e solemn.

Suppose that a neighbor, whom I don't want to see, comes to my house
and I tell my son to tell him, if he asks for me, that I am out of
town. He goes to the door and lies to my neighbor; it will not be
six months before that boy will lie to me; I will reap that lie.

A man said to me some time ago, "Why is it that we can not get
honest clerks now?"

I replied, "I don't know, but perhaps I can imagine a reason. When
merchants teach clerks to say that goods are all wool when they are
half cotton, and to adulterate groceries and say they are pure, when
they grind up white marble and put it into pulverized sugar, and the
clerk knows it, you will not have honest clerks."

As long as merchants teach their clerks to lie and to misrepresent,
to put a French or an English tag on domestic goods and sell them
for imported goods, so long they will have dishonest clerks.
Dishonest merchants make dishonest clerks. I am not talking fiction,
I am talking truth. It is not poetry, but solemn prose that a man
must reap the same kind of seed that he sows.

This is a tremendous argument against selling liquor. Leaving out
the temperance and religious aspects of the question, no man on
earth can afford to sell strong drink. If I sell liquor to your son
and make a drunkard of him, some man will sell liquor to my son and
make a drunkard of him. Every man who sells liquor has a drunken son
or a drunken brother or some drunken relative. Where are the sons of
liquor dealers? To whom are their daughters married? Look around and
see if you can find a man who has been in that business twenty years
who has not a skeleton in his own family.

I threw that challenge down once, and a man said to me the next day,
"I wasn't at your meeting last night, but I understand you made the
astounding statement that no man had been in the liquor business
twenty years who hadn't the curse in his own family."

"Yes," I said, "I did."

"It isn't true," he said, "and I want you to take it back. My father
was a rumseller, and I am a rumseller, and the curse has never come
into my father's family or into mine."

I said, "What! two generations selling that infernal stuff, and the
curse has never come into the family! I will investigate it, and if
I find I am wrong I will make the retraction just as publicly as I
did the statement."

There were two prominent citizens of the town in the room, on whose
faces I noticed a peculiar expression as the man w