distinguished men in England regard smuggling almost as a virtuous
act, and the smuggler as a great reformer, because his labours tend to
enable their countrymen to do everywhere what has been done in the
West Indies, in Ireland, Portugal, Turkey, and India--separate the
consumer from the producer. They regard it as the appointed work of
England to convert the whole earth into one vast farm dependent upon
one vast workshop, and that shop in the island of Great Britain. Such
being the views of peers of the realm, lord chancellors, ministers of
state, political economists, and statisticians, can we wonder at a
decline of morality among the middle class, under the combined
influence of the struggle for life, and the assurance that "the end
sanctifies the means," and that false invoices are but a means of
working out a great reformation in the commercial system of the world?
Good ends rarely require such means for their accomplishment, and the
very fact that it was needed to have Gibraltar as a means of smuggling
into Spain, Canada as a means of smuggling into this country,[131] and
Hong Kong for the purpose of poisoning the Chinese with smuggled
opium, should have led to a careful consideration of the question
whether or not the system which looked to exhausting the soil of
Virginia and driving the poor negro to the sugar culture in Texas, was
one of the modes of "doing God service."

Unsound moral feeling is a necessary consequence of an exclusive
devotion to trade such as is now seen to exist in England. It is the
business of the trader to buy cheaply and sell dearly, be the
consequences what they may to those from whom he buys, or to whom he
sells; and unhappily the prosperity of England now depends so entirely
on buying cheaply and selling dearly that she is forced to overlook
the effects upon those to whom she sells, or from whom she buys, and
she therefore rejoices when others are being ruined, and grieves when