deserts.

The male or female adventurers, launching with their bag of letters for
all their merchandise on the social sea, understand well the potent
value, beyond bills of exchange, of the sheets they bear. They may have
taken them as an equivalent for some service they have rendered, in
discharge of some actual or apparent obligation in the great market
limited to no quarter of our towns and no description of articles, but
running through every section of human life. Our _acceptance_ of these
notes is a commercial transaction, not of the fairest sort. It belongs
to a species of trade in which we are made to pay other people's debts,
and our dear friends and intimate relations sell us for some song or
other which has been melodiously chanted into their own ears. "A new way
to pay old debts," indeed! Every part of the bargain or trick of the
game is by the main operators well known and availed of for their own
behoof. By letter, persons have been introduced into circles where they
had no footing, posts for whose responsibilities they were utterly
unfit, and trusts whose funds they showed more faculty to embezzle than
apply. Such licentious proceedings have good-natured concessions to
wrong requests multiplied to the hurt of the commonweal. Let us beware
of this kind of sympathetic lie, which ends in robbery, and swindles
thousands out of what is more important than material property, for the
support of pretenders that are worse than thieves, who are bold enough,
like drones, to break into the hive of the busy and eat the honey they
never gathered, absorbing to themselves, as far as they can, the
courtesy of the useful members of the community by the worst monopoly in
the world.

Our treatment of the subject would be partial, if we did not emphasize
the advantage of a right use, of this _introductory_ prerogative. What
more delightful to remember than that we brought together those who were
each other's counterparts? What more beautiful than to have put the
deserving in the way of the philanthropic, and illustrated the old law,
that, grateful as it is to have our wants supplied, a lofty soul always
finds it more blessed to give than to receive, and a boon infinitely
greater to exercise beneficent affection than even to be its object? It
ill becomes us who write on this theme to put down one unfair or
churlish period. We too well remember our own experience in
circumstances wherein our only merit was to be innocent recip