The arithmetic of Arvid Paulson’s honor box was never impressive. A few dollars a day for a few weeks a year, sixty years running, emptied into a Folgers can and never counted where anyone could see. As a financial instrument it was negligible. As a piece of civic engineering it was, we would argue, the most efficient thing anyone in this county ever built.

Consider what it did. It let a man be in two places at once, which is the eternal problem of a one-man business. It saved every customer the small indignity of waiting to be waited on. It made every transaction a statement about the person making it, conducted in private, with nobody watching — which is the only condition under which such statements mean anything at all. And it did this for six decades on a county road with no camera, no lock, and no arrangement more sophisticated than a slot cut in a lid with a can opener.

It worked because it was allowed to work. We are told, and we believe, that the box came up short sometimes. We are also told it was never once mentioned. That is the part worth writing down. The honor box did not run on honesty alone; it ran on a decision, renewed daily by a man who could have installed a lockbox and didn’t, to keep offering the trust regardless of what the can said that night. His line about knowing where everybody lives was a joke about half the time. The other half was the whole system: he knew, and he trusted anyway, and knowing was never the enforcement mechanism. It was the reason.

There is a temptation this week to say that such things belong to a vanished Misquah, and we decline it. The box was on the hayrack Saturday afternoon while its owner was being buried four miles away, and it took in what it took in, and nobody counted it at the stand. It is still there. The corn is still two dollars. Whatever it is that was being trusted all those years, the evidence suggests we still have some.