her, and are covered with
glory, until their biography is written by an intelligent enemy.

The faculty of persuading the world at large to consider that you are in
the right is called your "prestige," a word closely connected with the
term "prestidigitation,"--if not in derivation, most certainly in
meaning. When you have found out your neighbor's sin, your prestige is
increased; when your neighbor has found out yours, your prestige is
gone. There is little credit to be got from charity; for if you conceal
your good deeds it is certain that nobody will suspect you of doing
them, and if you do them before the world every one will say that you
are vainglorious and purse-proud, and altogether a dangerous hypocrite.
On the other hand, there is undeniably much social interest attached to
a man who is supposed to be bad, but who has never been caught in his
wickedness; and if a thorough-going sinner is discovered, after having
concealed his doings for many years, people at least give him all the
credit he can expect, saying, "Surely he was a very clever fellow to
deceive us for so long!" There are plenty of ways which serve to conceal
evil doings, from the vulgar lies which make up the code of schoolboy
honor, to the national bad faith which systematically violates all
treaties when they cease to be lucrative; from the promising youth who
borrows money from his tailor, and has it charged to his father with
compound interest as "account rendered for clothes furnished," down to
the driveling dishonesty of some old statesman who clings to office
because his ornate eloquence still survives his scanty wit. Verily, if
the boy be father to the man, it is not pleasant to imagine what manner
of men they will be to whom the modern boy stands in the relation of
paternity. The big boys who kill little ones with their fists, and spend
a pleasant hour in watching a couple of cats, slung over a clothes-line
by the tails, fight each other to death, are likely to be less
remarkable for their singular lack of intelligence than for their
extraordinary excess of brutality. It is true that a nation's greatest
activity for good is developed in the time of its transition from
coarseness to refinement. It may also be true that its period of
greatest harmfulness is when, from a fictitious refinement, it is
dragged down again by the natural brutality of its nature; when the
ideal has ceased to correspond with the real; when the poet has lost
his hold