d 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 com