his own price, and chooses his customer.  This operates not unkindly on the jobbers who are wealthy and independent; but for those who have but lately begun to mount the hill of difficulty, it offers one more impediment.  For, to men who have a great many goods to sell, it is a matter of moment to secure the customers who can buy in large quantities, and whose notes will bring the money of banks or private capitalists as soon as offered.  Against such buyers, men of limited means and of only average business-ability have but a poor chance.  There will always be some articles of merchandise in the buying or selling of which they cannot compete.

When a financial crisis overtakes the community, we hear much and sharp censure of all speculation.  Speculators, one and all, are forthwith consigned to an abyss of obloquy.  The virtuous public outside of trade washes its hands of all participation in the iniquity.  This same virtuous public knows very little of what it is talking about.  What is speculation?  Shall we say, in brief and in general, that it consists in running risks, in taking extra-hazardous risks, on the chance of making unusually large profits?  Is it that men have abandoned the careful ways of the fathers, and do not confine themselves to small stores, small stocks, and cash transactions?  And do you know who it is that has compelled this change?  That same public who denounce speculation in one breath, and in the next clamor for goods at low prices, and force the jobber into large stores and large sales at small profits as the indispensable condition of his very existence.

Those who thus rail at speculation are generally quite unaware that their own inexorable demand for goods at low prices is one of the principal efficient causes of that of which they complain.  They do not know that the capacious maw of the insatiable public is yearly filled with millions on millions of shirtings and sheetings, and other articles of prime necessity, without one farthing of profit to the jobber.  The outside world reason from the assumption, that the jobber might, but will not, avoid taking considerable risks.  They do not consider, for they do not know, how entirely all is changed from the days and circumstances in which a very small business would suffice to maintain the merchant.  They do not consider, that, an immense amount of goods being of compulsion sold without profit, a yet other huge amount must be so sold as to compensate for this.  Nor do they consider that the possibility of doing this is often contingent upon the buyer’s carefully calculated probability of a rise in the article he is purchasing.  Many a time is the jobber enabled and inclined to purchase largely only by the assurance that from the time of his purchase the price will be advanced.

The selling of dry-goods is another department in high art about which the ignorance of outsiders is ineffable.  I was once asked, in the way of courtesy and good neighborhood, to call on a clergyman in our vicinity,—­which I did.  Desirous of doing his part in the matter of good fellowship and smooth conversation, he began thus:—­