life from good society, in case he commit a single disgraceful action. He knows that whoever takes one false step in this direction is marked as a person that no one trusts, whose company every one shuns, and from whom all advancement is cut off; to whom, as being "a fellow that has stolen," the proverb is applied: "He who steals once is a thief all his life." These, then, are the guards that watch over correct behaviour between man and man, and he who has lived, and kept his eyes open, will admit that the vast majority of honourable actions in human intercourse must be attributed to them; nay, he will go further, and say that there are not wanting people who hope to elude even their vigilance, and who regard justice and honesty merely as an external badge, as a flag, under the protection of which they can carry out their own freebooting propensities with better success. We need not therefore break out into holy wrath, and buckle on our armour, if a moralist is found to suggest that perhaps all integrity and uprightness may be at bottom only conventional. This is what Holbach, Helvetius, d'Alembert, and others of their time did; and, following out the theory, they endeavoured with great acumen to trace back all moral conduct to egoistic motives, however remote and indirect. That their position is literally true of most just actions, as having an ultimate foundation centred in the Self, I have shown above. That it is also true to a large extent of what is done in kindness and humanity, there can be no doubt; acts of this sort often arise from love of ostentation, still oftener from belief in a retribution to come, which may be dealt out in the second or even the third power;[3] or they can be explained by other egoistic motives. Nevertheless, it is equally certain that there occur actions of disinterested good-will and entirely voluntary justice. To prove the latter statement, I appeal only to the facts of experience, not to those of consciousness. There are isolated, yet indisputable cases on record, where not only the danger of legal prosecution, but also all chance of discovery, and even of suspicion has been excluded, and where, notwithstanding, the poor man has rendered to the rich his own. For example, things lost, and found, have been given back without any thought or hope of reward; a deposit made by a third person has been restored after his death to the rightful owner; a poor man, secretly intrusted with a treasure by a fugitive, has faithfully kept, and then returned, it. Instances of this sort can be found, beyond all doubt; only the surprise, the emotion, and the high respect awakened, when we hear of them, testify to the fact that they are unexpected and very exceptional. There are in truth really honest people: like four-leaved clover, their existence is not a fiction. But Hamlet uses no hyperbole when he says: "To be honest, as this world goes, is to be one man pick'd out of ten thousand." If it be objected that, after all,