up against you in the court of your own heart and condemn you for a
thief. Have you a salary? If you trifle with your health, and so render
yourself less capable for duty, and still touch, and still greedily
pocket the emolument--what are you but a thief? Have you double
accounts? do you by any time-honoured juggle, deceit, or ambiguous
process, gain more from those who deal with you than if you were
bargaining and dealing face to face in front of God?--What are you but a
thief? Lastly, if you fill an office, or produce an article, which, in
your heart of hearts, you think a delusion and a fraud upon mankind,
and still draw your salary and go through the sham manoeuvres of this
office, or still book your profits and keep on flooding the world with
these injurious goods?--though you were old, and bald, and the first at
church, and a baronet, what are you but a thief? These may seem hard
words and mere curiosities of the intellect, in an age when the spirit
of honesty is so sparingly cultivated that all business is conducted
upon lies and so-called customs of the trade, that not a man bestows two
thoughts on the utility or honourableness of his pursuit. I would say
less if I thought less. But looking to my own reason and the right of
things, I can only avow that I am a thief myself, and that I
passionately suspect my neighbours of the same guilt.

Where did you hear that it was easy to be honest? Do you find that in
your Bible? Easy? It is easy to be an ass and follow the multitude like
a blind, besotted bull in a stampede; and that, I am well aware, is what
you and Mrs. Grundy mean by being honest. But it will not bear the
stress of time nor the scrutiny of conscience. Even before the lowest of
all tribunals,--before a court of law, whose business it is, not to keep
men right, or within a thousand miles of right, but to withhold them
from going so tragically wrong that they will pull down the whole
jointed fabric of society by their misdeeds--even before a court of law,
as we begin to see in these last days, our easy view of following at
each other's tails, alike to good and evil, is beginning to be reproved
and punished, and declared no honesty at all, but open theft and
swindling; and simpletons who have gone on through life with a quiet
conscience may learn suddenly, from the lips of a judge, that the custom
of the trade may be a custom of the devil. You thought it was easy to be
honest. Did you think it was easy to