At the same time we do not mean to attribute falsehood to Mr.
Sponge--quite the contrary--it is no uncommon thing for merchants and
traders--men who 'talk in thousands,' to declare that they lost twenty
thousand by this, or forty thousand by that, simply meaning that they
didn't make it, and if Mr. Sponge, by taking the longest of the long odds
against the most wretched of the outsiders, might have won the sums he
named, he surely had a right to say he lost them when he didn't get them.
It never does to be indigenously poor, if we may use such a term, and when
a man gets to the end of his tether, he must have something or somebody to
blame rather than his own extravagance or imprudence, and if there is no
'rascally lawyer' who has bolted with his title-deeds, or fraudulent agent
who has misappropriated his funds, why then, railroads, or losses on the
turf, or joint-stock banks that have shut up at short notice, come in as
the scapegoats. Very willing hacks they are, too, railways especially, and
so frequently ridden, that it is no easy matter to discriminate between the
real and the fictitious loser.
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