My infatuated friends and Goverment Bondmen: 

As an ex-statesman which has served his country for 4 years as Gustise of the Peece, raisin’ said offis to a hire standard than usual, to say nothin’ about raisin’ an interestin’ family of eleven morril an hily intellectooal children, I rise and git up, ontramelled by any politikle alliances, to say:  that when you fellers git on a mussy fit, like the old woman who undertook to pick her chickens by runnin’ them through a patent hash cutter, you make the feathers fly, and leave your victims in a hily clawed up stait.

Perfesser ARKIMIDEES, of Oxford, (and here allow me to stait, so as to avoid newspaper contraryversy, as in the case of DISRALLY’S novel Lothere, I have no refference to T. GOLDWIN SMITH whatsomever, as I believe ARKIMIDEES is now dead,) said he could raise the hul earth with a top section of a rale fence, if he could only find something tangible to rest his timber on.

My friends, that man had never heerd of Wall Street, and I’de bet all the money I can borrer on it.

With such a prop as this ere little territory, where games of chance are “entered into accordin’ to the act of Congress,” to cote from a familiar passage in every printed copy of PUNCHINELLO, the Perfesser could have raised this little hemisfeer quicker than any of you chaps can gobble up a greenhorn.

And, sirs, I’me sorry to be obliged to speak plain, it would be a darned site more to your credit if you’d try and raise the earth, instead of daily usin’ Wall Street as a base of operations to raise H——­, well—­excuse me, the futer asilum for retired brokers.

How do you manage, when you want to make a steak?

You run up stocks and produce a crysis.

Outsiders rush in lickety smash, and invest all the money they can rake and scrape, in these inflated stocks.  Suddenly you prick the bubble, when, alas! besides the cry-sis, there’s more cry-bubs in and about Wall Street than there was in Egipt, when NAPOLEON BONAPART chopped off the heads off all the first born.  Instances have been known, where a good many of you chaps have rammed your head in the Tiger’s mouth once too often.

If my memry serves me correctly, FISKE and GOOLD made you perambulate off on your eyebrows, last fall, and while the a-4-said Tigers walked off with the seats of your trowserloons in their teeth, you all jined in the follerin’ him: 

     Wall Street is all a fleetin’ sho’,
     From which lame ducks are driven,
     “Up in a balloon they allers go,
     To Tophet, not to Heaven.”

Another little dodge of your’n, my misguided friends, is to keel off K. VANDERBILT.

What did you do t’other day?

Why, when KERNELIUS was engaged in a friendly game of cards for keeps, up at Saratogy, some poor deluded money-maniac telegrafs that the Commodore had at last found his match, and had been gathered to his fathers.  While at the bottom of the dispatch was forged the name of my friend, KISSLEBURGH, city editor of the Troy Times, who, up to the present time, if this coot knows herself, hain’t bin into the hiway robbin’ bizziness, not by a long shot.  But, my friends and feller citizens, old VAN is sharper that a two-edged gimlet.