In his own island ten sequins would buy almost any mariner of the port
to do any act short of positive legal criminality; and the idea that a
barbarian of the west would refuse such a sum, in preference to selling
his shipmates, never crossed his mind. Little, however, did the Italian
understand the American. A greater knave than Ithuel, in his own way, it
was not easy to find; but it shocked all his notions of personal
dignity, self-respect, and republican virtue, to be thus unequivocally
offered a bribe; and had the lugger not been so awkwardly circumstanced,
he would have been apt to bring matters to a crisis at once by throwing
the gold into the vice-governatore's face; although, knowing where it
was to be found, he might have set about devising some means of cheating
the owner out of it at the very next instant. Boon or bribe, directly or
unequivocally offered in the shape of money, as coming from the superior
to the inferior, or from the corrupter to the corrupted, had he never
taken, and it would have appeared in his eyes a species of degradation
to receive the first, and of treason to his nationality to accept the
last; though he would lie, invent, manage, and contrive, from morning
till night, in order to transfer even copper from the pocket of his
neighbor to his own, under the forms of opinion and usage. In a word,
Ithuel, as relates to such things, is what is commonly called
law-honest, with certain broad salvoes, In favor of smuggling of all
sorts, in foreign countries (at home he never dreamed of such a thing),
custom-house oaths, and legal trickery; and this is just the class of
men apt to declaim the loudest against the roguery of the rest of
mankind.
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