But this side line I could not feel was legitimate trade, and so, although I was several times driven to avail myself of this knowledge to meet a sudden emergency, I never attempted to use it except when compelled. Another thing, I was never tempted, as I have known traders to be, to pawn goods which, being unpaid for, were really not my own. This was because I had no credit from anyone except from the landlord and the Furnishing Company, and I found that burden heavy enough in all conscience. But I have known a woman working for a wholesale mantle house, and employing a dozen other women, to make up goods and pawn them to pay her workers, take a portion of the order in and get more material out, and so on in a vicious circle, with what wear and tear of mental and moral fibre no one could possibly guess. No wonder the lunacy rate rises. And yet when you come to think of it, there is only a quantitative, not a qualitative difference between that poor hunger-bitten woman making ulsters at sixpence each, and some of our motor-driving fur-coated manipulators of stocks and shares who pawn one lot of somebody else's shares to buy a lot for a third party, and pledge the latest purchase to redeem or contango or bedevil something else. Yes, there is one great difference, the stock-dealer neither goes hungry nor cold, nor runs much risk of "doing time," because he happens to be caught with ten shillings short at delivery time. CHAPTER VI DEVELOPMENTS The appetite grows by what it feeds upon, says the proverb, and this is indubitably true of extra work. No matter what the auxiliary business may be, or how sorely it may press upon the over-burdened body and mind, it gradually becomes a necessity, reckoned upon as an essential part of the income, and impossible to be done without. That such work is an evil of the first magnitude cannot be gainsaid by any thinking man. Unless of course it be, as sometimes happens, in the nature of a recreation, but even then what home life can the man have who is absent at work from breakfast time until nearly midnight? And what justice can he do his legitimate employer, who after all has the best right to his chief energies. It may be said that if men were only paid a sufficient wage for the work they do during the day they would not seek evening employment, but such a statement would be very difficult to prove, since what is sufficient for one is not for another. And some men have a mania for work, begrudge themselves necessary sleep and food time, not because they _need_ the money, but because they _want_ it. The best that can be said for the practice is that it is far better than spending every evening in the vicious atmosphere of a saloon bar or public billiard-room, as so many workers do under the plea of recreation. But both are bad for the man practising them, making him prematurely old, and robbing him of all real enjoyment of life.