Mr. Horton was a tradesman in a flourishing business. He looked well after it as a man of the world, and never allowed a “good chance” to escape. He had a son as his first-born. This son was a great favourite with him, for he saw in him the powers which would make a clever man of business. When he first wore jackets, Harry proved himself an adept in small trades, bartering his worn out and damaged toys for the better ones of his playmates.
“I tell you,” said Horton one day to a friend of his in the presence of Harry, “that is the boy who is good at a bargain.”
This was the phrase he often used when he wished to pass an eulogium upon his boy as a little tradesman. Also in other ways he failed not to set up his son as a paragon in business.
Made vain by these flatteries, he went on in increasing zeal and craftiness to be “good at a bargain.”
The flattering words of his father impelled him in all possible ways to make money; so that when grown to manhood he was an adept at sharpness in trade practices. At last, however, he went too far. His cunning, which had grown out of “being good at a bargain,” was employed in a fraud, which was discovered and led to his apprehension. When his trial came on, his father was present, anxiously waiting the issue. When the sentence of his guilt was given, and his punishment stated, he covered his face with his hand in deep emotion of paternal grief. He could not look upon his condemned son, whom he had helped to ruin, whom he had started and encouraged in the way which brought him to this end.
It was a most distressing scene when the father and son met in the dreary prison cell. Each looked at the other with reproach. Each blamed the other for the shame and pain brought upon them.
“This is a ‘bad bargain,’ my boy,” said the old man, tremulously. “You have ruined us all.”
“Ruined you!” responded the son, in a tone that stung the father to the heart. “Who ruined me? I was ruined when you flattered me so in my boyhood, telling me so often how clever I was and good at a bargain, instead of checking me: when you praised my trickery instead of punishing it. Had you then kept back those words of parental flattery and trained me in principles of strict honesty, I should not now have been here, paying in prison walls by convict labour and a felon’s name the price of ‘being good at a bargain.’”
In how many other ways the flattering tongues of parents have issued in the ruin of children I have not space to illustrate.
“Take care,” says Walter Raleigh, “thou be not made fool by flatterers, for even the wisest men are abused by these. Know, therefore, that flatterers are the worst kind of traitors; for they will strengthen thy imperfections, encourage thee in all evils, correct thee in nothing, but so shadow and paint all thy vices and follies as thou shall never, by their will, discern evil from good, or vice from virtue. A flatterer is said to be a beast that biteth smiling. They are hard to distinguish from friends, they are so obsequious and full of protestations; for as a wolf resembles a dog, so doth a flatterer a friend. A flatterer is compared to an ape, who because she cannot defend the house like a dog, labour as an ox, or bear burdens as a horse, doth therefore yet play tricks and provoke laughter.”