fashion of cynical judgments on good and bad characters.

Or we might take an illustration from what is, unhappily, a very common
element in English life: the habit of gambling sport. Wherever this
habit spreads, in any class of society, from the highest to the lowest,
its effect is invariable; it undermines integrity, it hardens the heart
and debases taste, and is the willing handmaid of other vices. Moral
degradation is its inseparable companion. Therefore, if you mix in it,
or share in it, or give any adhesion or countenance to it, which helps,
as men say, to make it respectable, and so to spread its influence, you
are debasing the moral currency.

Or take another common case. You are familiar with the poet's
description, "And thus he bore without abuse the grand old name of
gentleman." That is a noble thing for any man or boy to have said of
him; and there is not one among you who does not desire always to be able
to claim that name as his own.

But, wherever we go in the world, how many men there are who claim it and
yet debase it by ignoble use! They help to spread the notion that a man
may be a man of low morality and still a gentleman; that his
gentlemanliness may be a mere varnish of culture and manners, a thin
veneering having underneath it only meanness, or coarseness, or
corruption; and that, notwithstanding this, he may still claim to be
called a gentleman. Those who spread such doctrines are debasing the
moral currency of English life. And it should be the mission of schools
like this, and of those who grow up in them, to pour upon all such
persons the contempt which they deserve, and to restore the currency of
common life to something of Christian purity.