By damning those we have no mind to."
After all, society keeps a pretty good "look-out" after offences distributed in common. The law is tolerably comprehensive of things which are of general commission; and mankind, sooner or later, contrive to catch, or successfully oppose, the numerous little enormities which slip through the finest of our legal meshes.
"Raro antecedentem scelestum,
Deseruit pede pœna claudo."
From all this it results that moral obliquities, which fall within the observation of society, make but an up-hill game; that which is felt to be prejudicial to the interests of all men, is easily determined to be vicious. But here again there is much in fashion. Society has often determined that the immorality of a thing is not to be measured by the nature of the act, nor the motive even on which it has been founded, so much as by the more refined test afforded by the position of the actor. One man may, like a sort of commercial megatherium, gorge, with railway velocity, provisions which a once-breathing, fond affection and a cold world had alike determined to be the life-blood of widows and orphans, and yet have noblemen and others for his associate! he may perhaps be a legislator in a great nation; whilst the poor starveling, who steals for the vulgar purpose of satisfying hunger, may be sent to the treadmill, where he may solve at leisure the problem thus set him, by "the most enlightened nation on earth."
Again, vices which have a known influence in disturbing the relations of society are in various ways opposed by the more public influence of religion. So that in the end a man finds—although he may arrive at the conclusion, only by exhausting all other views before he hits on those which lead to it—that honesty is as good a way of getting on as any other; or he may advance perhaps even on this utilitarian creed so far as to agree with Tillotson: that people take more trouble to get to Hell, than would suffice to carry them to Heaven. The immoralities of trades and professions lie in a very different position, and involve peculiarities which favour their growth and perpetuity.
They are committed in secret;—people are proverbially cautious of attacking the weak positions of others, who feel that their own are ill-defended. This, and the established manœuvres of each calling, enable an individual to do a good deal "off his own bat," without, as one of our bishops happily expressed it, "being caught out." In trade we are sometimes informed that a thing cannot be sold cheaper; that the price asked is already less than the cost; and people are appropriately addressed as idiots, who every day appear to believe that which common sense shows to be impossible.
Your purveyors will sometimes tell you that they are not living by the prices they charge; although you have just ascertained that the same article may be bought at infinitely less cost in the next market. The other day, a watchmaker told us that our watch wanted a good deal of looking to, and, amongst other things, "no doubt cleaning;" but this he discovered, we suppose, by some recondite mesmeric process in a book, which recorded when it had been cleaned last, without looking at the watch at all.
As regards professions, lawyers are said to defend right and wrong with indiscriminate avidity, with the encouraging prospect of obtaining more fruit in maintaining one wrong cause, than establishing twenty right.
Then the real nature of these things is, like too many in other sciences, obscured by a cloudy nomenclature. We hear of "customs of the trade," "secrets of the trade," or "profession," applied to things which the moralist only recognizes under very different designations. Sophisms thus secured, and which appear to minister to a man's interests, have their true colours developed with difficulty; to say nothing of it not being easy to discover that which there is no desire to examine.