xpense, or expense disproportionate to one's means,--may be
found in all grades of society; but it is chiefly apparent among the rich,
those aspiring to wealth, and those wishing to be _thought_ affluent. Many
a young man cheats his business, by transferring his means to theatres,
race-courses, expensive parties, and to the nameless and numberless
projects of pleasure. The enterprise of others is baffled by the
extravagance of their family; for few men can make as much in a year as an
extravagant woman can carry on her back in one winter. Some are ambitious
of fashionable society, and will gratify their vanity at any expense. This
disproportion between means and expense soon brings on a crisis. The
victim is straitened for money; without it he must abandon his rank; for
fashionable society remorselessly rejects all butterflies which have lost
their brilliant colors. Which shall he choose, honesty and mortifying
exclusion, or gaiety purchased by dishonesty? The severity of this choice
sometimes sobers the intoxicated brain; and a young man shrinks from the
gulf, appalled at the darkness of dishonesty. But to excessive vanity,
high-life with or without fraud, is Paradise; and any other life
Purgatory. Here many resort to dishonesty without a scruple. It is at this
point that public sentiment half sustains dishonesty. It scourges the
thief of Necessity, and pities the thief of Fashion.

The struggle with others is on the very ground of honor. A wife led from
affluence to frigid penury and neglect; from leisure and luxury to toil
and want; daughters, once courted as rich, to be disesteemed when
poor,--this is the gloomy prospect, seen through a magic haze of
despondency. Honor, love and generosity, strangely bewitched, plead for
dishonesty as the only alternative to such suffering. But go, young man,
to your wife; tell her the alternative; if she is worthy of you, she will
face your poverty with a courage which shall shame your fears, and lead
you into its wilderness and through it, all unshrinking. Many there be who
went weeping into this desert, and ere long, having found in it the
fountains of the purest peace, have thanked God for the pleasures of
poverty. But if your wife unmans your resolution, imploring dishonor
rather than penury, may God pity and help you! You dwell with a sorceress,
and few can resist her wiles.

5. DEBT is an inexhaustible fountain of Dishonesty. The Royal Preacher
tells us: _The borrower is serv