grey dawn beholds desolation and
ashes, charred rafters and blackened corpses.
It may be asked whether the Government exercises no control over
these local feuds; but in those districts where they exist the
mandarins rarely interfere, except by way of mediation and advice.
Their power is not so great that they can afford to do more; and,
besides, it is not in accordance with Chinese ideas that they should
do so. Notwithstanding its nominally despotic form of government,
China is really one of the most self-governing countries in the world.
Each family, village, district, and province is to a very great extent
expected to regulate or “harmonise” itself. In order to this end, great
powers are allowed within these limits. The father, or the head of a
family, can inflict most serious and even very cruel punishments on
its members, without his neighbours thinking they have any right to
interfere with him; and, on the other hand, he is held responsible for
the misdeeds of his children, and when these have offended against
public justice, and are not to be got hold of, he often suffers
vicariously in their place. In like manner, villages are allowed great
power in the settling of their internal affairs through their elders.
Within certain wide limits the district is left to preserve its own
peace, without troubling the higher authorities of the province; and if
it choose to indulge in the expensive luxury of clan-fights, why that is
its own loss. The mandarin of Nam-taw, the capital of the district,
had told both the Ma-hum and Schan-tsun people that they were
very foolish to go on fighting as they were doing, and he had ordered
the latter, as the aggressors, to desist, but there his interference
ended: there ought to be virtue enough in the district to put down
such a state of matters, but there was not; and by late news from
China it appears that the warlike inhabitants of Schan-tsun have
been continuing and flourishing in their career of violence; for about
a couple of months ago their “young people”—the frolicsome portion
of the population—made a night-attack upon the neighbouring
village of Sun-tsan, sacked every house, carried off provisions,
destroyed the whole place except the temple, and killed at random
men, women, and children to the number of 150, no less than 75 of
the latter having been destroyed. It is, in fact, this local weakness of
the Government which causes the rebellions that devastate the
country. A gentleman thoroughly acquainted with the language,
writing to me by last mail from the centre of China, truly remarks on
this subject: “The causes of the rebellion are, so far as I can see, the
overpopulation of the country, the inefficiency of the mandarins, and
the indifference of the people. The Chinese enjoy an amount of
freedom and self-government which, I suppose, is nowhere
surpassed, if equalled; and their social system, which is the result of
so many centuries’ experience of what human life is, is sufficient to
meet most of their requirements. But it is not sufficient to suppress
the uprising of the dangerous classes. To do this the power of the
country must be organised into some sort of shape, and then wielded
with energy and honesty. Unfortunately, the present mandarins
neither have the one nor the other. But the beginning of great
changes in China is at hand. I am convinced that any attempt at
foreign interference in the civil government of the provinces would
do great mischief.”
It will illustrate the sort of democratic feeling which prevails in
China, to mention that the elder with whom I stayed had Aheung and
my stranger chair-coolies as well as myself to sit down at dinner with
him in the evening. The extreme politeness of the Chinese prevents
this being disagreeable, and I never saw the commonest coolie either
inclined to presume upon such contact, or particularly pleased by it.
The German and the Catholic missionaries have their meals in this
way when travelling, and I found it, upon trial, to be much the best.
In its then condition the resources of Ma-hum were limited, and the
house we were in was a mere hovel of sun-dried bricks; but our host
produced at dinner fresh and salt fish, pork and turnip soup, boiled
pork and salted eggs, fine pork and small white roots like potatoes,
with cabbage, bean-paste, and rice, apologising for not having had
warning to prepare a better repast. When unafflicted by famine or
rebellion, I should say that the labouring Chinese live better than any
other people of the same class, except in Australia and the United
States. Though they only take two meals a day, yet they often refresh
themselves between with tea and sweet cakes; and at these meals
they like to have several dishes, among which both fish and pork are
usually to be found; often eggs, ducks, and fowls; in some parts of the
country mutton, and in others beef. Their cookery is also very good; I
never met anything very outré in it, except on one single occasion,
chips of dog-ham, which were served out as appetisers, and are very
expensive, and come from the province of Shan-tung, where the
animal is fed up for the purpose upon grain. The breeding of fish in
ponds is one of the most plentiful and satisfactory sources for the
supply of food in China, and attempts are being made at present to
introduce it into France. The great secret of their cookery is that it
spares fuel and spares time. In most of their dishes the materials are
cut up into small pieces before being placed upon the fire, and some
are even cooked by being simply steamed within the pan in which the
invariable rice is cooked. The rice tastes much more savoury than
that which we get in this country, and is not unpleasant to eat alone,
steam rather than water being used in preparing it for the table—a
sea voyage exercising some damaging effect upon its flavour. The
great drawback of the food of the lower Celestials is that the
vegetables are often salt, and resemble sour kraut; the pork is too fat,
and the salt fish is frequently in a state of decay. Bean-paste also—a
frequent article among the poor—cannot be too strongly condemned;
nor is it redeemed by the fact that it is in much use among the holy
men of the Buddhist monasteries, for they have a decided preference
for “vegetables of the sea.”
