Moral Responsibility. 37 



become inextricably lost in a maze of difficulty and ruin. 

 But in any case the mental deterioration forms the severest 

 retribution, and none the less, but rather the more so, that 

 it is so insensible. Nothing is more ordinary than for 

 persons of even superior abilities, if they once engage in a 

 course of falsehood and deception, entirely as it were to lose 

 their head, and to commit themselves at last in a manner 

 absolutely childish and unworthy of their natural capacity, 

 and utterly inexplicable in any other manner with which I am 

 acquainted. If I name as an instance, Dixon, of the Oriental 

 Bank, the example may have more force than my argument. 

 That Dixon acquired his position in that institution is proof 

 that he at first earned and deserved confidence ; and his 

 capacity for judging wisely and rightly must have been 

 vastly superior at the beginning, than at the end of his 

 career, when he not only was guilty of the most puerile and 

 profitless duplicity, but appeared also altogether incapable of 

 perceiving either his dishonesty or his folly. But even when 

 falsehoods are told with what are deemed the best intentions, 

 it is almost always perceptibly the case that beside the 

 unconscious but inevitable mental injury, the purposed object 

 also is defeated, and it becomes apparent after all that truth 

 would have answered best. And it is clear that even clever- 

 ness and sagacity cannot avail to enable a man to discern 

 when a lie would be advantageous to him ; for he views 

 things from a deceptive stand-point, and it would be wonder- 

 ful indeed if even the severest logic were to deduce from 

 erroneous premisses anything but false conclusions. 



We can all bear witness to the appropriate ways in which 

 various vices produce their own proper and significant penal- 

 ties. Intemperance, debauchery, lying, idleness, dishonesty, 

 selfishness, ignorance, all not only meet with, but clearly 

 cause more exactly appropriate punishments than any with 

 which society visits those offences of which it takes cogni- 

 zance. I think that the fact that such habits are indirectly 

 though surely recompensed by their own necessary conse- 

 quences, constitutes them moral offences, and that it is only 

 when they are publicly injurious to others, that they become 

 offences against, and are punishable by society. But whe- 

 ther such bad habits culminate or not in open social offences, 

 they infallibly bring their own natural retribution of physical 

 and mental deterioration ; and the ever-increasing but unfelt 

 difficulty of recovering from or staying that deterioration, is 

 its most dangerous and fatal feature. The degrading results 



