Two days after that conference of the lawyer and the merchant, "honest John" learned, with sorrow, that his father was dead; estate involved, and his friends at home in no favorable mood in reference to what they heard of John Jenks and his "bad management" in the city.
John Jenks—heard no more—he "caved!" as he agreed to.
We pass over Jenks' Smithsonian difficulty, which a prudent lawyer and discerning jury brought out all right.
We come to 1850—some fifteen or eighteen years after John Jenks "caved." The John Jenks of 183- had been ruined by his good nature, set adrift moneyless, in a manner, with even a spotted reputation to begin with; he "profited by his reverses," he was now a man of family—fifty, fat, and wealthy, and altogether the meanest and most selfish man you ever saw!
Jenks freely admits his originality is entirely—"used up!" The reader may affix the moral of my sketch—at leisure.
The Greatest Moral Engine.
Say what you will, it's no use talking, poverty is more potent and powerful, as a moral engine, than all the "sermons and soda water," law, logic, and prison discipline, ever started. All a man wants, while he has a chance to be honest, and to get along smoothly, is a good situation and two dollars a day; give him five dollars a day, and he gets lazy and careless; while at ten, or a hundred a day, he is sure to cultivate beastly feeling, eat and sleep to stupefaction, become a roue, or a rotten politician. A poor man, in misery, applies to God for consolation, while a rich man applies to his banker, and tries on a "bender," or goes on a tour to Europe, and studies foreign folly and French license. Poverty is great; in a Christian community, or a thriving village, it is equal to "martial law," in suppressing moral rebellion and keeping down the "dander!" And how faithful, too, is poverty, says Dr. Litterage, for it sticks to a man after all his friends and the rest of mankind have deserted him!