At Ma-hum I got a small empty cottage to sleep in, with only the
company of a phoong quei, or “wind box,” used for preparing corn,
and exactly the same in construction and appearance as the
“fanners” which used to be employed in Scottish barns. My trip, so
far as it was by land, ended next day at Nam-tow, the district capital,
a large walled town of, I should think, not less than a hundred
thousand souls. This place had been bombarded about eighteen
months before by our gunboats, in consequence of the mandarins
stopping the supplies of Hong-Kong, and withdrawing the native
servants; so I was rather afraid of being mobbed, or otherwise ill-
treated, if I delayed in it, or turned on my footsteps when looking for
the passage-boat to Hong-Kong. Even when there is no positive
danger, a Chinese mob is rather trying to a solitary European; but
China is a civilised country, and fortunately there were two boats and
competition. The consequence of this was, that the touter of one of
them waylaid us about a mile and a half from the town, and led me
direct to his junk, in which I at once embarked, to the
disappointment of the crowd which had begun to gather upon our
heels.
I used to find it safer to go about that part of the coast in passage-
boats rather than in one of my own, and of course in that way saw
much more of the people. These vessels usually go two and two in
company, in order to assist one another against the not unfrequent
attacks of pirates; and are pretty well armed with stink-pots, two or
three small cannon, and spears innumerable. When not crowded
they do very well, and a small sum procures the sole use of a small
matted cabin without any furniture, if it is not pre-engaged. On this
occasion the extra cabin was occupied, and in that of the supercargo,
which is also usually available, there was a portion of his family; so I
had to content myself with the deck and the “first-class” cabin, which
was occupied by shopkeepers and small merchants. The Chinese are
not very clean, especially in cold weather, when they put on coat over
coat without ever changing the inner one: in the poorer houses the
dirt and water are not properly “balanced,” and they have a saying
which associates “lice and good-luck;” but, most fortunately for
travellers, their pediculi, like horses in Japan, appear to participate
in the national antipathy for foreigners. There were about fifty
passengers in this boat bound for Hong-Kong, and the cargo
consisted of vegetables and sugar-cane. One little boy on board
appeared to have been told off to do the cooking and religion. He
would suddenly stop in his task of cutting up fish or turnips, and
burn a red joss-paper with a prayer upon it, for the success of our
voyage; then as suddenly utter an exclamation and dive down again
among the pots. This little wretch of a cook, though chaffed at by the
sailors and afflicted by a severe cold, appeared perfectly contented,
happy, and even joyful—which may be a lesson to some other doctors
elsewhere. The Universe, acting under the Chinese system, had
found a place which suited him, work adapted to his nature, and
such small enjoyments as he could appreciate. He always found time,
every five minutes, to snatch a chew at sugar-cane, and even lost five
cash by gambling. In these passage-boats the fare is not, and cannot
be expected to be, very good; but our diminutive artist prepared for
dinner stewed oysters, fried and boiled fish, fat pork, salt eggs, rice,
greens, turnips, and onions.
The British sailor adorns his bunk with a rude portrait of lovely
Nancy, but our junk had inscriptions savouring of a lofty kind of
poetry and morality. In the cabin there was written up in Chinese
characters, “The virtue which we receive from Heaven is as great as a
mountain;” and also, “The favour (grace) received from the Spirit of
the Ocean is as deep as the ocean itself.” On the roof we were
informed that Heaven, and not only wood, was above us, by the
inscription, “The virtue of the (divine) Spirit illuminates everything.”
These were intelligible, but this one, which was on the mainmast,
requires interpretation—“There is majesty on the Eight Faces.” It
must be understood to mean that there is majesty, or glory,
everywhere around. The paper on the rudder exclaimed—“Keep us
secure, Tai Shon!” or “Great mountain,” a very holy and “powerful”
hill in Schan-tung, to which Confucius has alluded, and to which
pilgrimages are made. At the bows there was the cheering assurance,
“The ship’s head prospers,” which in our passage was not falsified.
