temper the other. Let the memory of every past occasion of this kind be
deeply impressed, not only on your mind but on your heart, by frequent
reflection on the painful thoughts that then forced themselves upon
you,--the distress of those upon whose daily labour the daily
maintenance of their family depends, the collateral distress of the
artisans employed by them, whom they cannot pay because you cannot pay,
the degradation to your own character, from the experience of your
creditors that you have expended that which was in fact not your own,
the diminished, perhaps for ever injured, confidence which they and all
who become acquainted with the circumstances will place in you, and,
finally, the probability that you have deprived some honest,
industrious, self-denying tradesman of his hardly-earned dues, to bestow
the misnamed generosity upon some object of distress, who, however real
the distress may be now, has probably deserved it by a deficiency in all
those good qualities which maintain in respectability your defrauded
creditor. The very character, too, of your creditor may suffer by your
inability to pay him, for he, miscalculating on your honesty and
truthfulness, may, on his side, have engaged to make payments which
become impossible for him, when you fail in your duty, in which case you
can scarcely calculate how far the injury to him may extend; becoming a
more permanent and serious evil than his incapacity to answer those
daily calls upon him of which I have before spoken. In short, if you
will try to bring vividly before you all the painful feelings that
passed through your mind, and all the contingencies that were
contemplated by you on any one of these occasions, you will scarcely
differ from me when I assert my belief that the name of dishonesty would
be a far more correct word than that of generosity to apply to such
actions as the above: you are, in fact, giving away the money of another
person, depriving him of his property, his time, or his goods, under
false pretences, and, in addition to this, appropriating to yourself the