The creditor is usually depicted as a severe man, with a hard visage; while the debtor is an open-handed generous man, ready to help and entertain everybody.  He is the object of general sympathy.  When Goldsmith was dunned for his milk-score and arrested for the rent of his apartments, who would think of pitying the milk-woman or the landlady?  It is the man in debt who is the prominent feature of the piece, and all our sympathy is reserved for him.  “What were you,” asked Pantagruel of Panurge, “without your debts?  God preserve me from ever being without them!  Do you think there is anything divine in lending or in crediting others?  No!  To owe is the true heroic virtue!”

Yet, whatever may be said in praise of Debt, it has unquestionably a very seedy side.  The man in debt is driven to resort to many sorry expedients to live.  He is the victim of duns and sheriff’s officers.  Few can treat them with the indifference that Sheridan did, who put them into livery to wait upon his guests.  The debtor starts and grows pale at every knock at his door.  His friends grow cool, and his relatives shun him.  He is ashamed to go abroad, and has no comfort at home.  He becomes crabbed, morose, and querulous, losing all pleasure in life.  He wants the passport to enjoyment and respect—­money; he has only his debts, and these make him suspected, despised, and snubbed.  He lives in the slough of despond.  He feels degraded in others’ eyes as well as in his own.  He must submit to impertinent demands, which he can only put off by sham excuses.  He has ceased to be his own master, and has lost the independent bearing of a man.  He seeks to excite pity, and pleads for time.  A sharp attorney pounces on him, and suddenly he feels himself in the vulture’s gripe.  He tries a friend or a relative, but all that he obtains is a civil leer, and a cool repulse.  He tries a money-lender; and, if he succeeds, he is only out of the frying-pan into the fire.  It is easy to see what the end will be,—­a life of mean shifts and expedients, perhaps ending in the gaol or the workhouse.

Can a man keep out of debt?  Is there a possibility of avoiding the moral degradation which accompanies it?  Could not debt be dispensed with altogether, and man’s independence preserved secure?  There is only one way of doing this; by “living within the means.”  Unhappily, this is too little the practice in modern times.  We incur debt, trusting to the future for the opportunity of defraying it.  We cannot resist the temptation to spend money.  One will have fine furniture and live in a high-rented house; another will have wines and a box at the opera; a third must give dinners and music-parties:—­all good things in their way, but not to be indulged in if they cannot be paid for.  Is it not a shabby thing to pretend to give dinners, if the real parties who provide them are the butcher, the poulterer, and the wine-merchant, whom you are in debt to, and cannot pay?