those who deal with you than it you were bargaining and dealing
face to face in front of God?--What are you but a thief? Lastly,
if you fill an office, or produce an article, which, in your heart
of hearts, you think a delusion and a fraud upon mankind, and still
draw your salary and go through the sham manoeuvres of this office,
or still book your profits and keep on flooding the world with
these injurious goods?--though you were old, and bald, and the
first at church, and a baronet, what are you but a thief? These
may seem hard words and mere curiosities of the intellect, in an
age when the spirit of honesty is so sparingly cultivated that all
business is conducted upon lies and so-called customs of the trade,
that not a man bestows two thoughts on the utility or
honourableness of his pursuit. I would say less if I thought less.
But looking to my own reason and the right of things, I can only
avow that I am a thief myself, and that I passionately suspect my
neighbours of the same guilt.

Where did you hear that it was easy to be honest? Do you find that
in your Bible? Easy! It is easy to be an ass and follow the
multitude like a blind, besotted bull in a stampede; and that, I am
well aware, is what you and Mrs. Grundy mean by being honest. But
it will not bear the stress of time nor the scrutiny of conscience.
Even before the lowest of all tribunals,--before a court of law,
whose business it is, not to keep men right, or within a thousand
miles of right, but to withhold them from going so tragically wrong
that they will pull down the whole jointed fabric of society by
their misdeeds--even before a court of law, as we begin to see in
these last days, our easy view of following at each other's tails,
alike to good and evil, is beginning to be reproved and punished,
and declared no honesty at all, but open theft and swindling; and