Money controls the law as well as the gospel. The son of a great man and noble is forgotten if the father dies poor; but the mantle of the rich man falls on the son's shoulders. If the son be only half so manly as his sire, and twice as rich, he is sure to be doubly honored. Money supplies defects of character, defects of culture. It is deemed better than education, talent, genius, and character, all put together. Was it not written two thousand years ago in the Proverbs, it "answereth all things?" Look round and see. It does not matter how you get or keep it. "The end justifies the means." Edmund Burke, or somebody else, said "Something must be pardoned to the spirit of liberty." Now it is "Something must be pardoned" to the love of money, nothing "to the spirit of liberty." We find that rich men will move out of town on the last day of April, to avoid taxation on the first day of May. That is nothing. It is very "respectable," very "honorable," indeed! I do not believe that there is any master-carpenter or master-blacksmith in Boston who would not be ashamed to do so. But men of the controlling classes do not hesitate! No matter how you get money. You may rent houses for rum-shops and for brothels; you may make rum, import rum, sell rum, to the ruin of the thousands whom you thereby bring down to the kennel and the almshouse and the jail. If you get money by that, no matter: it is "clean money," however dirtily got. A merchant can send his ships to sea, and in the slave-trade acquire gold, and live here in Boston, New York, or Philadelphia; and his gold will be good sterling gold, no matter how he got it! In political office, if you are a Senator from California or Oregon, you may draw "constructive mileage," and pay yourself two or three thousand dollars for a journey never made from home, and two or three thousand more back to your home. So you filch thousands of dollars out of the public purse, and you are the "Honorable Senator" just as before. You have got the money, no matter how. You may be a Senator from Massachusetts, and you may take the "trust fund," offered you by the manufacturers of cotton, and be bound as their "retained attorney," by your "retaining fee," and you are still "the Honorable Senator from Massachusetts," not hurt one jot in the eyes of the controlling classes. If you are Secretary of State, you may take forty or fifty thousand dollars from State Street and Wall Street, and suffer no discredit at all. At one end of the Union they will deny the fact as "too atrocious to be believed" at this end they admit it, and say it was "honorable in the people to give it," and "honorable in the Secretary to take it." "Alas! the small discredit of a bribe Scarce hurts the master, but undoes the scribe."