and ostentation require that the servants of these people should be numerous; their number unavoidably makes them idle; idleness makes them debauched; debauchery renders them often necessitous; the affluence or the prodigality, the indolence or indulgence; or indifference of their masters, affords them every possible facility for being dishonest; and, beginning with the more venial kinds of peculation, their conscience has an opportunity of making an easy descent through the various gradations of larceny, till the misdemeanant passes into the felon.  In the meantime, the master, taking no blame to himself, nor considering that servants are for the most part what their masters make them, that they are the creatures, at least, of those circumstances which their masters throw around them, and might be moulded in the generality of cases, with almost certain effect, by the will and conduct of the master—­passes over, with an indolent and epicurean censure, the lighter delinquencies which he may happen to detect, laughs perhaps at his own laxity, and, when at length alarmed, discharges the culprit without a character, and relieves himself, at the expense of he knows not whom, by making of a corrupted menial a desperate outcast.  If it be said that a man cannot be expected to change his mode of life for the sake of his servants, it might be answered, that any mode of life by which each individual indulging in it hazards the perdition of several of his fellow-creatures, ought to be changed, and cannot be persevered in without guilt.  But even if no such sacrifice were insisted upon, there remain means by which the evil might be mitigated.

In the first place, the adherence to honesty on the part of the masters might be exemplary; whereas their actual measure of honesty would perhaps be indicated with sufficient indulgence, if they were described (in the qualified language which Hamlet applies to himself) to be “indifferent honest.”  There is a currency of untruth in daily use amongst fashionable people for purposes of convenience, which proceeds to a much bolder extent than the social euphemisms by which those of the middle classes also, not perhaps without some occasional violation of their more tender consciences, intimate a wish to be excused from receiving a guest.  Fashionable people, moreover, are the most unscrupulous smugglers and buyers of smuggled goods, and have less difficulty than others and less shame, in making various illicit inroads upon the public property and revenue.  It is not to be denied that these practices are, in point of fact, a species of lying and cheating; and the latter of them bears a close analogy to the sort of depredation in which the dishonesty of a servant commonly commences.  To a servant it must seem quite as venial an offence to trench upon the revenues of a duke, as to the duke it may seem to defraud the revenues of a kingdom.  Such proceedings, if not absolutely to be branded as dishonest, are not at least altogether honourable; they are such as may be more easily excused in a menial than in a gentleman.  Nor can it ever be otherwise than of evil example to make truth and honesty matters of degree.