[25] Those European gentlemen who allow their passions
to get the better of their reason among their domestics do much to
lower the character of their countrymen in the estimation of the
people; but the high officials who forget what they owe to themselves
and the native officers of their courts, when presiding on the bench
of justice, do ten thousand times more; and I grieve to say that I
have known a few officials of this class.

We have in England known many occasions, particularly in the cases of
prosecutions by the officers of Government for offences against the
State, where little circles of society have made it a 'point of
honour' for some individuals to speak untruths, and for others to
give verdicts against their consciences; some occasions indeed where
those who ventured to speak the truth, or give a verdict according to
their conscience, were in danger from the violence of popular
resentment. Have we not, unhappily, in England and among our
countrymen in all parts of the world, experience of a wide difference
between what is exacted from members of particular circles of society
by the 'point of honour', and what is held to be strict religions
truth by the rest of society? Do we not see gentlemen cheating their
tradesmen, while they dare not leave a gambling debt unpaid? The
'point of honour' in the circle to which they belong demands that the
one should be paid, because the non-payment would involve a breach of
faith in their relations with each other, as in the case of the
members of a gang of robbers; but the non-payment of a tradesman's
bill involves only a breach of faith in a gentleman's relations with
a lower order. At least, some gentlemen do not feel any apprehension
of incurring the odium of the circle in which they move by cheating
of this kind. In the same manner the roue, or libertine of rank, may
often be guilty of all manner of falsehoods and crimes to the females
of the class below him, without any fear of incurring the odium of
either males or females of his own circle; on the contrary, the more
crimes he commits of this sort, the more sometimes he may expect to
be caressed by males and females of his own order. The man who would
not hesitate a moment to destroy the happiness of a family by the
seduction of the wife or the daughter, would not dare to leave one
shilling of a gambling debt unpaid--the one would bring down upon him
the odium of his circle, but the other would not; and the odium o