3. Dishonesty is learned from one’s employers. The boy of honest parents and honestly bred, goes to a trade, or a store, where the employer practises legal frauds. The plain honesty of the boy excites roars of laughter among the better taught clerks. The master tells them that such blundering truthfulness must be pitied; the boy evidently has been neglected, and is not to be ridiculed for what he could not help. At first, it verily pains the youth’s scruples, and tinges his face to frame a deliberate dishonesty, to finish, and to polish it. His tongue stammers at a lie; but the example of a rich master, the jeers and gibes of shopmates, with gradual practice, cure all this. He becomes adroit in fleecing customers for his master’s sake, and equally dexterous in fleecing his master for his own sake.
4. Extravagance is a prolific source of dishonesty. Extravagance, – which is foolish expense, or expense disproportionate to one’s means, – may be found in all grades of society; but it is chiefly apparent among the rich, those aspiring to wealth, and those wishing to be thought affluent. Many a young man cheats his business, by transferring his means to theatres, race-courses, expensive parties, and to the nameless and numberless projects of pleasure. The enterprise of others is baffled by the extravagance of their family; for few men can make as much in a year as an extravagant woman can carry on her back in one winter. Some are ambitious of fashionable society, and will gratify their vanity at any expense. This disproportion between means and expense soon brings on a crisis. The victim is straitened for money; without it he must abandon his rank; for fashionable society remorselessly rejects all butterflies which have lost their brilliant colors. Which shall he choose, honesty and mortifying exclusion, or gaiety purchased by dishonesty? The severity of this choice sometimes sobers the intoxicated brain; and a young man shrinks from the gulf, appalled at the darkness of dishonesty. But to excessive vanity, high-life with or without fraud, is Paradise; and any other life Purgatory. Here many resort to dishonesty without a scruple. It is at this point that public sentiment half sustains dishonesty. It scourges the thief of Necessity, and pities the thief of Fashion.
The struggle with others is on the very ground of honor. A wife led from affluence to frigid penury and neglect; from leisure and luxury to toil and want; daughters, once courted as rich, to be disesteemed when poor, – this is the gloomy prospect, seen through a magic haze of despondency. Honor, love and generosity, strangely bewitched, plead for dishonesty as the only alternative to such suffering. But go, young man, to your wife; tell her the alternative; if she is worthy of you, she will face your poverty with a courage which shall shame your fears, and lead you into its wilderness and through it, all unshrinking. Many there be who went weeping into this desert, and ere long, having found in it the fountains of the purest peace, have thanked God for the pleasures of poverty. But if your wife unmans your resolution, imploring dishonor rather than penury, may God pity and help you! You dwell with a sorceress, and few can resist her wiles.
5. Debt is an inexhaustible fountain of Dishonesty. The Royal Preacher tells us: The borrower is servant to the lender. Debt is a rigorous servitude. The debtor learns the cunning tricks, delays, concealments, and frauds, by which slaves evade or cheat their master. He is tempted to make ambiguous statements; pledges, with secret passages of escape; contracts, with fraudulent constructions; lying excuses, and more mendacious promises. He is tempted to elude responsibility; to delay settlements; to prevaricate upon the terms; to resist equity, and devise specious fraud. When the eager creditor would restrain such vagrancy by law, the debtor then thinks himself released from moral obligation, and brought to a legal game, in which it is lawful for the best player to win. He disputes true accounts; he studies subterfuges; extorts provocatious delays; and harbors in every nook, and corner, and passage, of the law’s labyrinth. At length the measure is filled up, and the malignant power of debt is known. It has opened in the heart every fountain of iniquity; it has besoiled the conscience; it has tarnished the honor; it has made the man a deliberate student of knavery; a systematic practitioner of fraud; it has dragged him through all the sewers of petty passions, – anger, hate, revenge, malicious folly, or malignant shame. When a debtor is beaten at every point, and the law will put her screws upon him, there is no depth in the gulf of dishonesty into which he will not boldly plunge. Some men put their property to the flames, assassinate the detested creditor, and end the frantic tragedy by suicide, or the gallows. Others, in view of the catastrophe, have converted all property to cash, and concealed it. The law’s utmost skill, and the creditor’s fury, are alike powerless now, – the tree is green and thrifty; its roots drawing a copious supply from some hidden fountain.
Craft has another harbor of resort for the piratical crew of dishonesty; viz.: putting the property out of the law’s reach by a fraudulent conveyance. Whoever runs in debt, and consumes the equivalent of his indebtedness; whoever is fairly liable to damage for broken contracts; whoever by folly, has incurred debts and lost the benefit of his outlay; whoever is legally obliged to pay for his malice or carelessness; whoever by infidelity to public trusts has made his property a just remuneration for his defaults; – whoever of all these, or whoever, under any circumstances, puts out of his hands property, morally or legally due to creditors, is a dishonest man. The crazy excuses which men render to their consciences, are only such as every villain makes, who is unwilling to look upon the black face of his crimes.
He who will receive a conveyance of property, knowing it to be illusive and fraudulent, is as wicked as the principal; and as much meaner, as the tool and subordinate of villany is meaner than the master who uses him.
If a church, knowing all these facts, or wilfully ignorant of them, allows a member to nestle in the security of the sanctuary; then the act of this robber, and the connivance of the church, are but the two parts of one crime.
6. Bankruptcy, although a branch of debt, deserves a separate mention. It sometimes crushes a man’s spirit, and sometimes exasperates it. The poignancy of the evil depends much upon the disposition of the creditors; and as much upon the disposition of the victim. Should they act with the lenity of Christian men, and he with manly honesty, promptly rendering up whatever satisfaction of debt he has, – he may visit the lowest places of human adversity, and find there the light of good men’s esteem, the support of conscience, and the sustenance of religion.
A bankrupt may fall into the hands of men whose tender-mercies are cruel; or his dishonest equivocations may exasperate their temper and provoke every thorn and brier of the law. When men’s passions are let loose, especially their avarice whetted by real or imaginary wrong; when there is a rivalry among creditors, lest any one should feast upon the victim more than his share; and they all rush upon him like wolves upon a wounded deer, dragging him down, ripping him open, breast and flank, plunging deep their bloody muzzles to reach the heart and taste blood at the very fountain; – is it strange that resistance is desperate and unscrupulous? At length the sufferer drags his mutilated carcass aside, every nerve and muscle wrung with pain, and his whole body an instrument of agony. He curses the whole inhuman crew with envenomed imprecations; and thenceforth, a brooding misanthrope, he pays back to society, by studied villanies, the legal wrongs which the relentless justice of a few, or his own knavery, have brought upon him.