d
that; their moral fibre was strained, if not weakened, by the struggle
for money going on all around us; on the other hand, you had
opportunity, the fascination of chance, the uncertainty of punishment.
The causes would continue the same, and the effects would continue the
same. He declared that no good citizen could wish a defaulter to escape
the penalty of his offence against society; but it behooved society to
consider how far it was itself responsible, which it might well do
without ignoring the responsibility of the criminal. He ended with a
paragraph in which he forecast a future without such causes and without
such effects; but Ricker would not let this pass, even in the
semi-ironical temper Maxwell had given it. He said it was rank
socialism, and he cut it out in the proof, where he gave the closing
sentences of the article an interrogative instead of an affirmative
shape.

XIX.

The Hilarys always straggled down to breakfast as they chose. When Matt
was at home, his mother and he were usually first; then his father came,
and Louise last. They took the _Events_, as many other people did,
because with all its faults it was a thorough newspaper; and they
maintained their self-respect by taking the _Abstract_. The morning that
the defalcation came out, Matt sent and got all the other papers, which
he had glanced through and talked over with his mother before his father
joined them at nine o'clock.

Several of them had illustrations: likenesses of Northwick, and views of
his house in Boston, and his house in Hatboro'; views of the company's
Mills at Ponkwasset; views of the railroad wreck at Wellwater; but it
was Pinney's masterpiece which really made Hilary sick. All the papers
were atrocious, but that was loathsome. Yet there was really nothing
more to blame in the attitude of the papers than in that of the
directors, who gave the case to the detectives, and set the machinery of
publicity at work. Both were acting quite within their rights, both were
fulfilling an official duty. Hilary, however, had been forced against
his grain into the position, almost, of Northwick's protector; he had
suffered keenly from the falsity of this position, for no one despised
the sort of man Northwick was more than he; but when you have suffered,
even for a rogue, you begin to feel some kindness for him. All these
blows fell upon his growing sympathy for the poor devil, as he called
him. He got through the various acco