treme of this prudence. It saves itself by its activity. It
takes bank notes,--good, bad, clean, ragged, and saves itself by the
speed with which it passes them off. Iron cannot rust, nor beer sour,
nor timber rot, nor calicoes go out of fashion, nor money stocks
depreciate, in the few swift moments in which the Yankee suffers any
one of them to remain in his possession. In skating over thin ice our
safety is in our speed.

Let him learn a prudence of a higher strain. Let him learn that
everything in nature, even motes and feathers, go by law and not by
luck, and that what he sows he reaps. By diligence and self-command
let him put the bread he eats at his own disposal, and not at that of
others, that he may not stand in bitter and false relations to other
men; for the best good of wealth is freedom. Let him practise the
minor virtues.[684] How much of human life is lost in waiting! Let him
not make his fellow creatures wait. How many words and promises are
promises of conversation! Let his be words of fate. When he sees a
folded and sealed scrap of paper float around the globe in a pine ship
and come safe to the eye for which it was written, amidst a swarming
population, let him likewise feel the admonition to integrate his
being across all these distracting forces, and keep a slender human
word among the storms, distances and accidents that drive us hither
and thither, and, by persistency, make the paltry force of one man
reappear to redeem its pledge after months and years in the most
distant climates.

We must not try to write the laws of any one virtue, looking at that
only. Human nature loves no contradictions, but is symmetrical. The
prudence which secures an outward well-being is not to be studied by
one set of men, whilst heroism and holiness are studied by another,
but they are reconcilable. Prudence concerns the present time,
persons, property and existing forms. But as every fact hath its roots
in the soul, and, if the soul were changed, would cease to be, or
would become some other thing, therefore the proper administration of
outward things will always rest on a just apprehension of their cause
and origin; that is, the good man will be the wise man, and the
single-hearted the politic man. Every violation of truth is not only a
sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human
society. On the most profitable lie the course of events presently
lays a destructive tax; whilst frankness proves