Debt of honour

“ A debt of gratitude which [Pg 150] must become a debt of honour to be paid in full measure, pressed down, and running over to those, less fortunate than ourselves, who will turn to us in their need.
And in the longed-for days to come France will need us as she needs us now. She will need our sympathy, our money, our very selves. She will no longer call on us to destroy in order to save, she will call on us to regenerate, redeem, to roll away the Stone from her House of Death, and touching the crucified with our hand, bid them come forth, revivified, strong and free. ”

“ I cannot much wonder at the Endeavour after Gain, but am extremely astonished that Men can be so insensible of the Danger of running into Debt. One would think it impossible a Man who is given to contract Debts should know, that his Creditor has, from that Moment in which he transgresses Payment, so much as that Demand comes to in his Debtor's Honour, Liberty, and Fortune. ”

“ It would happen that a lady lost more than she could venture to confess to her husband or father. Her creditor was probably a fine gentleman, or she became indebted to some rich admirer for the means of discharging her liabilities. In either event, the result may be guessed. In the one case, the debt of honour was liquidated on the old principle of the law-merchant, according to which there was but one alternative to payment in purse. ”

“ A national debt, like any other, may be honestly incurred in case of need, and honestly paid in due time. But if a man should be ashamed to borrow, much more should a people; and if a father holds it his honour to provide for his children, and would be ashamed to borrow from them, and leave, with his blessing, his note of hand, for his grandchildren to pay, much more should a nation [285] be ashamed to borrow, in any case, or in any manner; and if it borrow at all, it is at least in honour bound to borrow from living men, and not indebt itself to its own unborn brats. ”

“ But the anxiety to uphold authority, to preserve honour for whom it was due, to maintain social and political order in spite of influences which were conspicuously at work breaking it up before men’s eyes, was a true and wholesome feeling, to the strength of which we owe a debt unspeakable even in these days of progress. ”

“ Nay, if the worst comes to the worst, it is easy to break even one's word of honor, and still remain honorable—again by adopting that universal remedy, the duel, and fighting with those who maintain that we pledged our word. Further, there is one debt, and one alone, that under no circumstances must be left unpaid—a gambling debt, which has accordingly been called a debt of honor. ”

“ Eemember through life your teachers to whom you owe so much. Let your thought and action be always guided by a profound feeling of loyalty to our gracious Sovereign and to the British nation to whom you owe a debt of gratitude, which you can never adequately repay. ”

“ If a father sees his son drowning and jumps into the water to rescue him, is he entitled to any special credit, as a matter of right? Duty is something due; therefore, it is a debt. "When ye have done all the things that are commanded you, say, We are all bondservants; we have done that which it was our duty to do." ”

“ Madison.—If paper, or the honor of statues or medals can discharge the debts of justice, payable in gold or silver, we can not only exonerate ourselves from those due to the original holders, but from those of the assignees. So far as paper goes, the latter have received the compensation. If honor can discharge the debt, they have received civil honors; look around to the officers of every Government in the Union, and you find them sharing equal honors with those bestowed on the original creditors. ”

“ And is the honor of an individual more sacred than that of a state or nation? State and national debts rest upon faith, they repose upon honor, the obligation is sacred, and must be fulfilled. It can never he illegal or unconstitutional to pay a debt, where the money has been received by a state or a nation. And, where a State, acting through its supreme Executive and Legislature, has issued its bonds and affixed its seal, and they have passed into the hands of bona fide holders, the obligation must be fulfilled. ”

“ When I remember the long list of Warriors, Statesmen, Scholars, and the immense army of Usemen it has given to the world, I conceive that the world owes the name a debt of gratitude, and, being one of the creditors, I expect partial payment at least. ”

“ In private life, if you are insulted by an individual to whom you are indebted, what is the first impulse 270of a man of honor? To owe no pecuniary obligation to the man who has wounded your feelings—to pay him the debt instantly, and to demand reparation for the insult, or at the least, to hold no friendly communication with him afterwards. ”

“ What do you want the money for? To pay betting debts? They're not recoverable in law; and even if they were, isn't it as well for you to owe money to one man as to another?"
"But they're debts of honour," said Alfred, with a not uncommon but very miserable assumption of high-mindedness; "no gentleman can afford not to pay his debts of honour." ”

“ I am in debt to a friend, George, and unless I am left in peace here to collect my tithes and till my fields and run my mills and ship my pearl-ashes, I can never hope to pay a debt of honor incurred--and which I mean to pay, if I live, so help me God! ”

“ And yet you are about to put yourself under that tyranny, when you run in debt for such dress! Your creditor has authority, at his pleasure, to deprive you of your liberty, by confining you in gaol for life, or by selling you for a servant, if you should not be able to pay him. ”

“ It is difficult to decide the preference between debts of honour and legal demands; both are bad enough, and almost a fair excuse for driving any one into the hands of money-lenders—to whom an application, if successful, is accompanied with a sense of being in the vulture’s gripe—a reflection akin to that of those who formerly sold themselves to the devil—or, if unsuccessful, is rendered doubly galling by the smooth, civil leer of cool contempt with which you are dismissed, as if they had escaped from your clutches—not you from their’s. ”

“ At length he exclaimed: "But, master, where's the money come from?"
"Never do you mind that, ——," was the reply; "go home, and tell your wife you are out of debt; you are an independent man. I only hope the creditors have felt something of the satisfaction in forgiving you one-half your debt to them, that we know God feels in forgiving our debts to him for Christ's sake: I have said that much to all of them." ”

