Part 11

Stop before choosing business quarters of a magnitude and pretension wholly out of keeping with your trade and custom. There is a laughable case in point, in the upper part of New York, where a diminutive, tumble-down junk-shop displays a flaring sign with the preposterous legend: “Great American Mammoth Junk Emporium.”

Stop before advertising your commodities for something better than they really are. This is to cheat yourself in the long run, for the average of public buyers rarely allow themselves to be deliberately swindled twice by the same liar.

Stop short of supposing that the hackneyed phrase, “Business is business,” can ever excuse a downright dishonest transaction in the opinion of all your business acquaintances.

Stop, therefore, before setting the majority of them down as secretly unprincipled, and vaunting their uprightness as a mask. Money-loving as they are, the majority of those whose good opinion is worth having are personally honest at the core.

Stop short of being dazzled by mere business success, irrespective of questionable or dangerous methods by which it may have been achieved. Unless the means shall have justified the result, there can be no praiseworthy success.

Stop short of supposing that spasmodic cleverness can ever take the place of solid method, organized effort and settled application in any respectable calling.

Stop, and go easy before provoking a powerful business hostility, if possible, but never to the sacrifice of a true principle; and, war being fully declared (i.e., competition, ruthless and uncompromising), let it be to the knife, to the bitter end, till the last pecuniary sinew snaps!

In Thought, Word and Deed.

Stop before even thinking unworthily. Not to entertain in the mind what you would blush to speak or put in writing is an excellent general rule of ethics.

Stop before nourishing a pride of nationality. This is even more unreasonable than the pride of ancestry, for the greatness of the latter may be in some degree inherited, while for the mere accident of birth-place a man is as irresponsible as he is unentitled to plume himself upon historical greatness in the abstract.

Stop, also, before cherishing even a pride of race. This is wholly distinct from the virtue of Patriotism, in its best sense; is opposed to the enlightened spirit of the age; and is one of the narrowest of prejudices.

Stop short of despising public spirit in others, or eliminating it from your own calculations. The most insignificant pot-house politician is of more worldly use than the most gifted misanthrope. No amount of selfish seclusion or isolation can absolve one from his duty of fellowship.

Stop before making butts of others, especially by reason of personal peculiarities for which they are in no wise responsible. The old aphorism about stone-throwing in relation to glass domiciles is always in order; and even a natural-born fool is more to be pitied than ridiculed.

Stop putting in words that which you would not do, or putting in writing that which you would not sign.

Stop, and remember that an ill-considered angry word may, on the breath of hearsay, become a winged seed, from which shall spring a poisonous upas growth, whose deadly influence could not have been dreamed of at its inception.

Stop before falling into apathy, before becoming a do-nothing, through discouragements. “A great mind,” says Lacon, “may change its objects, but it cannot relinquish them; it must have something to pursue. Variety is its relaxation, and amusement its repose.”

Stop short of being painstaking to excess in what you would pass off as improvised. Over-elaboration in this regard may be likened to the dishabille in which a coquette would wish you to think you have surprised her, after spending hours at her toilet.

Stop short of supposing that rascality can be as uniformly logical as honesty. Villains are usually the worst casuists, and rush into greater crimes to avoid less.

Stop, in combating the World, and reflect that by resisting its temptations you master the secret of ultimately possessing its noblest prizes, the respect of your fellows, and the proudest self-respect in having successfully withstood not in order to achieve, but from a sense of moral duty.

Stop, in resisting the allurements of the Flesh, and consider that by subjecting them to the yoke of reason, your capacity for rational fleshly enjoyment is both intensified and prolonged.

Stop, in fighting the Devil (i.e., moral perverseness,) and remember that your victory will be evidence of moral balance on your own part, rather than of faint-heartedness on His Inky Majesty’s. And you may likewise recall with complacency Emerson’s indictment, where he says, “It stands to reason that the Devil is an ass.”

Stop, after having fairly floored the Machiavellian triumvirate, the World, the Flesh and the Devil, and candidly confess that you might have fared worse but for the precepts and injunctions laid down in this little book.

THE END.

A GREAT HIT.

A NAUGHTY GIRL’S DIARY

---BY---

AUTHOR OF

“A Bad Boy’s Diary.”