self-candour

Updated: May 22, 2025

Swindler is English for a convicted person. Yet the percentage of the props and pillars of financial success and mercantile respectability who, in the self-candour and secrecy of their sleepless hours, are honestly unable to recall to mind one or more occasions when Portland, or Dartmoor, or Simonstown, or the Kowie loomed more than near, cannot be a vast one; which, for present purposes, may be taken to mean that if you have got to make money you must make it anyhow, or not at all 'anyhow' covering such methods as are involved in the conventional term 'rascality. If you have got it you can run as straight as you like.

Bertram Mitford - The Sign of the Spider