eculation, the universal derangement of business, the growing laxness of
morals, is, to an alarming extent, introducing such a state of things. Men
of notorious immorality, whose dishonesty is flagrant, whose private
habits would disgrace the ditch, are powerful and popular. I have seen a
man stained with every sin, except those which required courage; into
whose head I do not think a pure thought has entered for forty years; in
whose heart an honorable feeling would droop for very loneliness;--in evil
he was ripe and rotten; hoary and depraved in deed, in word, in his
present life and in all his past; evil when by himself, and viler among
men; corrupting to the young;--to domestic fidelity, a recreant; to common
honor, a traitor; to honesty, an outlaw; to religion, a hypocrite;--base
in all that is worthy of man, and accomplished in whatever is disgraceful;
and yet this wretch could go where he would; enter good men's dwellings,
and purloin their votes. Men would curse him, yet obey him; hate him and
assist him; warn their sons against him, and lead them to the polls for
him. A public sentiment which produces ignominious knaves, cannot breed
honest men.

Any calamity, civil or commercial, which checks the administration of
justice between man and man, is ruinous to honesty. The violent
fluctuations of business cover the ground with rubbish over which men
stumble; and fill the air with dust, in which all the shapes of honesty
appear distorted. Men are thrown upon unusual expedients; dishonesties are
unobserved; those who have been reckless and profuse, stave off the
legitimate fruits of their folly by desperate shifts. We have not yet
emerged from a period, in which debts were insecure; the debtor legally
protected against the rights of the creditor; taxes laid, not by the
requirements of justice, but for political effect; and lowered to a
dishonest insufficiency; and when thus diminished, not collected; the
citizens resisting their own officers; officers resigning at the bidding
of the electors; the laws of property paralyzed; bankrupt laws built up;
and stay-laws unconstitutionally enacted, upon which the courts look with
aversion, yet fear to deny them, lest the wildness of popular opinion
should roll back disdainfully upon the bench, to despoil its dignity, and
prostrate its power. General suffering has made us tolerant of general
dishonesty; and the gloom of our commercial disaster threatens to become
the pall of ou