Nature well knows what it is, Nature will not have it
as such, and will reject your forged note one day, with huge costs. The
foolish traders in the market pass freely, nothing doubting, and rejoice
in the dexterous execution of the piece: and so it circulates from hand
to hand, and from class to class; gravitating ever downwards towards the
practical class; till at last it reaches some poor _working_ hand, who
can pass it no farther, but must take it to the bank to get bread with
it, and there the answer is, "Unhappy caitiff, this note is forged. It
does not mean performance and reality, in parliaments and elsewhere, for
thy behoof; it means fallacious semblance of performance; and thou, poor
dupe, art thrown into the stocks on offering it here!"

Alas, alas, looking abroad over Irish difficulties, Mosaic
sweating-establishments, French barricades, and an anarchic Europe, is
it not as if all the populations of the world were rising or had risen
into incendiary madness;--unable longer to endure such an avalanche
of forgeries, and of penalties in consequence, as had accumulated upon
them? The speaker is "excellent;" the notes he does are beautiful?
Beautifully fit for the market, yes; _he_ is an excellent artist in his
business;--and the more excellent he is, the more is my desire to lay
him by the heels, and fling _him_ into the treadmill, that I might save
the poor sweating tailors, French Sansculottes, and Irish Sanspotatoes
from bearing the smart!

For the smart must be borne; some one must bear it, as sure as God
lives. Every word of man is either a note or a forged note:--have these
eternal skies forgotten to be in earnest, think you, because men go
grinning like enchanted apes? Foolish souls, this now as of old is the
unalterable law of your existence. If you know the truth and do it,
the Universe itself seconds you, bears you on to sure victory
everywhere:--and, observe, to sure defeat everywhere if you do not
do the truth. And alas, if you _know_ only the eloquent fallacious
semblance of the truth, what chance is there of your ever doing it?
You will do something very different from it, I think!--He who well
considers, will find this same "art of speech," as we moderns have
it, to be a truly astonishing product of the Ages; and the longer he
considers it, the more astonishing and alarming. I reckon it the saddest
of all the curses that now lie heavy on us. With horror and amazement,
one perceives that this muc