es. One might almost regard modern shopkeepers in the same light.
By giving credit, by pressing women to buy fine clothes, they place the
strongest temptation before them. They inveigle the wives of men who are
disposed to be honest into debt, and afterwards send in untruthful
bills. They charge heavier prices, and their customers pay
them,--sometimes doubly pay them; for it is impossible to keep a proper
check upon long-due accounts.

Professor Newman's advice is worthy of being followed. "Heartily do I
wish," he says, "that shop debts were pronounced after a certain day
irrecoverable at law. The effect would be that no one would be able to
ask credit at a shop except where he was well known, and for trifling
sums. All prices would sink to the scale of cash prices. The
dishonourable system of fashionable debtors, who always pay too late, if
at all, and cast their deficiencies on other customers in the form of
increased charges, would be at once annihilated. Shopkeepers would be
rid of a great deal of care, which ruins the happiness of thousands."[1]

[Footnote 1: _Lectures on Political Economy_, p. 255.]

A perfect knowledge of human nature is in the prayer, "Lead us not into
temptation." No man and no woman ever resists temptation after it has
begun to be temptation. It is in the outworks of the habits that the
defence must lie. The woman who hesitates to incur a debt which she
ought not to incur, is lost. The clerk or apprentice who gloats over his
master's gold, sooner or later appropriates it. He does so when he has
got over the habitual feeling which made any approach to it an
impossibility. Thus the habits which insinuate themselves into the
thousand inconsiderable acts of life, constitute a very large part of
man's moral conduct.

This running into debt is a great cause of dishonesty. It does not
matter what the debt is, whether it be for bets unsettled, for losses by
cards, for milliners' or drapers' bills unpaid. Men who have been well
educated, well trained, and put in the way of earning money honestly,
are often run away with by extravagances, by keeping up appearances, by
betting, by speculation and gambling, and by the society of the
dissolute of both sexes.

The writer of this book has had considerable experience of the manner in
which young men have been led from the way of well-doing into that of
vice and criminality. On one occasion his name was forged by a clerk, to
enable him to obtain a sum of