“MORAL STATISTICIAN”--I don't want any of your statistics. I took your
whole batch and lit my pipe with it. I hate your kind of people. You are
always ciphering out how much a man's health is injured, and how much
his intellect is impaired, and how many pitiful dollars and cents
he wastes in the course of ninety-two years' indulgence in the fatal
practice of smoking; and in the equally fatal practice of drinking
coffee; and in playing billiards occasionally; and in taking a glass of
wine at dinner, etc., etc., etc....
Of course you can save money by denying yourself all these vicious
little enjoyments for fifty years; but then what can you do with it?
What use can you put it to? Money can't save your infinitesimal
soul. All the use that money can be put to is to purchase comfort and
enjoyment in this life; therefore, as you are an enemy to comfort and
enjoyment, where is the use in accumulating cash? It won't do for you to
say that you can use it to better purpose in furnishing good table,
and in charities, and in supporting tract societies, because you know
yourself that you people who have no petty vices are never known to give
away a cent, and that you stint yourselves so in the matter of food that
you are always feeble and hungry. And you never dare to laugh in the
daytime for fear some poor wretch, seeing you in a good-humor, will try
to borrow a dollar of you; and in church you are always down on your
knees, with your eyes buried in the cushion, when the contribution-box
comes around; and you never give the revenue-officers a true statement
of your income. Now you all know all these things yourself, don't you?
Very well, then, what is the use of your stringing out your miserable
lives to a clean and withered old age? What is the use of your saving
money that is so utterly worthless to you? In a word, why don't you go
off somewhere and die, and not be always trying to seduce people into
becoming as “ornery” and unlovable as you are yourselves, by your
ceaseless and villainous “moral statistics”? Now, I don't approve of
dissipation, and I don't indulge in it, either; but I haven't a particle
of confidence in a man who has no redeeming petty vices whatever, and
so I don't want to hear from you any more. I think you are the very same
man who read me a long lecture last week about the degrading vice
of smoking cigars and then came back, in my absence, with your vile,
reprehensible fire-proof gloves on, and carried off my beautiful
parlor-stove.