Clever men are either philosophers or knaves; and as the world is crawling with fools the clever men who are philosophers spend their time making laws which will protect the fools from the clever men who are knaves. Sharp practice can only be punished, not stopped, so long as simpletons are willing to give a florin for a purse which they think contains two half-crowns, which is the sort of folly which gives rise to wonder how many men are really rational beings. The fool will believe anything if the knave talks long enough. No sort of folly is too hopeless when there is a clever man at the head of it. Shouting will establish a patent pill, found a new religion, produce a revolution; do any marvel, except make people decent. Pendoggat was a clever man in his own way; and Pezzack would have been a fool anywhere. The minister had piped to others, a little jig of mines and speculations, and some of them had danced in a half-hearted way. In his quaint but sincere fashion he had preached of gold and precious jewels; of bdellium and the onyx stone. It was the doctrine of "get rich" that he proclaimed, and his listeners opened their ears to that as they would scarcely have opened them to any more orthodox message of redemption. "Do good to your body, and your soul will do good to itself," was in effect what Pezzack was teaching, although he didn't know it, and would have been grieved had any one suggested it. He desired to place his listeners in comfortable circumstances, from the retired grocer of Bromley to the Dartmoor widow who had five pounds' worth of pence saved up in a teapot; to take unto himself a helpmeet; last and least--although again he did not put it in that way--to rebuild Ebenezer. So he preached of treasures hidden in the earth, and promised his hearers that every sovereign sown therein would germinate without a doubt, and bring forth in due season a healthy crop of some ten per cents, and some twenty per cents.