r morals.

If the shocking stupidity of the public mind to atrocious dishonesties is
not aroused; if good men do not bestir themselves to drag the young from
this foul sorcery; if the relaxed bands of honesty are not tightened, and
conscience intoned to a severer morality, our night is at hand,--our
midnight not far off. Woe to that guilty people who sit down upon broken
laws, and wealth saved by injustice! Woe to a generation fed upon the
bread of fraud, whose children's inheritance shall be a perpetual memento
of their fathers' unrighteousness; to whom dishonesty shall be made
pleasant by association with the revered memories of father, brother, and
friend!

But when a whole people, united by a common disregard of justice, conspire
to defraud public creditors; and States vie with States in an infamous
repudiation of just debts, by open or sinister methods; and nations exert
their sovereignty to protect and dignify the knavery of a Commonwealth;
then the confusion of domestic affairs has bred a fiend, before whose
flight honor fades away, and under whose feet the sanctity of truth and
the religion of solemn compacts are stamped down and ground into the dirt.
Need we ask the causes of growing dishonesty among the young, and the
increasing untrustworthiness of all agents, when States are seen clothed
with the panoply of dishonesty, and nations put on fraud for their
garments?

Absconding agents, swindling schemes, and defalcations, occurring in such
melancholy abundance, have at length ceased to be wonders, and rank with
the common accidents of fire and flood. The budget of each week is
incomplete without its mob and runaway cashier--its duel and defaulter;
and as waves which roll to the shore are lost in those which follow on, so
the villanies of each week obliterate the record of the last.

The mania of dishonesty cannot arise from local causes; it is the result
of disease in the whole community; an eruption betokening foulness of the
blood; blotches symptomatic of a disordered system.

10. FINANCIAL AGENTS are especially liable to the temptations of
Dishonesty. Safe merchants, and visionary schemers; sagacious adventurers,
and rash speculators; frugal beginners, and retired millionaires, are
constantly around them. Every word, every act, every entry, every letter,
suggests only wealth--its germ, its bud, its blossom, its golden harvest.
Its brilliance dazzles the sight; its seductions stir the appetites; its
powe