“There is an ugly word called cunning, which is very pernicious to it [honesty], and which particularly injures it by hiding it from our discovery and making it hard to find.  This is so like honesty that many a man has been deceived with it, and have taken one for t’other in the markets:  nay, I have heard of some who have planted this wild honesty, as we may call it, in their own ground, have made use of it in their friendship and dealings, and thought it had been the true plant.  But they always lost credit by it, and that was not the worst neither, for they had the loss who dealt with them, and who chaffered for a counterfeit commodity; and we find many deceived so still, which is the occasion there is such an outcry about false friends, and about sharping and tricking in men’s ordinary dealings with the world.”

A master-mind in the art of working a man, as Bacon calls it, is surely apparent here.  Who could have suspected the moralist of concealing the sins he was inclined to, by exposing and lamenting those very sins?  There are other passages in the Serious Reflections which seem to have been particularly intended for Mist’s edification.  In reflecting what a fine thing honesty is, Crusoe expresses an opinion that it is much more common than is generally supposed, and gratefully recalls how often he has met with it in his own experience.  He asks the reader to note how faithfully he was served by the English sailor’s widow, the Portuguese captain, the boy Xury, and his man Friday.  From these allegoric types, Mist might select a model for his own behaviour.  When we consider the tone of these Serious Reflections, so eminently pious, moral, and unpretending, so obviously the outcome of a wise, simple, ingenuous nature, we can better understand the fury with which Mist turned upon Defoe when at last he discovered his treachery.  They are of use also in throwing light upon the prodigious versatility which could dash off a masterpiece in fiction, and, before the printer’s ink was dry, be already at work making it a subordinate instrument in a much wider and more wonderful scheme of activity, his own restless life.

It is curious to find among the Serious Reflections a passage which may be taken as an apology for the practices into which Defoe, gradually, we may reasonably believe, allowed himself to fall.  The substance of the apology has been crystallized into an aphorism by the author of Becky Sharp, but it has been, no doubt, the consoling philosophy of dishonest persons not altogether devoid of conscience in all ages.

   “Necessity makes an honest man a knave; and if the
   world was to be the judge, according to the common received
   notion, there would not be an honest poor man alive.”