and who moves battalions and columns by his nod; so with the rising generation of ‘speculators:’  they see the great estates that have succeeded the pencil-box and the orange-basket; they see those whom nature and good laws made to black shoes, sweep chimnies or the streets, rolling in carriages, or sitting in saloons surrounded by gaudy footmen with napkins twisted round their thumbs; and they can see no earthly reason why they should not all do the same; forgetting the thousands and thousands, who, in making the attempt, have reduced themselves to that beggary which, before their attempt, they would have regarded as a thing wholly impossible.

70.  In all situations of life, avoid the trammels of the law.  Man’s nature must be changed before law-suits will cease; and, perhaps, it would be next to impossible to make them less frequent than they are in the present state of this country; but though no man, who has any property at all, can say that he will have nothing to do with law-suits, it is in the power of most men to avoid them in a considerable degree.  One good rule is to have as little as possible to do with any man who is fond of law-suits, and who, upon every slight occasion, talks of an appeal to the law.  Such persons, from their frequent litigations, contract a habit of using the technical terms of the Courts, in which they take a pride, and are, therefore, companions peculiarly disgusting to men of sense.  To such men a law-suit is a luxury, instead of being as it is, to men of ordinary minds, a source of anxiety and a real and substantial scourge.  Such men are always of a quarrelsome disposition, and avail themselves of every opportunity to indulge in that which is mischievous to their neighbours.  In thousands of instances men go to law for the indulgence of mere anger.  The Germans are said to bring spite-actions against one another, and to harass their poorer neighbours from motives of pure revenge.  They have carried this their disposition with them to America; for which reason no one likes to live in a German neighbourhood.

71.  Before you go to law consider well the cost; for if you win your suit and are poorer than you were before, what do you accomplish?  You only imbibe a little additional anger against your opponent; you injure him, but do harm to yourself.  Better to put up with the loss of one pound than of two, to which latter is to be added all the loss of time, all the trouble, and all the mortification and anxiety attending a law-suit.  To set an attorney to work to worry and torment another man is a very base act; to alarm his family as well as himself, while you are sitting quietly at home.  If a man owe you money which he cannot pay, why add to his distress without the chance of benefit to yourself?  Thousands of men have injured themselves by resorting to the law; while very few ever bettered themselves by it, except such resort were unavoidable.