These evidences of high moral feeling, however, were hardly borne
out by the conduct of the crew. As ‘Punch’s’ footman observed of the
leg-of-mutton dinner, they were “substantial, but coarse;” quite
without the politeness of the peasantry; friendly enough, but
indulging in rough play, such as giving each other, and some of the
passengers, sundry violent pats on the head. The captain, as is
everywhere usual at sea, gave his orders roughly, and required them
to be promptly obeyed. They don’t think much of firing into another
boat, by way of amusement or gentle warning; and are not altogether
averse to a quiet little piece of piracy when it comes in their way. On
leaving the Canton river the wind and tide in the Kup-shui-moon
pass or strait were so strong that we ran in-shore, anchored, and
spent the night there. Most of the crew and some of the passengers
sat up most of the night gambling, which surely did not look as if
their virtue was quite the size of a mountain, and indulged in some
violent disputes. Their playing-cards were more elaborate than ours,
having many characters and devices upon them, but not a fourth of
the size. Being scarcely half an inch broad, though about the same
length as ours, and with more distinctive marks, they were held and
handled with much greater ease. Instead of being dealt out, they
were laid down on their faces between the players, and each man
helped himself in order.
The Kup-shui-moon is a great place for pirates, and as I was
courting sleep some of the passengers were discussing the
probability of our being taken by them, and hung up by the thumbs
and great toes to make us send for an outrageous ransom. They did
not use Hai traák, the Chinese word for “sea-robbers,” but Pi-long,
which is a Chinesified form of the English word “pirate,” and La-lì-
loong, which is doubtless their form of the Portuguese word ladrone.
Like the Italians with their bifstecca for our abrupt “beefsteak,” the
Chinese, when they adopt or use European words, throw them into
an extended mellifluous form, in which it is difficult to recognise the
original sound. La-lì-loong is a good illustration of this, and so also is
pe-lan-dia, by which they mean “brandy.” The estuary of the Pearl
river and the neighbouring coast have long been famous for pirates,
and the passengers were not without some cause of apprehension. I
have seen these professional pirate junks watching in the Kup-shui-
moon at one time, and only a few mails ago there came out accounts
of an attempt to take an English steamer in or close to it. Not less
than their names, Pi-long and La-lì-loong, the pirates of China are a
result of foreign contact, and as yet give no signs of diminishing
either in numbers or in power.
However, no sea-robbers disturbed our repose. Next morning I
found we had passed the strait, and were drawing under the shadow
of Victoria Peak.
 MARRIAGE BELLS.

The British nation has just had one of its grand spontaneous
holidays—a holiday so universal and unanimous that imagination is
at a loss where to find that surprised and admiring spectator whose
supposed presence heightens ordinary festivities by giving the
revellers a welcome opportunity of explaining what it is all about.
There is not a peasant nor a babe within the three kingdoms which
has not had his or its share in the universal celebration, and is not as
well aware as we are what the reason is, or why every sleeper in
England was roused on this chill Tuesday morning by the clangour of
joy-bells and irregular (alas! often thrice irregular) dropping of the
intermittent feu-de-joie, with which every band of Volunteers in
every village, not to speak of great guns and formal salutes, has
vindicated its British rights—every man for himself—to honour the
day. We are known as a silent nation in most circumstances, and a
nation grave, sober-minded, not enthusiastic; yet, barring mountains
and moors, there is not a square mile of British soil in any of the
three kingdoms in which the ringing of joyful bells, the cheers of
joyful voices, have not been the predominating sound from earliest
dawn of this March morning. Labour has suspended every exertion
but that emulation of who shall shout the loudest and rejoice the
most heartily. If there was any compulsion in the holiday, it was a
pressure used by the people upon a Government which has other
things to do than invent or embellish festivals. We have insisted
upon our day’s pleasuring. We have borne all the necessary expenses,
and taken all the inevitable trouble. Is it sympathy, loyalty, national
pride? or what is it? It is something embracing all, yet more simple,
more comprehensive, more spontaneous than either: it is a real
personal joy which we have been celebrating—the first great personal
event in the young life which belongs to us, and which we delight to
honour. The Son of England receives his bride in the sight of no
limited company, however distinguished, but of the entire nation,
which rejoices with him and over him without a dissentient or
discontented voice. Our sentiments towards him are of no secondary
description. It is our wedding, and this great nation is his father’s
house.
