In the thirst for wealth dishonest practices are condoned in business, and within the law robbery is allowed. There is a disposition to take more account of what a man has than of what he is; and this cannot fail to have a vicious effect. X 19 was a young man who held a position of trust and received a small salary. He had no showy vices and, so far as could be ascertained, not many others. He was strong in the negative virtues; being an abstainer from drink, tobacco, and such things as are affected by pleasure-seekers and cost money. His employers were quite satisfied that they had in him a model servant; but they found their mistake, and were as unreasonably indignant as they had been unreasonably pleased; for he had been conducting a very ingenious system of fraud upon them. With the money he had abstracted he had been speculating in shares, and he had been successful up to a point. If his last venture had turned out well he would have been able to resign his situation and live virtuously ever after, first paying back to them their money. This is what he calculated would take place, and if his expectations had been realised nobody would have known of his misfeasance; but he lost on his venture and there was a crash. He pleaded guilty to embezzlement and was sent to prison for a long period. He had disposed of a considerable sum of money, but the curious thing about it was that he claimed that he was simply doing what his employers lived by doing--using other people's money without consulting them as to details; though he admitted that in their case they were in a position to meet claims, and their clients knew that their money was not lying in a safe. He took his sentence quite philosophically, with the remark that he had observed that people who had defrauded certain kinds of commercial corporations, such as banks, always got longer terms of imprisonment than those who merely robbed poor people; and as the firm that employed him was a big concern he would have to be made an example of. He was shrewd in his observations, however wrong-headed they were in some respects, and he is not the only young man who has taken the risk in the attempt to acquire riches and who has argued in the same way. The number of those who are tempted to do so will diminish when it is shown that the successfully dishonest person is as much condemned by the opinion of those whose society he seeks as the failure is condemned by the law.