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He had developed what I regarded as an innocent intellectual recreation which he called stock-market meteorology. I think he got the idea from one use of curves in the graphic presentation of associated variations that he saw me plotting. He secured some of my squared paper and, having cast about for a time, decided to trace the rise and fall of certain lines and railways.

In her depths she was had been romantic and given to dreaming, but the manifold weaknesses of her father who had been one of the most brilliant and accomplished of men, a graduate of Harvard, and the possessor of many books and the selfish and tyrannous exactions which had tempered his enthusiasm for all things feminine, the caustic tongue and overbearing masculinity of her uncle, who had been as weak in his way as her father, for he had lost the greater part of his patrimony on the stock-market, and the charming inconsequence of her brother-in-law, who loved his family extravagantly and treated them like poor relations, had not prepared her to idealize the young men she had met in Rosewater and Europe.

But the Commercial Echo and Financial Undertone, appearing at four o'clock, printed in its stock-market columns the announcement: "We understand that the Duke of Dulham, who arrives in town today, is proposing to invest a large sum of money in American Industrials." And, of course, that announcement reached every member of the Mausoleum Club within twenty minutes.

And we have no nonsense about charity, we don't worry about the poor who fester in our city slums; because poverty is a product of Mortal Mind, and we offer to all men a way to get rich right off the bat. You may come to our marble churches and hear people testify how through the power of Divine Mind they were enabled to anticipate a rise in the stock-market.

It was the dread of such an outcome which finally happened and ruined many Northern firms that caused the stock-market in New York to go up and down with feverish uncertainty. Banks suspended payment in Washington, Baltimore, and Philadelphia. The one important and all-engrossing thing in the mind's eye of all the financial world at this moment was that specter of unpaid Southern accounts.

So far the fortunes of the stock-market had not smiled on Mansfield's schemes, and, I reflected, it was not impossible that what might be merely an incident to a man like Mansfield could be very serious to the rest of them. It was the middle of the afternoon when I returned to the laboratory with my slender budget of news.

As we sat at breakfast in a Fifth Avenue hotel I ran my eye eagerly over the stock-market reports and the financial news, and rallied Maude for a lack of spirits. "Aren't you glad to be home?" I asked her, as we sat in a hansom. "Of course I am, Hugh!" she protested. "But I can't look upon New York as home, somehow. It frightens me." I laughed indulgently. "You'll get used to it," I said.

It happens that I am sufficiently familiar with the stock-market to make a decent living out of the Exchange; and it also happens that I am sufficiently fortunate with cards to make the pleasure of playing fairly remunerative. Any man who can put up proper margin has a right to my services; any man whom I invite and who can take up his notes, has a right to play under my roof.

But Governor Wise no longer proposes to seize the Treasury at Washington, perhaps because Mr. Buchanan has left so little in it. The old Mumbo-Jumbo is occasionally paraded at the North, but, however many old women may be frightened, the pulse of the stock-market remains provokingly calm. General Cushing, infringing the patent-right of the late Mr.

The imputation of inconsistency is one to which every sound politician and every honest thinker must sooner or later subject himself. Fools and dead men are the only people who never change their opinions or their course of action. The course of great statesmen resembles that of navigable rivers, avoiding immovable obstacles with noble bends of concession, seeking the broad levels of opinion on which men soonest settle and longest dwell, following and marking the almost imperceptible slope of national tendency, yet forever recruited from sources nearer heaven, from summits where the gathered purity of ages lies encamped, and sometimes bursting open paths of progress and civilisation through what seem the eternal barriers of both. It is a loyalty to great ends, an anchored cling to solid principles, which knows how to swing with the tide, but not to be carried away by it, that we demand in public men, and not persistence in prejudice, sameness of policy, or stolid antagonism to the inevitable. But we demand also that they shall not too lightly accept Wrong instead of Right, as inevitable; and there is a kind of change that is suspicious because it is sudden, and detrimental to the character in proportion as it is of advantage to the man; and the judgment of mankind allows a well-founded distinction between an alteration of policy compelled by events, and an abandonment of professed principles tainted with any suspicion of self-interest. We hold that a Representative is a trustee for those who elected him, that his political apostasy only so far deserves the name of conversion as it is a conversion of what was not his to his own use and benefit; and we have a right to be impatient of instruction in duty from those whom the hope of promotion could nerve to make the irrevocable leap from a defeated party to a triumphant one, and who can serve either side, if so they only serve themselves. It is this kind of freedom from prejudice that has brought down our politics to the gambling level of the stock-market; it is this kind of unlucky success, and the readiness of the multitude to forgive and even to applaud it, that justify the old sarcasm, Patibulum inter et statuam qu