I know, that all parsimony is of a quality approaching to unkindness;
and that (on some person or other) every reform must operate as a sort
of punishment. Indeed, the whole class of the severe and restrictive
virtues are at a market almost too high for humanity. What is worse,
there are very few of those virtues which are not capable of being
imitated, and even outdone, in many of their most striking effects, by
the worst of vices. Malignity and envy will carve much more deeply, and
finish much more sharply, in the work of retrenchment, than frugality
and providence. I do not, therefore, wonder that gentlemen have kept
away from such a task, as well from good-nature as from prudence.
Private feeling might, indeed, be overborne by legislative reason; and a
man of a longd-sighted and a strong-nerved humanity might bring himself,
not so much to consider from whom he takes a superfluous enjoyment, as
for whom in the end he may preserve the absolute necessaries of life.