It is in this simple manner, no doubt, that the system to which I am a convert effects no small part of its own great purposes.

No sooner does any one interest grow painful by excess than a new claim arises to divert the thoughts, a new demand is made on the sensibilities; and by lowering our affections from the intensity of selfishness to the more bland and equable feeling of impartiality, forms that just and generous condition of the mind at which the political economists aim when they dilate on the glories and advantages of their favorite theory of the social stake.
In this happy frame of mind I fell to reading the letters with avidity and with the godlike determination to reverence Providence and to do justice.

Fiat justitia ruat coelum! The first epistle was from the agent of the principal West India estate.
He acquainted me with the fact that all hopes from the expected crop were destroyed by a hurricane, and he begged that I would furnish the means necessary to carry on the affairs of the plantation until another season might repair the loss.

Priding myself on punctuality as a man of business, before I broke another seal a letter was written to a banker in London requesting him to supply the necessary credits, and to notify the agents in the West Indies of the circumstance.

As he was a member of parliament, I seized the occasion also to press upon him the necessity of government's introducing some early measure for the protection of the sugar-growers, a most meritorious class of his fellow-subjects, and one whose exposures and actual losses called loudly for relief of this nature.