This they for ever pursue, with an ardor that no discouragement can check; a recklessness of public sentiment that defies all shame; and often with a degree of self-inflicted want, both of food and raiment, which must be witnessed to be believed. _Order 8th._ The _Confiscators_.--In this order must be included (strange as it may seem) not only all thieves, pickpockets, swindlers, robbers and professional gamblers, but even many others, who, although professing most sanctimonious horror at the bare idea of violating the _letter_ of the laws relative to property, scruple not to disregard their _spirit_, whenever pelf is to be made by {362} it. To make money is the great end of their existence; but the means are left to time and circumstances to suggest--always, however, to be used according to the law-verbal, in such cases made and provided. The general title indicates rather the _wills_ than the _deeds_ of the whole order; the former being permanent, intense, and liable to no change--whereas the latter terminate, now and then, in such uncomfortable results as loss of character, imprisonment, and hanging. _Self-appropriation_, without parting with any equivalent, without incurring any loss that can possibly be avoided, is the cardinal, the paramount law with every grade: they differ only in the "_modus operandi_." Some, for example, work by fraud--others by force; some by superior skill, or exclusive knowledge--while hosts of others rely for success upon practising on the passions and vices, or the innocence and gullibility of their fellow-men. To do this the more effectually, they make much use of the terms justice, honesty, fair-dealing, in their discourse, but take special care to exclude them from their practice; for _they_ are to prosper, even should the Devil take all at whose expense that prosperity has been achieved, if, indeed, he deemed them worth taking, after their dear friends, the confiscators, have done with them.