His father’s house—not now is the time to enlarge upon these
words, nor the suggestions of most tender sadness, the subduing
Lenten shadow upon the general joy which they convey, and which is
in everybody’s mind. It is the house of his Mother whom her people
have come to serve, not with ordinary tributes of loyalty, but with
intuitions of love. England has learned to know, not what custom
exacts or duty requires towards her Royal Mistress, but, with a
certain tender devotion which perhaps a nation can bear only to a
woman, to follow the thoughts, the wishes, the inclinations of her
Queen. Something has come to pass of which constitutional
monarchy, popular freedom, just laws, offer no sufficient
explanation. The country is at one with the Sovereign. A union so
perfect has come about by degrees, as was natural; and the heart of
the race which expanded to her in natural sympathy, when, young
and inexperienced, she ascended the throne, has quickened gradually
into a warmer universal sentiment than perhaps has ever been felt
for a monarch. We use the ancient hyperboles of loyalty with
calmness in this island, knowing that they rather fall short of the fact
than exceed it. It is barely truth to say that any trouble or distress of
Hers affects her humble subjects in a degree only less acute than
their own personal afflictions; and that never neighbour was wept
over with a truer heart in the day of her calamity than was the Queen
in hers by every soul of her subjects, great and small. Intense sorrow
cannot dwell long in the universal bosom; but the country, not
contented with rendering its fullest tribute of grief for the lost, has
dedicated many an occasional outbreak of tears through all these
months to that unaccustomed cloud which veiled the royal house.
And now it is spring, and the purest abstract type of joy—young love
and marriage—comes with strange yet sweet significance in Lent, to
open, as we all hope, a new chapter in that household history in
which we are so much concerned. With all the natural force of
revulsion out of mourning, with all the natural sympathy for that
visible representation of happiness in which men and women can
never refuse to be interested, there has mingled, above all, a wistful
national longing “to please the Queen.” Curiosity and interest were
doubtless strongly excited by the coming of the bride—but not for the
fair Danish Princess alone would London have built itself anew in
walls of human faces, and an entire community expended a day of its
most valuable time for one momentary glimpse of the sweet girlish
countenance on which life as yet has had time to write nothing but
hope and beauty. The sentiment of that wonderful reception was but
a subtle echo of our Lady’s wish, lovingly carried out by the nation,
which is her Knight as well as Subject. To hide our dingy London
houses, we could not resort to the effective tricks with which skilful
French hands can make impromptu marble and gold: but we did
what art and genius could never attempt to do—what nothing but
love could accomplish; we draped and festooned and clustered over
every shabby line of architecture with a living illumination of English
faces, all glowing and eager not only to see the new-comer, but to
show the new-comer, what no words could ever tell her, that she
came welcome as a daughter to that heart of England in which,
without any doubt or controversy, the Mother-Monarch held a place
more absolute than could be conquered by might or won by fame. Let
us not attempt to read moral lessons to the princely lovers, who, it is
to be hoped, were thinking of something else than moralities in that
moment of their meeting, and were for the time inaccessible to
instruction; but without any moral meaning, the sentiment which
swayed the enthusiastic multitude on the day of the Princess
Alexandra’s arrival was more like that of a vast household, acting
upon the personal wish of its head, than a national demonstration
coldly planned by official hands. The Queen, who sat at her palace
window in the soft-falling twilight, looking out like any tender
mother for the coming of her son and his bride, till the darkness hid
her from the spectators outside, gave the last climax of truth and
tenderness to that welcome, which was no affair of ceremony, but a
genuine universal utterance of the unanimous heart.
Loyalty seems an inherent quality in our race; but it has been a
loyalty of sections up to the present time, whenever it has been at all
fervent or passionate. It has been reserved for Queen Victoria to
make of it a sentiment as warm as in days of tumult, as broad as in
times of peace. So thoroughly has she conquered the heart of the
nation, that it seems about time to give up explaining why. To those
who have been born under her rule, and even to her own
contemporaries, a pure Court and a spotless royal life appear no
exceptional glories, but the natural and blessed order of things; and
we love her, not consciously because of her goodness, but only for
love’s own royal reason, because we love her. Nothing can happen of
any moment in those royal rooms where so very small a number of
her people can ever dream of entering as guests, without moving the
entire mass of her people with a sentiment only second, as we have
already said, to immediate personal joy or grief. It is this alone that
can explain the extraordinary rejoicings of this day. We keep the
feast not by sympathy in another’s joy, but by positive appropriation
of a joy which is our own. The wedding has, in fact, been celebrated
in the presence of all England, with unanimous consent and
acclamation of the same. With blessings and tears, with
immeasurable good wishes, hopes, and joyful auguries, we have
waited at the princely gates to send the Bride and Bridegroom upon
their way. Speak it in audible words, oh Princes and Poets! Echo it in
mighty tones of power, oh awful cannons and voices of war, which
deal no death in England,—sound it forth over all the world and
space in inarticulate murmurous thunders, oh unanimous People!
