It is too often forgotten that in this world virtue has its price as well as vice, and neither can be bought cheap. Vice can be bought on the "hire system," by which a person gets into debt pleasantly--which introduces shiftlessness into life. Wrong is a money-lender, whose concealed charges and heavy interest have to be paid one day at the peril of ruin. Right doing may be said to pay as it goes along, which implies conscience, effort, and often sacrifice of some immediate pleasure. But independence lies that way, and no other. Right principle incurs no deferred obligation. Debt is a chain by which the debtor binds himself to someone else. The connection may be disregarded, but the chain can never be broken, except by restitution. Many persons are beguiled into doing right under the impression that it is as pleasant as doing wrong. This is not so, and the concealment of the fact has injurious consequences. When a person who has been, as it were, betrayed into virtue, without being instructed as to the inconvenience which may attend it, when he encounters them, he suspects he has been imposed upon, and thinks he had better give vice a turn. It was this that made Huxley declare that the hardest as well as the most useful lesson a man could learn, was to do that which he ought to do, whether he liked it or not. Character, which can be trusted, comes that way, and that way alone. He who enters on that path reaps reward daily in the pleasure and strength which duty imparts, while sooner or later follow advantage and honour. The most useful character George Eliot drew was that of Tito, who was wrecked because he had no sense that there was strength and safety in truth. The only strength he trusted to lay in his ingenuity and dissimulation. The world is pretty full of Titos, who all come to one end, and nobody mourns them. A few instances may be relevantly given in which rightness has been attended by disadvantages, when wrongness appeared to have none--yet wrongness was found to bring great unpleasantness in the end. When there were petitions before the House of Commons to change the oath which excluded Jews, and petitions to permit persons to make affirmations who had conscientious objections to taking an oath, it was represented to me that if both claims were kept before Parliament at the same time both would be rejected. The Jewish claim was the older, and concerned the enfranchisement of a race. I therefore caused the omission for several years of any petition for affirmation--though my disability of being unable to take the oath excluded me from justice and rendered me an outlaw.