The vices of an early age are more vigorous but rarer. Mean crimes; ambidextrous, cunning contrivances under the forms but against the spirit of law; ingenious larcenies by railway companies, by chartered corporations, by trust companies, by commercial partnerships, by seminaries and academies, where the pupils provide their own furniture, silver, and a great part of the instruction, and pay twice—ordinary and extraordinary—for everything they ought to get and do not; sharp, unscrupulous trade, slicing down realities so thin that they hardly serve to veneer our wants, and diluting truth so much that the millionth part of a grain will supply a whole store for twenty-four hours; the brokerage of office; the thousand deceits, infiltrated through the spongy textures of doubtful natures, and sprouting out, like rice, when the water of gain is poured upon it;—these all are the luxuries of a higher civilization. They have nothing to feed on in a simple state of society. They drift in upon an older one like barnacles and foul creepers on the copper fastenings of noble, well-freighted ships. Like blood in super-refined sugar, subtle vices look so white in the mixture that we almost fail to see their crimsoning hues. We speak of the crimes and misdemeanors of the Colonial times as indications of the prevailing morality, just as flies in open pans of cream tell its quality and richness. Morality, we have said, is not bounded by isothermal lines; and yet climate and soil do seriously affect the prevailing moral tones and hues, just as earthly lakes take on the passing colors of the heavens above. The Puritan sternness of New England convictions—as iron-like as the firs and larches on her own hills—swept in as gray gustiness across her early history as her northeasters over her wide fields. The latter pinched her children physically till they became of the same blue tint as their church regulations. The rigidity of even Huguenot faith could not stand the continual sun of South Carolina, which, at length, so relaxed its sharp lines that they ceased to cut at all across that compressed globe of iniquity, human slavery. The moral qualities of Virginia were like its own soil, at first stiff and deep, but gradually deteriorating until they got down into such a narcotic, stony poverty, that the plough of vigorous truth seldom turned up.