Page:Time and Tide by Weare and Tyne.djvu/127

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
XV. PER-CENTAGE.
113

cornices, and is "supplied" with them, to its beatitude for evermore.

84. Now, the theft we first spoke of, by falsity of workmanship or material, is, indeed, so far worse than these thefts by dishonest acquisition, that there is no possible excuse for it on the ground of self-deception; while many speculative thefts are committed by persons who really mean to do no harm, but think the system on the whole a fair one, and do the best they can in it for themselves. But in the real fact of the crime, when consciously committed, in the numbers reached by its injury, in the degree of suffering it causes to those whom it ruins, in the baseness of its calculated betrayal of implicit trust, in the yet more perfect vileness of the obtaining such trust by misrepresentation, only that it may be betrayed, and in the impossibility that the crime should be at all committed, except by persons of good position and large knowledge of the world—what manner of theft is so wholly unpardonable, so inhuman, so contrary to every law and instinct which binds or animates society?

And then consider farther, how many of the