n society, we may observe, that the best
laws and the best principles are not sufficient to resist the
combination of numbers. Never attempt to affix infamy to a number of
people at once, says a philosophic legislator.[70] This advice showed
that he perfectly understood the nature of the passion of shame.
Numbers keep one another in countenance; they form a society for
themselves; and sometimes by peculiar phrases, and an appropriate
language, confound the established opinions of virtue and vice, and
enjoy a species of self-complacency independent of public opinion, and
often in direct opposition to their former _conscience_. Whenever any
set of men want to get rid of the shame annexed to particular actions,
they begin by changing the names and epithets which have been
generally used to express them, and which they know are associated
with the feelings of shame: these feelings are not awakened by the new
language, and by degrees they are forgotten, or they are supposed to
have been merely prejudices and habits, which _former methods of
speaking_ taught people to reverence. Thus the most disgraceful
combinations of men, who live by violating and evading the laws of
society, have all a peculiar phraseology amongst themselves, by which
jocular ideas are associated with the most disreputable actions.

Those who live by depredation on the river Thames, do not call
themselves thieves, but _lumpers_ and _mudlarks_. Coiners give regular
mercantile names to the different branches of their trade, and to the
various kinds of false money which they circulate: such as _flats_, or
_figs_, or _fig-things_. Unlicensed lottery wheels, are called _little
goes_; and the men who are sent about to public houses to entice poor
people into illegal lottery insurances, are called _Morocco-men_: a
set of villains, hired by these fraudulent lottery keepers, to resist
the civil power during the drawing of the lottery, call themselves
_bludgeon-men_; and in the language of robbers, a receiver of stolen
goods is said to be _staunch_, when it is believed that he will go all
lengths rather than betray the secrets of a gang of highwaymen.[71]

Since words have such power in their turn over ideas, we must, in
education, attend to the language of children as a means of judging
of the state of their minds; and whenever we find, that in their
conversation with one another, they have any slang, which turns moral
ideas into ridicule, we may be certain that