from any concern with politics. This is suicidal. Thus the tempest will grow blacker and fiercer. Our youth will be caught up in its whirling bosom and dashed to pieces, and its hail will break down every green thing. At God’s house the cure should begin. Let the hand of discipline smite the leprous lips which shall utter the profane heresy: All is fair in politics. If any hoary professor, drunk with the mingled wine of excitement, shall tell our youth, that a Christian man may act in politics by any other rule of morality than that of the Bible; and that wickedness performed for a party, is not as abominable, as if done for a man; or that any necessity justifies or palliates dishonesty in word or deed,—let such a one go out of the camp, and his pestilent breath no longer spread contagion among our youth. No man who loves his country, should shrink from her side when she groans with raging distempers. Let every Christian man stand in his place; rebuke every dishonest practice; scorn a political as well as a personal lie; and refuse with indignation to be insulted by the solicitation of an immoral man. Let good men of all parties require honesty, integrity, veracity, and morality in politics, and there, as powerfully as anywhere else, the requisitions of public sentiment will ultimately be felt.

9. A corrupt public sentiment produces dishonesty. A public sentiment, in which dishonesty is not disgraceful; in which bad men are respectable, are trusted, are honored, are exalted—is a curse to the young. The fever of speculation, the universal derangement of business, the growing laxness of morals, is, to an alarming extent, introducing such a state of things. Men of notorious immorality, whose dishonesty is flagrant, whose private habits would disgrace the ditch, are powerful and popular. I have seen a man stained with every sin, except those which required courage; into whose head I do not think a pure thought has entered for forty years; in whose heart an honorable feeling would droop for very loneliness;—in evil he was ripe and rotten; hoary and depraved in deed, in word, in his present life and in all his past; evil when by himself, and viler among men; corrupting to the young;—to domestic fidelity, a recreant; to common honor, a traitor; to honesty, an outlaw; to religion, a hypocrite;—base in all that is worthy of man, and accomplished in whatever is disgraceful; and yet this wretch could go where he would; enter good men’s dwellings, and purloin their votes. Men would curse him, yet obey him; hate him and assist him; warn their sons against him, and lead them to the polls for him. A public sentiment which produces ignominious knaves, cannot breed honest men.

Any calamity, civil or commercial, which checks the administration of justice between man and man, is ruinous to honesty. The violent fluctuations of business cover the ground with rubbish over which men stumble; and fill the air with dust, in which all the shapes of honesty appear distorted. Men are thrown upon unusual expedients; dishonesties are unobserved; those who have been reckless and profuse, stave off the legitimate fruits of their folly by desperate shifts. We have not yet emerged from a period, in which debts were insecure; the debtor legally protected against the rights of the creditor; taxes laid, not by the requirements of justice, but for political effect; and lowered to a dishonest insufficiency; and when thus diminished, not collected; the citizens resisting their own officers; officers resigning at the bidding of the electors; the laws of property paralyzed; bankrupt laws built up; and stay-laws unconstitutionally enacted, upon which the courts look with aversion, yet fear to deny them, lest the wildness of popular opinion should roll back disdainfully upon the bench, to despoil its dignity, and prostrate its power. General suffering has made us tolerant of general dishonesty; and the gloom of our commercial disaster threatens to become the pall of our morals.

If the shocking stupidity of the public mind to atrocious dishonesties is not aroused; if good men do not bestir themselves to drag the young from this foul sorcery; if the relaxed bands of honesty are not tightened, and conscience intoned to a severer morality, our night is at hand,—our midnight not far off. Woe to that guilty people who sit down upon broken laws, and wealth saved by injustice! Woe to a generation fed upon the bread of fraud, whose children’s inheritance shall be a perpetual memento of their fathers’ unrighteousness; to whom dishonesty shall be made pleasant by association with the revered memories of father, brother, and friend!

But when a whole people, united by a common disregard of justice, conspire to defraud public creditors; and States vie with States in an infamous repudiation of just debts, by open or sinister methods; and nations exert their sovereignty to protect and dignify the knavery of a Commonwealth; then the confusion of domestic affairs has bred a fiend, before whose flight honor fades away, and under whose feet the sanctity of truth and the religion of solemn compacts are stamped down and ground into the dirt. Need we ask the causes of growing dishonesty among the young, and the increasing untrustworthiness of all agents, when States are seen clothed with the panoply of dishonesty, and nations put on fraud for their garments?

Absconding agents, swindling schemes, and defalcations, occurring in such melancholy abundance, have at length ceased to be wonders, and rank with the common accidents of fire and flood. The budget of each week is incomplete without its mob and runaway cashier—its duel and defaulter; and as waves which roll to the shore are lost in those which follow on, so the villanies of each week obliterate the record of the last.

The mania of dishonesty cannot arise from local causes; it is the result of disease in the whole community; an eruption betokening foulness of the blood; blotches symptomatic of a disordered system.

10. Financial agents are especially liable to the temptations of Dishonesty. Safe merchants, and visionary schemers; sagacious adventurers, and rash speculators; frugal beginners, and retired millionaires, are constantly around them. Every word, every act, every entry, every letter, suggests only wealth—its germ, its bud, its blossom, its golden harvest. Its brilliance dazzles the sight; its seductions stir the appetites; its power fires the ambition, and the soul concentrates its energies to obtain wealth, as life’s highest and only joy.

Besides the influence of such associations, direct dealing in money as a commodity, has a peculiar effect upon the heart. There is no property between it and the mind;—no medium to mellow its light. The mind is diverted and refreshed by no thoughts upon the quality of soils; the durability of structures; the advantages of sites; the beauty of fabrics; it is not invigorated by the necessity of labor and ingenuity which the mechanic feels; by the invention of the artisan, or the taste of the artist. The whole attention falls directly upon naked Money. The hourly sight of it whets the appetite, and sharpens it to avarice. Thus, with an intense regard of riches, steals in also the miser’s relish of coin—that insatiate gazing and fondling, by which seductive metal wins to itself all the blandishments of love.

Those who mean to be rich, often begin by imitating the expensive courses of those who are rich. They are also tempted to venture, before they have means of their own, in brilliant speculations. How can a young cashier pay the drafts of his illicit pleasures, or procure