In the prime of youth he had had what
the people about him called high notions, and counted quixotic
fancies. But it was not their mockery of his tall talk that
turned him aside; opposition invariably confirmed Turnbull. He
had never set his face in the right direction. The seducing
influence lay in himself. It was not the truth he had loved; it
was the show of fine sentiment he had enjoyed. The distinction of
holding loftier opinions than his neighbors was the ground of his
advocacy of them. Something of the beauty of the truth he must
have seen--who does not?--else he could not have been thus moved
at all; but he had never denied himself even a whim for the
carrying out of one of his ideas; he had never set himself to be
better; and the whole mountain-chain, therefore, of his notions
sank and sank, until at length their loftiest peak was the maxim,
_Honesty is the best policy_--a maxim which, true enough in
fact, will no more make a man honest than the economic aphorism,
_The supply equals the demand_, will teach him the niceties
of social duty. Whoever makes policy the ground of his honesty
will discover more and more exceptions to the rule. The career,
therefore, of Turnbull of the high notions had been a gradual
descent to the level of his present dishonesty and vulgarity;
nothing is so vulgarizing as dishonesty. I do not care to follow
the history of any man downward.
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