f a wrong.

THE PENALTY.

+Dishonesty eats the heart out of a man.+--The habit of looking solely
to one's own interest deadens the social sympathies, dwarfs the generous
affections, weakens self-respect, until at length the dishonest men can
rob the widow of her livelihood; take an exorbitant commission on the
labor of the orphan; charge an extortionate rent to a family of
helpless invalids; sell worthless stocks to an aged couple in exchange
for the hard earnings of a life-time, and still endure to live.
Dishonesty makes men inhuman. The love of gain is a species of moral and
spiritual decay. When it attacks the heart the finer and better feelings
wither and die; and on this decay of sympathy and kindness and
generosity and justice there thrive and flourish meanness and
heartlessness and cruelty and inhumanity.

+Hereditary effects of dishonesty.+--So deeply does the vice of
dishonesty eat into the moral nature that mental and moral deterioration
is handed down to offspring. The scientific study of heredity shows that
the deterioration resulting from this cause is more sure and fatal than
that following many forms of insanity. The son or daughter of a mean,
dishonest man is handicapped with tendencies toward moral turpitude and
anti-social conduct for which no amount of his ill-gotten gains,
received by inheritance, can be an adequate compensation. Says Maudsley,
"I cannot but think that the extreme passion for getting rich, absorbing
the whole energies of a life, predisposes to mental degeneracy in the
offspring, either to moral defect, or to intellectual deficiency, or to
outbursts of positive insanity." And the same author says elsewhere:
"The anti-social, egoistic development of the individual predisposes to,
if it does not predetermine, the mental degeneracy of his progeny; he,
alien from his kind by excessive egoisms, determines an alienation of
mind in them. If I may trust in that matter my observations, I know no
one who is more likely to breed insanity in his offspring than the
intensely narrow, self-sensitive, suspicious, distrustful, deceitful,
and self-deceiving individual, who never comes into sincere and sound
relations with men and things, who is incapable by nature and habit of
genuinely healthy communion with himself or with his kind. A moral
development of that sort, I believe, is more likely to predetermine
insanity in the next generation than are many forms of actual
derangement in parents: for