ned a government contract!

This accounts for the utter chagrin which men feel at the treatment
they receive when they lose their property. Hold up your head amid
financial disaster, like a Christian! Fifty thousand subtracted from a
good man leaves how much? Honor; Truth; Faith in God; Triumphant Hope;
and a kingdom of ineffable glory, over which he is to reign forever
and ever.

If a millionnaire should lose a penny out of his pocket, would he sit
down on a curb-stone and cry? And shall a man possessed of everlasting
fortunes wear himself out with grief because he has lost worldly
treasure? You have only lost that in which hundreds of wretched
misers surpass you; and you have saved that which the Caesars, and the
Pharaohs, and the Alexanders could never afford.

And yet society thinks differently; and you see the most intimate
friendships broken up as the consequence of financial embarrassments.
You say to some one--"How is your friend ----?" The man looks bewildered,
and says, "I do not know." You reply, "Why; you used to be intimate."
"Well," says the man, "our friendship has been dropped: the man has
failed."

Proclamation has gone forth: "Velvets must go up, and homespun must
come down;" and the question is "How does the coat fit?"--not, "Who
wears it?" The power that bears the tides of excited population up
and down our streets, and rocks the world of commerce, and thrills all
nations, Transatlantic and Cisatlantic, is--_clothes_. It decides
the last offices of respect; and how long the dress shall be totally
black; and when it may subside into spots of grief on silk, calico, or
gingham. Men die in good circumstances, but by reason of extravagant
funeral expenses are well nigh insolvent before they get buried. Many
men would not die at all, if they had to wait until they could afford
it.

Excessive fashion is productive of a most ruinous strife. The
expenditure of many households is adjusted by what their neighbors
have, not by what they themselves can afford to have; and the great
anxiety is as to who shall have the finest house and the most costly
equipage. The weapons used in the warfare of social life are not
Minie rifles, and Dahlgren guns, and Hotchkiss shells, but chairs
and mirrors, and vases, and Gobelins, and Axminsters. Many household
establishments are like racing steamboats, propelled at the utmost
strain and risk, and just coming to a terrific explosion. "Who cares,"
say they, "if we only com