the system
under the baneful influence of which we live. But it is not the less
necessary that I beseech you not to practise such gambling; that I
beseech you, if you be engaged in it, to disentangle yourself from it as
soon as you can. Your life, while you are thus engaged, is the life of
the gamester; a life of constant anxiety; constant desire to over-reach;
constant apprehension; general gloom, enlivened, now and then, by a
gleam of hope or of success. Even that success is sure to lead to
further adventures; and, at last, a thousand to one, that your fate is
that of the pitcher to the well.

69. The great temptation to this gambling is, as is the case in other
gambling, the _success of the few_. As young men who crowd to the army,
in search of rank and renown, never look into the ditch that holds their
slaughtered companions; but have their eye constantly fixed on the
General-in-chief; and as each of them belongs to the _same profession_,
and is sure to be conscious that he has equal merit, every one deems
himself the suitable successor of him who is surrounded with _Aides des
camps_, and who moves battalions and columns by his nod; so with the
rising generation of 'speculators:' they see the great estates that have
succeeded the pencil-box and the orange-basket; they see those whom
nature and good laws made to black shoes, sweep chimnies or the streets,
rolling in carriages, or sitting in saloons surrounded by gaudy footmen
with napkins twisted round their thumbs; and they can see no earthly
reason why they should not all do the same; forgetting the thousands and
thousands, who, in making the attempt, have reduced themselves to that
beggary which, before their attempt, they would have regarded as a thing
wholly impossible.

70. In all situations of life, avoid the _trammels of the law_. Man's
nature must be changed before law-suits will cease; and, perhaps, it
would be next to impossible to make them less frequent than they are in
the present state of this country; but though no man, who has any
property at all, can say that he will have nothing to do with law-suits,
it is in the power of most men to avoid them in a considerable degree.
One good rule is to have as little as possible to do with any man who is
fond of law-suits, and who, upon every slight occasion, talks of an
appeal to the law. Such persons, from their frequent litigations,
contract a habit of using the technical terms of the Courts, in which
they