No lie you can speak or act but it will come, after longer or shorter circulation, like a bill drawn on Nature’s Reality, and be presented there for payment—with the answer, No effects.

Carlyle frames falsehood as a kind of financial instrument: a “bill” issued against the world’s underlying truth. For a time, a lie may circulate—socially, politically, or personally—appearing to “buy” results. But reality is the final clearinghouse, and when the account is settled the lie is dishonored: it yields “No effects,” i.e., no lasting, constructive outcome. The image reflects Carlyle’s moral earnestness and his recurring insistence that truth is not merely a virtue but a practical necessity: actions grounded in unreality eventually collapse, because the world’s causal order will not sustain them. The warning is both ethical and pragmatic: deception is ultimately self-defeating.