And what is it to deceive or over-reach some one else in business? It is just the same thing as these; it is the breaking of this same commandment; it is stealing, just as much as robbery, burglary, and theft are, only it does not go by so bad a name, and is not so likely to be punished by the laws of the land. And what do I mean by this over-reaching or deceiving? I mean selling goods under false pretences for more than they are really worth; using false weights or measures; evading in one way and another the payment of one's just debts; taking advantage of one's neighbor's difficulties to make an undue profit for one's self; in short, all the many ways in which men turn a dishonest penny or dollar; in which they get rich by trickery and injustice. {165} All these are stealing, just as bad and a great deal more dishonorable than robbery, burglary, or theft, because not attended with so much risk to the person who is guilty of them. Now, it seems to me that this sin of cheating--for that is the bad name such sharp practices ought to go by, though they often do not--is a most strange and unaccountable one; much more so than those other kinds of stealing. The man who breaks into your house or who picks your pocket is generally one who is pretty badly off, and who needs what he takes more than the people do from whom he takes it. You do not expect to find rich men setting up as burglars or pickpockets. It is true, sometimes you do find people who have a passion for stealing things when they have plenty of money to buy them; but that is commonly considered to be a special kind of insanity, and they have a name made on purpose for it; they call it "kleptomania." The people who do this are supposed to be crazy on this particular point; but is it not really just the same thing for a man who has enough and to spare to be trying to cheat his neighbor? Such a man, it would seem, must be crazy too. And there is another way in which cheating is a strange thing, and especially in a Catholic. For every Catholic at least must know that if he tries to cheat he himself gets cheated worse than the people he is trying to impose on. For he gets himself into a very bad position. He has got to do one of two things. {166} One is to restore, as far as possible, what he has cheated other people out of; and that is a very hard thing to do sometimes--much harder than it would have been to have left cheating alone. But hard as this is, the other is much harder. For the other thing is to go to hell; to be banished from God for ever; to pay for all eternity the debt which he would not pay here.