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No class in the world is so susceptible to atmospheric conditions as stock-gamblers. Many a stout-hearted one has been known to postpone the inauguration of a long-planned coup merely because the air filled his blood with the dank chill of superstition.
Every one knows that the commercial world thrives in proportion as there is confidence between man and man; and the extirpation of all double-dealing and fraud from society will increase this confidence, and hence greater prosperity. The heavy commercial disasters that have smitten this land were the work of godless speculators and infamous stock-gamblers.
Every one wears the straight, high-crowned silk hat that went out with us years ago, and the cut of clothing of even the most buckish young fellows is behind the times. I stepped into the Exchange, an immense interior, that will hold five thousand people, where the stock-gamblers meet twice a day. It was very different from the terrible excitement and noise of the Paris Bourse.
Grasping the pickets in either hand he stared at the crumbling headstones of those guardsmen of Mammon who once walked the earth and fought their heart battles, as he was walking and fighting, but who now knew no ten o'clock, no three, who looked upon the stock-gamblers and dollar-trailers as they looked upon the worms that honeycombed their headstones' bases.
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.
The author also speaks of these stock-gamblers as using the most insidious means to influence public opinion in favor of their measures; and then proposes, seriously, a change in various matters of detail, thinking that this would prove a sufficient remedy for an evil which had its roots far down in the whole system of irredeemable currency.
While it lasted, that is, while the shearing of the flock was proceeding, it was very uncomfortable. Those same joyous, winning stock-gamblers, with beaming faces, of the week before, were fear-clutched, losing stock-gamblers, with livid faces, on what they afterward called the day of the panic. It really was only a slump; rather sharper than usual. Too many lambs had been over-speculating.
To avoid the folly of locking up large amounts of money received for taxes each year on the one hand, or permitting stock-gamblers and money-sharks, on the other hand, to use it, each district was allowed by law to issue district banknotes of one dollar denomination, guaranteed by the Government, drawing two per cent. a year interest up to eighty per cent. of the yearly expenses of the district.
Every one wears the straight, high-crowned silk hat that went out with us years ago, and the cut of clothing of even the most buckish young fellows is behind the times. I stepped into the Exchange, an immense interior, that will hold five thousand people, where the stock-gamblers meet twice a day. It was very different from the terrible excitement and noise of the Paris Bourse.
While every other man in the crowd was at a high tension of excitement, Barry Conant was as calm as though standing in the centre of a ten-acre daisy-field cutting off the helpless flowers' heads with every swing of his arm. Switching stock-gamblers into eternity had grown to be a pastime to Barry Conant.
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