If you are rich, and want to enjoy the exalted luxury of relieving distress, go to the Bankrupt Court, to the Court for Insolvent Debtors, to the gaols, the work-houses, and the hospitals.  If you are rich and childless, and want heirs, look to the same assemblages of misfortune; for all are not culpable who appear in the Bankrupt and Insolvent Lists; nor all criminal who are found in gaols; nor all improvident who are inmates of work-houses and hospitals.  On the contrary, in these situations, an alloy of vice is mixed with virtue enough to afford materials for as deep tragedies as ever poet fancied or stage exhibited; and visiters of relief would act the part of angels descending from Heaven among men, whose chief affliction is the neglect of unthinking affluence.

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Marriage is a circumstance of life, which, in its actual course, involves the feelings and fortunes of human beings more than any other event of their lives.  It is a connexion generally formed by inexperience, under the blindness and caprice of passion; and, though these conditions cannot be avoided, as forming the bases of the connexion, yet it is so important, that a man is never ruined who has an interesting, faithful, and virtuous wife; while he is lost to comfort, fortune, and even to hope, who has united himself to a vicious and unprincipled one.  The fate of woman is still more intimately blended with that of her husband; for, being in the eyes of the law and the world but second to him, she is the victim of his follies and vices at home, and of his ill success and degradation abroad.  Rules are useless, where passions, founded on trifling associations and accidents, govern; but much mischief often results from fathers expecting young men to be in the social position of old ones, and from present fortune being preferred to virtues; for industry and talent, stimulated by affection, and fostered by family interests, soon create competency and fortune; while a connexion founded on mere wealth, which is often speedily wasted by dissipation, habits of extravagance, and the chances of life, necessarily ends in disappointment, disgust, and misery.

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Wretched is the man who has no employment but to watch his own digestions; and who, on waking in the morning, has no useful occupation of the day presented to his mind.  To such a one respiration is a toil, and existence a continued disease.  Self-oblivion is his only resource, indulgence in alcohol in various disguises his remedy, and death or superstition his only comfort and hope.  For what was he born, and why does he live? are questions which he constantly asks himself; and his greatest enigmas are the smiling faces of habitual industry, stimulated by the wants of the day, or fears for the future.  If he is excited to exertion, it is commonly to indulge some vicious propensity, or display his scorn of those pursuits which render others happier than himself.  If he seek to relieve his inanity in books, his literature ascends no higher than the romances, the newspapers, or the scandal, of the day; and all the nobler pursuits of mind, as well as body, are utterly lost in regard to him.  His passage through life is like that of a bird through the air, and his final cause appears merely to be that of sustaining the worms in his costly tomb.