He often provides also for himself. A
profligate spendthrift who is always borrowing money will get more
from his friends than the rigidly honest man who only borrows of
them once, under pressure of the direst want. In the one case the
friends will not be at all surprised, and they will give. In the
other case they will be very much surprised, and they will
hesitate. Is the prison that Mr. Scoundrel lives in at the end of
his career a more uncomfortable place than the workhouse that Mr.
Honesty lives in at the end of his career? When John-Howard-
Philanthropist wants to relieve misery he goes to find it in
prisons, where crime is wretched--not in huts and hovels, where
virtue is wretched too. Who is the English poet who has won the
most universal sympathy--who makes the easiest of all subjects for
pathetic writing and pathetic painting? That nice young person who
began life with a forgery, and ended it by a suicide--your dear,
romantic, interesting Chatterton. Which gets on best, do you
think, of two poor starving dressmakers--the woman who resists
temptation and is honest, or the woman who falls under temptation
and steals? You all know that the stealing is the making of that
second woman's fortune--it advertises her from length to breadth
of good-humoured, charitable England--and she is relieved, as the
breaker of a commandment, when she would have been left to starve,
as the keeper of it.
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