The habit of running in debt is pregnant with evil and misery of every description. It often--perhaps generally--amounts to positive dishonesty. The money which you owe a tradesman is really his property. The articles, which you have received from him, are hardly your own, until you have paid for them. If you keep them, without paying for them when the seller wishes and asks for payment, you deprive a man of that which belongs to him; and is not that something approaching to robbery? To a man possessed of proper feeling and a nice sense of honour, it must be very painful to suffer a tradesman to ask twice for what is clearly his right. To affect to be offended with such an application, and to meet it with superciliousness and insolence, is injustice carried to its height. The manner in which some men, who would be ready to shoot any one who disputed their claims to be considered as gentlemen, treat their creditors, whom they choose to call _duns_, would, from its contrariety to any thing like reason, be almost ludicrous, if it were not so culpable, so cruel, and so dishonest. A tradesman, from not being able to recover the money owed to him, sees himself in danger of losing his credit, and, together with his credit, the means of getting a maintenance; he sees his wife and children perhaps upon the very verge of misery, and yet, if he civilly asks for what is his due, he is considered as troublesome and impertinent, perhaps reproached and insulted! Upon this subject I shall allow myself to quote the words of Delany, the friend of Dean Swift, one of the most animated and sensible of our sermon writers.