time comes, he is no more able to perform than he was before, and this
multiplies promises, and consequently breaches, so much of which are to
be placed to the accounts of force, that I must acknowledge, though the
debtor is to blame, the creditor is too far concerned in the crime of it
to be excused, and it were to be wished some other method could be found
out to prevent the evil, and that tradesmen would resolve with more
courage to resist the importunities of the creditor, be the consequence
what it would, rather than break in upon their morals, and load their
consciences with the reproaches of it for all their lives after.

I remember I knew a tradesman, who, labouring long under the ordinary
difficulties of men embarrassed in trade, and past the possibility of
getting out, and being at last obliged to stop and call his people
together, told me, that after he was broke, though it was a terrible
thing to him at first too, as it is to most tradesmen, yet he thought
himself in a new world, when he was at a full stop, and had no more the
terror upon him of bills coming for payment, and creditors knocking at
his door to dun him, and he without money to pay. He was no more obliged
to stand in his shop, and be bullied and ruffled by his creditors, nay,
by their apprentices and boys, and sometimes by porters and footmen, to
whom he was forced to give good words, and sometimes strain his
patience to the utmost limits: he was now no more obliged to make
promises, which he knew he could not perform, and break promises as fast
as he made them, and so lie continually both to God and man; and, he
added, the ease of his mind which he felt upon that occasion was so
great, that it balanced all the grief he was in at the general disaster
of his affairs; and, farther, that even in the lowest of his
circumstances which followed, he would not go back to live as he had
done, in the exquisite torture of want of money to pay his bills and his
duns.