Stop, rather, and fortify your uprightness on the broad grounds, “that honesty is not only the deepest policy, but the highest wisdom; since however difficult it may be for integrity to get on, it is a thousand times more difficult for knavery to get off.”
Stop before cultivating an inordinate desire to get rich in haste. In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred it will develop into a species of frenzy that must over-reach and defeat its aims.
Stop, rather, and understand that in speculation, the prizes of the few are only rendered possible by the ruin of the many.
Stop before setting up financial comets—that is suddenly-rich men—as your exemplars. The exceptional boldness, or unscrupulousness which constituted their open sesame to dazzling fortune, may but fling wide, for the mediocre imitator, the doors of poverty or of the state prison.
Stop when you have achieved a comfortable competence, and devote yourself to the rational enjoyment thereof. To be stacking up dollars and securities to the last gasp is worse than making a hell on earth; since it is a perversity so obtuse as to imagine that as heaven which is in truth a hell.
Stop, and remember, that the accumulation of wealth, as a sole pursuit, is a diseased passion, just as much as is the craving for strong drink, or for the excitement of gambling.
Stop, therefore, in the headlong race for money, and so intersperse that pursuit with knowledge and unselfish deeds, with moral and intellectual recreations, as shall render it the chief means, rather than the chief end, of a useful existence.
