Y FALSE WORK, AND BY
BANKRUPTCY.--NECESSARY PUBLICITY OF ACCOUNTS.

_March 26, 1867._

76. I feel much inclined to pause at this point, to answer the kind of
questions and objections which I know must be rising in your mind,
respecting the authority supposed to be lodged in the persons of the
officers just specified. But I can neither define, nor justify to you,
the powers I would desire to see given to them, till I state to you
the kind of laws they would have to enforce: of which the first group
should be directed to the prevention of all kinds of thieving; but
chiefly of the occult and polite methods of it; and, of all occult
methods, chiefly, the making and selling of bad goods. No form of
theft is so criminal as this--none so deadly to the State. If you
break into a man's house and steal a hundred pounds' worth of plate,
he knows his loss, and there is an end (besides that you take your
risk of punishment for your gain, like a man). And if you do it
bravely and openly, and habitually live by such inroad, you may retain
nearly every moral and manly virtue, and become a heroic rider and
reiver, and hero of song. But if you swindle me out of twenty
shillings' worth of quality on each of a hundred bargains, I lose my
hundred pounds all the same, and I get a hundred untrustworthy
articles besides, which will fail me and injure me in all manner of
ways, when I least expect it; and you, having done your thieving
basely, are corrupted by the guilt of it to the very heart's core.

77. This is the first thing, therefore, which your general laws must
be set to punish, fiercely, immitigably, to the utter prevention and
extinction of it, or there is no hope for you. No religion that ever
was preached on this earth of God's rounding ever proclaimed any
salvation to sellers of bad goods. If the Ghost that is in you,
whatever the essence of it, leaves your hand a juggler's, and your
heart a cheat's, it is not a Holy Ghost, be assured of that. And for
the rest, all political economy, as well as all higher virtue, depends
_first on sound work_.

Let your laws, then, I say, in the beginning, be set to secure this.
You cannot make punishment too stern for subtle knavery. Keep no truce
with this enemy, whatever pardon you extend to more generous ones. For
light weights and false measures, or for proved adulteration or
dishonest manufacture of article, the penalty should be simply