Let the Mother smile among her tears to hear how every faithful soul
of her true subjects honours her children; and then let there be
silence in the midst of all—silence one moment, and no more, for the
missing Voice which would have made the joy too perfect—
“Nor count me all to blame, if I
Conjecture of a stiller guest,
Perchance, perchance among the rest,
And though in silence wishing joy.”

And now the thing we wish for most to complete our rejoicing is, if
we could but have some spectator worthy the sight, to see all our
great towns blazing up to heaven, and every village glimmering over
“beneath its little lot of stars,” with all the lights it can gather. A
group of sympathetic angels fanning the solemn airs of night with
grand expanded wing and flowing garments, watching the great and
strange marvel of a nation wild with joy, would be pleasant to think
of at this moment. Perhaps to such watchers, lingering on cloudy
mountain heights above us, the hamlets shining like so many glow-
worms all over the dewy darkling country would be the sweetest
sight. London, glowing in a lurid blaze into the night, doing all that is
in her to give splendour to the darkness; Edinburgh, more gloriously
resplendent, with valleys and hills of fire, improvising a drama of
illumination with lyric responses and choral outbursts of sweet light,
the emblem of joy, are but the centres of the scene. Here, too, past
our village windows, comes the blaze of torches, held high in unseen
hands, moving in a picturesque uncertain line between the silent
bewildered trees: though nobody wits of us, hidden in the night, that
is no reason why we should stifle the joy in our hearts on this night of
the wedding. Windsor itself did not begin to thrill with bells earlier
than we; and even Edinburgh will have commenced to fade slowly
out of the enchanted air into the common slumber ere we have
exhausted all those devious rockets which startle the darkness and
the dews. Nor we only, but every congregation of cottages, every
cluster of humble roofs, wherever a church-spire penetrates the air,
wherever there is window to light or bell to ring. Bear us witness,
dear wondering angels! Far off by the silent inland rivers, deep under
the shadows of the hills, perched upon rocky points and coves by the
sea, lying low upon the dewy plains, is there a village over all the
island that has not lighted a joyous blaze for love of its Queen, and in
honour of the Bride? Health, joy, prosperity, and increase to our
Prince and Princess! If they can ever be happier than at this sweet
moment, crowned by Love and Youth with that joy which human
imagination has everywhere concluded the height of human
blessedness, let the heavens advance them speedily to yet a sweeter
glory. If there were any better bliss we could win for them or
purchase for them, the world well knows we would spare no pains;
but as it is, all that loyal hearts can do is to wish, with hearty love and
acclaim, every joy short of heaven to the young heirs of all our hopes;
but not that for many a happy year.
And now the holiday is over, and the stars begin to show softly
over the waning lights and voices fatigued with joy. Is there, perhaps,
a Watcher in the royal chambers who weeps in the night when all is
over, and God alone sees Her solitude—Our Queen! There is not a
woman in England but thinks of you—not a man but would purchase
comfort for your heart by any deed that man could do. Since the
marriage-feast was spread for you, Liege Lady and Sovereign, what
have not Life and Time done for all of us—what happiness, what
anguish, what births and deaths! Now is it over, the joy of life?—but
still remain tender love and honour, dear duty and labour, God and
the children, the heirs of a new life. Oh, tranquil heavens! stoop
softly over the widowed and the wedded—over us who have had, and
they who have, the perfection and the joy! Enough for all of us, that
over all is the Common Father, whose love can accomplish nothing
which is not Well.

10th March 1863.

Printed by William Blackwood & Sons, Edinburgh.

 TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
1. Typos fixed; non-standard spelling and dialect retained.
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BLACKWOOD'S
EDINBURGH MAGAZINE, VOL. 93, NO. 570, APRIL, 1863 ***

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