Never Sign an Accommodation Bill
Nothing is more deceptive than imaginary wealth. “We are apt,” says Sir E. B. Lytton, “to rely upon future prospects, and become really expensive while we are only rich in possibility. We live up to our expectations, not to our possessions, and make a figure proportionable to what we may be, not what we are. We outrun our present income, as not doubting to disburse ourselves out of the profits of some future place, project, or reversion we have in view.”
By no means is this artificial state of living more nourished than what are familiarly called “bill transactions.” This has been illustrated in novels and tales, but never more to the purpose than in the following passage in Pisistratus Caxton. “To sign an Accommodation Bill, and still more, to renew one when due, is opening an account with ruin. One always begins by being security for a friend. The discredit of the thing is familiarized to one’s mind by the false show of generous confidence in another. Then, what you have done for a friend, a friend should do for you—a hundred or two would be useful now—you are sure to repay it in three months. To youth the future seems safe as the Bank of England, and distant as the peaks of Himalaya. You pledge your honour that in three months you will release your friend. The three months expire. To release one friend, you catch hold of another—the bill is renewed, premium and interest thrown into the next pay-day—soon the amount multiplies, and with it the honour dwindles—your name circulates from hand to hand on the back of doubtful paper,—your name, which, in all money transactions, should grow higher and higher each year you live, falling down every month like the shares in a swindling speculation. You begin by what you call trusting a friend, that is, aiding him to self-destruction—buying him arsenic to clear his complexion,—you end by dragging all near you into your own abyss, as a drowning man would catch at his own brother.”