Dear me! Some people are much too fine nowadays to eat what their fathers were thankful to see on the table, and so they please their palates with costly feeding, come to the workhouse, and expect everybody to pity them. They turn up their noses at bread and butter and end up eating raw turnips stolen out of the fields. They who like fighting cocks at- other mens costs will get their combs cut, or perhaps get roasted for it one of these days. If you have a great store of peas, you may put more in the soup; but everybody should fare according to his earnings. He is both a fool and a knave who has a shilling coming in, and on the strength of it, spends a pound which does not belong to him. cut your coat according to your cloth is sound advice; but cutting other peoples cloth by running into debt is as like thieving as a sofa is like a couch. If I meant to be a rogue, I would deal in marine stores, or be a petty fogging lawyer or a priest, or open a loan office, or go out picking pockets, but I would scorn the dirty art of getting into debt without a prospect of being able to pay. Debtors can hardly help being liars, for they promise to pay when they know they cannot; and when they have made up a lot of false excuses, they promise again, so they lie as fast as a horse can trot. You have debts and make debts still, If youve not lied, lie you will. Now, if owing leads to lying, who shall say that it is not a most evil thing? Of courses their are exceptions, and I do not want to come down hard upon an honest man who is brought down by sickness or heavy losses. But take the rule as a rule, and you will find debt to be a great dismal swamp, a huge mud hole, a dirty ditch: happy is the man who gets out of it after once tumbling in, but happiest of all is he who has been by Gods goodness kept out of the mire altogether. If you ask the devil to dinner, it will be hard to get him out of the house again; it is better to have nothing to do him. Where a hen has laid one egg, she is very likely to lay another; when a man is once in debt, he is likely to get into it again; it is better to keep clear of it from the first. He who gets in for a penny will soon be in for pound, and when a man is in over his shoes, he is very liable to be in over his boots. Never owe a farthing, and you will never owe a guinea. If you want to sleep soundly, buy a bed of a man who is in debt; surely it must be a very soft one, or he never have rested so easy on it.
Posted on: Tue, 22 Oct 2013 07:17:04 +0000
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