ilkes and liberty!" He was not heard to breathe
a syllable concerning the obligations of society toward the weak and
unfortunate, for the five years that succeeded his majority; he touched
lightly on Christian duties in general, after he got to be worth fifty
pounds of his own; and as for railing at human follies, it would have
been rank ingratitude in one who so very unequivocally got his bread by
them. About this time, his remarks on the subject of taxation, however,
were singularly caustic, and well applied. He railed at the public debt,
as a public curse, and ominously predicted the dissolution of
society, in consequence of the burdens and incumbrances it was hourly
accumulating on the already overloaded shoulders of the trader.

The period of his marriage and his succession to the hoardings of his
former master, may be dated as the second epocha in the opinions of my
ancestor. From this moment his ambition expanded, his views enlarged in
proportion to his means, and his contemplations on the subject of his
great floating capital became more profound and philosophical. A man
of my ancestor's native sagacity, whose whole soul was absorbed in the
pursuit of gain, who had so long been forming his mind, by dealing as
it were with the elements of human weaknesses, and who already possessed
four hundred thousand pounds, was very likely to strike out for himself
some higher road to eminence, than that in which he had been laboriously
journeying, during the years of painful probation. The property of
my mother had been chiefly invested in good bonds and mortgages;
her protector, patron, benefactor, and legalized father, having an
unconquerable repugnance to confiding in that soulless, conventional,
nondescript body corporate, the public. The first indication that was
given by my ancestor of a change of purpose in the direction of his
energies, was by calling in the whole of his outstanding debts, and
adopting the Napoleon plan of operations, by concentrating his forces on
a particular point, in order that he might operate in masses. About this
time, too, he suddenly ceased railing at taxation. This change may
be likened to that which occurs in the language of the ministerial
journals, when they cease abusing any foreign state with whom the nation
has been carrying on a war, that it is, at length, believed politic to
terminate; and for much the same reason, as it was the intention of my
thrifty ancestor to make an ally of a p