s means
in ordinary English, that without having any tulips (i. e., short,) you
promise to deliver the ten roots as above in three days from date. Now
when the three days are up, if Semper Augustuses are worth in the market
only $1,500, you could, if this were a real transaction, buy ten of them
for $15,000, and deliver them to the other gambler for $20,000, thus
winning from him the difference of $5,000. But if the roots have risen
and are worth $2,500 each, then if the transactions were real you would
have to pay $25,000 for the ten roots and could only get $20,000 from
the other gambler, and he, turning round and selling them at the market
price, would win from you this difference of $5,000. But in fact the
transaction was not real, it was a stock gambling one; neither party
owned tulips or meant to, or expected the other to; and the whole was a
pure game of chance or skill, to see which should win and which should
lose that $5,000 at the end of three days. When the time came, the
affair was settled, still without any tulips, by the loser paying the
difference to the winner, exactly as one loses what the other wins at a
game of poker or faro. Of course if you can set afloat a smart lie after
making your bargain, such as will send prices up or down as your profit
requires, you make money by it, just as stock gamblers do every day in
New York, London, Paris, and other Christian commercial cities.

While this monstrous Dutch gambling fury lasted, money was plenty,
everybody felt rich and Holland was in a whiz of windy delight. After
about three years of fool's paradise, people began to reflect that the
shuttlecock could not be knocked about in the air forever, and that when
it came down somebody would be hurt. So first one and then another began
quietly to sell out and quit the game, without buying in again. This
cautious infection quickly spread like a pestilence, as it always does
in such cases, and became a perfect panic or fright. All at once, as it
were, rich people all over Holland found themselves with nothing in the
world except a pocket full or a garden-bed full of flower roots that
nobody would buy and that were not good to eat, and would not have made
more than one tureen of soup if they were.

Of course this state of things caused innumerable bankruptcies,
quarrels, and refusals to complete bargains, everywhere. The government
and the courts were appealed to, but with Dutch good sense they refused
to enforc