swear and break: they all grow rich by breaking!

the draper eagerly compounded. He afterwards "grew rich." Audley,
silently watching his victim, within two years, claims his doubled
pennies, every month during twenty months. The pennies had now grown up
to pounds. The knave perceived the trick, and preferred paying the
forfeiture of his bond for L500, rather than to receive the visitation
of all the little generation of compound interest in the last descendant
of L2000, which would have closed with the draper's shop. The inventive
genius of Audley might have illustrated that popular tract of his own
times, Peacham's "Worth of a Penny;" a gentleman who, having scarcely
one left, consoled himself by detailing the numerous comforts of life it
might procure in the days of Charles II.

Such petty enterprises at length assumed a deeper cast of interest. He
formed temporally partnerships with the stewards of country gentlemen.
They underlet estates which they had to manage; and anticipating the
owner's necessities, the estates in due time became cheap purchases for
Audley and the stewards. He usually contrived to make the wood pay for
the land, which he called "making the feathers pay for the goose." He
had, however, such a tenderness of conscience for his victim, that,
having plucked the live feathers before he sent the unfledged goose on
the common, he would bestow a gratuitous lecture in his own
science--teaching the art of making them grow again, by showing how to
raise the remaining rents. Audley thus made the tenant furnish at once
the means to satisfy his own rapacity, and his employer's necessities.
His avarice was not working by a blind, but on an enlightened principle;
for he was only enabling the landlord to obtain what the tenant, with
due industry, could afford to give. Adam Smith might have delivered
himself in the language of old Audley, so just was his standard of the
value of rents. "Under an easy landlord," said Audley, "a tenant seldom
thrives; contenting himself to make the just measure of his rents, and
not labouring for any surplusage of estate. Under a hard one, the tenant
revenges himself upon the land, and runs away with the rent. I would
raise my rents to the present price of all commodities: for if we should
let our lands, as other men have done before us, now other wares daily
go on in price, we should fall backward in our estates." These axioms of
political economy were discoveries in his day.