Then your conscience will be clear, and you can die in peace.  But I have no faith in such a reformation.  When the devil gets such a fair hold of a man he hardly ever lets go.

To the young I turn and utter a word of warning.  While you are determined to be acute business men, resolve at the very threshold that you will have nothing to do with stock-gambling.  This country can richly afford to lose the eight hundred millions of dollars swindled out of honest people, if our young men, by it, will be warned for all the future.  Think you such enterprises are forever passed away?  No! they begin already to clamor for public attention and patronage.  There are now hundreds of printing-presses busy in making pamphlets and circulars for schemes as hollow and nefarious as those I have mentioned.  There are silver-mining companies, founded upon nobody knows what—­to accomplish what, nobody cares.  There will be other Canada gold companies; there will be other copper-mining companies; there will be more mutual consumers’ coal companies, who, not satisfied with the price of ordinary coal-dealers, will resolve themselves into consumers’ associations, where the thing consumed is not the coal, but themselves—­the companies that were to be immaculate, setting the whole community to playing the game of “Who’s got the money?”

Stand off from all doubtful enterprises!  Resolve that if, in a lawful way, you cannot earn a living, then you will die an honest man, and be buried in an honest sepulchre.

There are two or three reasons why you should have nothing to do with such operations.  Mentioning the lowest motive first, it will desolate you financially.  I asked a man of large observation and undoubted integrity, how many of the professed stock-gamblers made a permanent fortune.  He answered, “Not one! not one of those who made this their only business.”  For a little while you may plunge in a round of seeming prosperity; but your money is put into a bag with holes.  You cannot successfully bury a dishonest dollar.  You may put it down into the very heart of the earth; you may heave rocks upon the top of it; on top of the rocks you may put banks and all moneyed institutions, but that dishonest dollar beneath will begin to heave and toss and upturn itself, and keep on until it comes to the resurrection of damnation.

Then this stock-gambling life is wretchedly unhappy.  It makes the nerves shake, and the brain hot, and the heart sad, and the life disquieted.

A man in Philadelphia, who seems to be an exception to the rule—­that such men do not permanently prosper—­who has well on towards a million of dollars, and is nearly seventy years of age, may be seen, every day, going in and out, eaten up of stocks, torn in an inquisition of stocks, rode by a nightmare of stocks; and, with the earnestness of a drowning man, he rushes into a broker’s shop, crying out:  “Did you get me those shares?” In such an anxious, exciting life there are griefs, disappointments, anguish, but there is no happiness.