and is never unsuccessful.

But some one may say here, How are these people to live? I agree at once
with the sentiment--no one is more ready to assent to that excellent
adage--'Il faut que tout le monde vive, even grand-dukes.' But there
are a hundred ways of eking out subsistence in cheap countries, without
trenching on morality. The military service of Austria, Prussia, and
Russia is open to them, should their own small territories not suffice
for moderate wants and wishes. In any case I am not going to trouble my
head with providing for German princes, while I have a large stock of
nephews and nieces little better off. All I care for at present is to
point out the facts of a case, and not to speculate how they might be
altered.

Now, to proceed. In proportion as vice is more prevalent, the decorum of
the world would appear to increase, and internal rottenness and external
decency bear a due relation to each other. People could not thus violate
the outward semblance of morality, by flocking in hundreds and tens of
hundreds to those gambling states, those _rouge et noir_ dependencies,
those duchies of the dice-box. A man's asking a passport for Baden would
be a tacit averment, 'I am going to gamble.' Ordering post-horses for
Ems would be like calling for 'fresh cards'; and you would as soon
confess to having passed a few years in Van Diemen's Land as acknowledge
a summer on the Rhine.

What, then, was to be done? It was certainly a difficulty, and might
have puzzled less ingenious heads than grand-ducal advisers. They,
however, soon hit upon the expedient. They are shrewd observers, and
clever men of the world. They perceived that while other eras have
been marked by the characteristic designation of brass, gold, or iron,
_this_, with more propriety, might be called the age of bile. Never was
there a period when men felt so much interested in their stomachs; at
no epoch were mankind so deeply concerned for their livers; this
passion--for it is such--not being limited to the old or feeble, to the
broken and shattered constitution, but extending to all age and sex,
including the veteran of a dozen campaigns and the belle of a London
season, the hard-lined and seasoned features of a polar traveller, and
the pale, soft cheek of beauty, the lean proportions of shrunken age,
and the plump development of youthful loveliness. In the words of the
song--

'No age, no profession, no station is free.'

It is the univer