more often not. Now, my beloved pupils, a law is a gun which if it
misses a pigeon always kills a crow; if it does not strike the guilty, it
hits some one else. As every crime creates a law, so in turn every law
creates a crime; and hence we go on multiplying sins and evils, and
faults and blunders, till society becomes the organized disorder for
picking pockets.




THE REGENERATION OF A KNAVE.

A man who begins the world by being a fool often ends it by becoming a
knave; but he who begins as a knave, if he be a rich man (and so not
hanged), may end, my beloved pupils, in being a pious creature. And this
is the wherefore: "a knave early" soon gets knowledge of the world. One
vice worn out makes us wiser than fifty tutors. But wisdom causes us to
love quiet, and in quiet we do not sin. He who is wise and sins not can
scarcely fail of doing good; for let him but utter a new truth, and even
his imagination cannot conceive the limit of the good he may have done to
man!




STYLE.

Do you well understand what a wonderful thing style is? I think not; for
in the exercises you sent me, your styles betrayed that no very earnest
consideration had been lavished upon them. Know, then, that you must