Did not the law right the injured man? No! The poor who were wronged would not undertake a suit against a company that could bring fifty thousand dollars to the enlightenment of judge, jury, and lawyer; while, on the other hand, the affluent who had been gouged would not go to the courts for justice. Why! how would it sound, if it got out, that Mr. So and So, one of the first merchants on Wall, or Third, or State street, had got swindled? They will keep it still.
The guilty range to-day undisturbed through society, and will continue to do so until the Lord God shall bring them to an unerring settlement, and proclaim to an astonished universe how many lies they told about the land, about the derricks, about the yield, about the dividends. What shall such an one say, when God shall, in the great day of account, hold up before him the circular, and the map, and the newspaper advertisement? Speechless!
Before that day shall come I warn you—Disgorge! you infamous stock gamblers! Gather together so many of your company as have any honesty left, and join in the following circular:—"We the undersigned, do hereby repent of our villainies, and beg pardon of the public for all the wrongs that we have done them; and hereby ask the widows and orphans whom we have made penniless to come next Saturday, between ten and three o'clock, and receive back what we stole from them. We hereby confess that the wells spoken of in our circular never yielded any oil; and that the creeks running through our ornamented map were an entire fiction; and that the elder who piously rolled up his eyes and said it was a safe investment, was not as devout as he looked to be. Signed by the subscribers at their office, in the year of our Lord 1871."
Then your conscience will be clear, and you can die in peace. But I have no faith in such a reformation. When the devil gets such a fair hold of a man he hardly ever lets go.
To the young I turn and utter a word of warning. While you are determined to be acute business men, resolve at the very threshold that you will have nothing to do with stock-gambling. This country can richly afford to lose the eight hundred millions of dollars swindled out of honest people, if our young men, by it, will be warned for all the future. Think you such enterprises are forever passed away? No! they begin already to clamor for public attention and patronage. There are now hundreds of printing-presses busy in making pamphlets and circulars for schemes as hollow and nefarious as those I have mentioned. There are silver-mining companies, founded upon nobody knows what—to accomplish what, nobody cares. There will be other Canada gold companies; there will be other copper-mining companies; there will be more mutual consumers' coal companies, who, not satisfied with the price of ordinary coal-dealers, will resolve themselves into consumers' associations, where the thing consumed is not the coal, but themselves—the companies that were to be immaculate, setting the whole community to playing the game of "Who's got the money?"
Stand off from all doubtful enterprises! Resolve that if, in a lawful way, you cannot earn a living, then you will die an honest man, and be buried in an honest sepulchre.
There are two or three reasons why you should have nothing to do with such operations. Mentioning the lowest motive first, it will desolate you financially. I asked a man of large observation and undoubted integrity, how many of the professed stock-gamblers made a permanent fortune. He answered, "Not one! not one of those who made this their only business." For a little while you may plunge in a round of seeming prosperity; but your money is put into a bag with holes. You cannot successfully bury a dishonest dollar. You may put it down into the very heart of the earth; you may heave rocks upon the top of it; on top of the rocks you may put banks and all moneyed institutions, but that dishonest dollar beneath will begin to heave and toss and upturn itself, and keep on until it comes to the resurrection of damnation.
Then this stock-gambling life is wretchedly unhappy. It makes the nerves shake, and the brain hot, and the heart sad, and the life disquieted.
A man in Philadelphia, who seems to be an exception to the rule—that such men do not permanently prosper—who has well on towards a million of dollars, and is nearly seventy years of age, may be seen, every day, going in and out, eaten up of stocks, torn in an inquisition of stocks, rode by a nightmare of stocks; and, with the earnestness of a drowning man, he rushes into a broker's shop, crying out: "Did you get me those shares?" In such an anxious, exciting life there are griefs, disappointments, anguish, but there is no happiness.
Worse than all, it destroys the soul. The day must come when the worthless scrip will fall out of the clutches of the stock-gambler. Satan will play upon him the "cornering" game which, down on Wall street, he played upon a fellow-operator. Now he would be glad to exchange all his interest in Venango County for one share in the Christian's prospect of heaven. Hopeless, he falls back in his last sickness. His delirium is filled with senseless talk about "percentages" and "commissions" and "buyer, sixty days," and "stocks up," and "stocks down." He thinks that the physician who feels his pulse is trying to steal his "board book." He starts up at midnight, saying: "One thousand shares of Reading at 116-1/2. Take it!" Falls back dead. No more dividends.... Swindled out of heaven. STOCKS DOWN!