containing a certain portion of ardent spirits, besides other drugs deleterious in their nature; and, of all the friends to the doctors, this fashionable beverage is the greatest.  And, which adds greatly to the folly, or, I should say, the real vice of using it, is, that the parties themselves, nine times out of ten, do not drink it by choice; do not like it; do not relish it; but use it from mere ostentation, being ashamed to be seen even by their own servants, not to drink wine.  At the very moment I am writing this, there are thousands of families in and near London, who daily have wine upon their tables, and who drink it too, merely because their own servants should not suspect them to be poor, and not deem them to be genteel; and thus families by thousands are ruined, only because they are ashamed to be thought poor.

59.  There is no shame belonging to poverty, which frequently arises from the virtues of the impoverished parties.  Not so frequently, indeed, as from vice, folly, and indiscretion; but still very frequently.  And as the Scripture tells us, that we are not to ’despise the poor because he is poor’; so we ought not to honour the rich because he is rich.  The true way is, to take a fair survey of the character of a man as depicted in his conduct, and to respect him, or despise him, according to a due estimate of that character.  No country upon earth exhibits so many, as this, of those fatal terminations of life, called suicides.  These arise, in nine instances out of ten, from this very source.  The victims are, in general, what may be fairly called insane; but their insanity almost always arises from the dread of poverty; not from the dread of a want of the means of sustaining life, or even decent living, but from the dread of being thought or known to be poor; from the dread of what is called falling in the scale of society; a dread which is prevalent hardly in any country but this.  Looked at in its true light, what is there in poverty to make a man take away his own life? he is the same man that he was before:  he has the same body and the same mind:  if he even foresee a great alteration in his dress or his diet, why should he kill himself on that account?  Are these all the things that a man wishes to live for?  But, such is the fact; so great is the disgrace upon this country, and so numerous and terrible are the evils arising from this dread of being thought to be poor.

60.  Nevertheless, men ought to take care of their means, ought to use them prudently and sparingly, and to keep their expenses always within the bounds of their income, be it what it may.  One of the effectual means of doing this is to purchase with ready money.  ST. PAUL says, ‘Owe no man any thing:’  and of his numerous precepts this is by no means the least worthy of our attention. Credit has been boasted of as a very fine thing:  to decry credit seems to be setting oneself up against the opinions of the whole world;