“ Madam, do you not find in the country you inhabit a great many devotees who are sunk in debt, whose fortune is squandered away on priests, and who are incapable of retrieving it? Content to put their conscience to rights on religious matters, they neither trouble themselves about the education of their children, nor the arrangement of their fortune, nor the discharge of their debts. Such men as would be thrown into despair did they omit one mass, will consent to leave their creditors without their money, ruined by their negligence as much as by their principles. ”

“ It is believed by many that if there were no laws at all to enforce collection, there would be many less bad debts; even now a debt of honor is held by public opinion to have precedence of those which the law claims the right to enforce. ”

“ In like manner, I should feel grateful to him, not as for a personal, but for a general benefit; being only one of the people, I should regard the debt of gratitude as incurred, not by myself, but by my country, and should not pay it myself, but only contribute my share towards doing so. I do not call a man my creditor because he has lent money to my country, nor should I include that money in a schedule of my debts were I either a candidate for a public office, or a defendant in the courts ”

“ But there was a special form of cost, invited by the virtue of our national existence; and it is this in particular that we are now paying,—paying it, I am sorry to say, in the form of retribution because the nation declined to meet it otherwise. But the peculiarity of the case is, as has been affirmed, that it was chiefly the virtue and nobility of the nation which created this debt at the outset.
And now what is the peculiar virtue and glory of this nation? Why, that its national existence is based upon a recognition of the absolute rights and duties of humanity. ”

“ I have made strict inquiry into this matter, and have sent down special commissioners to seek speech with your kinsman now in possession, and to make some settlement with him for the restitution to you of the estate. It is not fitting that one to whom the country and its Queen owe a debt of gratitude should be ousted from his inheritance either by the cunning craft of a greedy miser, or for lack of means to satisfy a creditor and release his lands from debt. ”

“ There is no security for the permanence of public effort, save in the clear conviction of its intrinsic rightfulness and conduciveness to the public good. The rest must be left to time and posterity. True, the debt is sometimes paid after the creditor is dead. But if reparation never comes to the living, unknown persons whose condition needs betterment receive it, and that is the proud and consoling thought of those who—unrequited—effected it. ”

“ Debts, that is, not of money, nor of restitution of fame, or honour, but of injuries done to us, that we should not follow them up with hatred, nor the wish for private vengeance, nor even for public punishment, unless the public welfare, or right reason require it. ”

“ The nation owes them a great debt, which will not be paid in this life. Their reward is in the nobleness which does such deeds and lives such life : thus they will take with them "an inheritance incorruptible, undefiled, and which fadeth not away." ”

“ Slight circumstances, and a man's loose expressions, would be construed into a full acknowledgment of the debt, when he himself neither intended to make, nor understood himself as making any acknowledgment at all. ”

“ When the nature of gratitude is considered in its proper light, as a debt which we have contracted, and which consequently must be discharged, we see at once that the merit or demerit of the individual to whom we owe this debt, has nothing whatever to do with our payment of it. A generous mind would perhaps feel more bound to discharge it to an unworthy object, simply because where respect or love was wanting, grateful feeling would be all that could with propriety be offered. ”

“ Is it your pleasure that the plebeians, crushed by debt, should surrender their persons to fetters and punishments sooner than that they should discharge their debts by repaying the principal? That they should be led off in crowds from the Forum as the property of their creditors? That the houses of the nobility should be filled with prisoners, and wherever a patrician lives there should be a private dungeon? ”

“ It was worth all this, perhaps not that a life might be saved, but that a debt might be paid, a promise made good,—his debt of gratitude to Sir Valentine, his promise to the queen. It was worth any cost, that a gentleman should fulfil his obligations, however incurred. ”

“ You know, he that stands surety for another takes the whole debt upon himself. This is our case; for, the living, as it were, entering bond for the dead, become responsible for their debts, and offer up fasts for fasts, tears for tears, in the same measure and proportion as they were liable to them, and so defray the debt of their friends at their own charge, and make all clear. ”

“ They are reminders of a state of things in a large part passed away, and as suggesters of a hope of a larger life in the future they contain a recognition and a resolve—a recognition of their work and a resolve to carry it forward: a recognition of the debt we owe to them, which can only be paid by service rendered to others. It is a debt which no statue, no matter how costly or lifelike, can liquidate. ”

“ It is that gratitude which, softening under the sense of recollected good, is eager to own the vast, countless debt it never, alas! can pay, for so many long years of unceasing solicitudes, honorable self-denials, life-preserving cares. ”

“ In short—for I am sure you must be dreadfully tired of hearing me talk about myself—the world, my{84} cursed creditors included, would be pretty well justified in believing that my worthy father-in-law would flatly refuse to pay a sum of something very like fourteen thousand pounds for a fellow whose extravagance and love of play were alone accountable for the debt; one, too, who has nothing—no, not even a ‘whistle’—to show of all the things that he has paid so dear for. ”

“ One man says, "I owe the Church the money, it is true, but I believe I shall break and not pay it." They want to get their money into the safe and then break. If they owed a Gentile they would pay their debts, they would work, and toil, and labor, day and night, to pay their enemy; but when they owe the Church and kingdom of God they can lie down and sleep in peace, though they owe thousands of dollars, and say, "O! well, it is all in the family, we are all one, it is no matter whether the debt is paid or not." ”

“ The old and ruined, who have lived honorable and industrious lives, who have endeavored to do their part in all the relations of life, yet have been in the slavery of debt all their days, and when their powers began to fail were stripped of the earnings of years, and besides, are compelled to bear the name of [153] dishonorable debtors, are the most worthy of sympathy of any the world knows. The decrepit old chattel slave had hope of a home until the end, and a decent burial, but the debtor has nothing, not even an honorable name. ”