LIGHTS OUT!



THE MASSACRE BY NEEDLE AND SEWING-MACHINE.

Very long ago the needle was busy. It was considered honorable for women to toil in olden time. Alexander the Great stood in his palace showing garments made by his own mother. The finest tapestries at Bayeux were made by the Queen of William the Conqueror. Augustus the Emperor would not wear any garments except those that were fashioned by some member of his royal family. So let the toiler everywhere be respected!

The greatest blessing that could have happened to our first parents was being turned out of Eden after they had done wrong. Adam and Eve, in their perfect state, might have got along without work, or only such slight employment as a perfect garden, with no weeds in it, demanded. But, as soon as they had sinned, the best thing for them was to be turned out where they would have to work. We know what a withering thing it is for a man to have nothing to do. Old Ashbel Green, at fourscore years, when asked why he kept on working, said, "I do so to keep out of mischief." We see that a man who has a large amount of money to start with has no chance. Of the thousand prosperous and honorable men that you know, nine hundred and ninety-nine had to work vigorously at the beginning.

But I am now to tell you that industry is just as important for a woman's safety and happiness. The most unhappy women in our communities to-day are those who have no engagements to call them up in the morning; who, once having risen and breakfasted, lounge through the dull forenoon in slippers down at the heel and with dishevelled hair, reading George Sand's last novel; and who, having dragged through a wretched forenoon and taken their afternoon sleep, and having spent an hour and a half at their toilet, pick up their card-case and go out to make calls; and who pass their evenings waiting for somebody to come in and break up the monotony. Arabella Stuart never was imprisoned in so dark a dungeon as that.

There is no happiness in an idle woman. It may be with hand, it may be with brain, it may be with foot; but work she must, or be wretched forever. The little girls of our families must be started with that idea. The curse of our American society is that our young women are taught that the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, tenth, fiftieth, thousandth thing in their life is to get somebody to take care of them. Instead of that, the first lesson should be, how, under God, they may take care of themselves. The simple fact is that a majority of them do have to take care of themselves, and that, too, after having, through the false notions of their parents, wasted the years in which they ought to have learned how successfully to maintain themselves. We now and here declare the inhumanity, cruelty, and outrage of that father and mother, who pass their daughters into womanhood, having given them no facility for earning their livelihood. Madame de Stael said: "It is not these writings that I am proud of, but the fact that I have facility in ten occupations, in any one of which I could make a livelihood."

You say you have a fortune to leave them. O man and woman! have you not learned that, like vultures, like hawks, like eagles, riches have wings and fly away? Though you should be successful in leaving a competency behind you, the trickery of executors may swamp it in a night; or some elders or deacons of our churches may get up an oil company, or some sort of religious enterprise sanctioned by the church, and induce your orphans to put their money into a hole in Venango County; and if, by the most skilful derricks, the sunken money cannot be pumped up again, prove to them that it was eternally decreed that that was the way they were to lose it, and that it went in the most orthodox and heavenly style.

O the damnable schemes that professed Christians will engage in—until God puts his fingers into the collar of the hypocrite's robe and rips it clear down to the bottom!

You have no right, because you are well off, to conclude that your children are going to be as well off. A man died, leaving a large fortune. His son, a few months ago, fell dead in a Philadelphia grog-shop. His old comrades came in and said, as they bent over his corpse: "What is the matter with you, Boggsey?" The surgeon standing over him said: "Hush up! he is dead!"—"Ah, he is dead!" they said. "Come, boys, let us go and take a drink in memory of poor Boggsey!"

Have you nothing better than money to leave your children? If you have not, but send your daughters into the world with empty brain and unskilled hand, you are guilty of assassination, homicide, regicide, infanticide—compared with which that of poor Hester Vaughan was innocence. There are women toiling in our cities for three and four dollars per week, who were the daughters of merchant princes. These suffering ones now would be glad to have the crumbs that once fell from their father's table. That worn-out, broken shoe that she wears is the lineal descendant of the twelve-dollar gaiters in which her mother walked; and that torn and faded calico had ancestry of magnificent brocade, that swept Broadway clean without any expense to the street commissioners. Though you live in an elegant residence, and fare sumptuously every day, let your daughters feel it is a disgrace to them not to know how to work. I denounce the idea, prevalent in society, that though our young women may embroider slippers, and crochet, and make mats for lamps to stand on, without disgrace, the idea of doing anything for a livelihood is dishonorable. It is a shame for a young woman, belonging to a large family, to be inefficient when the father toils his life away for her support. It is a shame for a daughter to be idle while her mother toils at the wash-tub. It is as honorable to sweep house, make beds, or trim hats, as it is to twist a watch-chain.

As far as I can understand, the line of respectability lies between that which is useful and that which is useless. If women do that which is of no value, their work is honorable. If they do practical work, it is dishonorable. That our young women may escape the censure of doing dishonorable work, I shall particularize. You may knit a tidy for the back of an armchair, but by no means make the money wherewith to buy the chair. You may, with delicate brush, beautify a mantel-ornament, but die rather than earn enough to buy a marble mantel. You may learn artistic music until you can squall Italian, but never sing "Ortonville" or "Old Hundred." Do nothing practical, if you would, in the eyes of refined society, preserve your respectability.

I scout these finical notions. I tell you a woman, no more than a man, has a right to occupy a place in this world unless she pays a rent for it.

In the course of a lifetime you consume whole harvests, and droves of cattle, and every day you live breathe forty hogsheads of good pure air. You must, by some kind of usefulness, pay for all this. Our race was the last thing created,—the birds and fishes on the fourth day, the cattle and lizards on the fifth day, and man on the sixth day. If geologists are right, the earth was a million of years in the possession of the insects, beasts, and birds, before our race came upon it. In one sense, we were innovators. The cattle, the lizards, and the hawks had pre-emption right. The question is not what we are to do with the lizards and summer insects, but what the lizards and summer insects are to do with us.

If we want a place in this world we must earn it. The partridge makes its own nest before it occupies it. The lark, by its morning song, earns its breakfast before it eats it; and the Bible gives an intimation that the first duty of an idler is to starve, when it says if he "will not work, neither shall he eat." Idleness ruins the health; and very soon Nature says, "This man has refused to pay his rent; out with him!"

Society is to be reconstructed on the subject of woman's toil. A vast majority of those who would have woman industrious shut her up to a few kinds of work. My judgment in this matter is, that a woman has a right to do anything she can do well. There should be no department of merchandise, mechanism, art, or science barred against her. If Miss Hosmer has genius for sculpture, give her a chisel. If Rosa Bonheur has a fondness for delineating animals, let her make "The Horse Fair." If Miss Mitchell will study astronomy, let her mount the starry ladder. If Lydia will be a merchant, let her sell purple. If Lucretia Mott will preach the Gospel, let her thrill with her womanly eloquence the Quaker meeting-house.

It is said, if woman is given such opportunities, she will occupy places that might be taken by men. I say, if she have more skill and adaptedness for any position than a man has, let her have it! She has as much right to her bread, to her apparel, and to her home, as men have.

But it is said that her nature is so delicate that she is unfitted for exhausting toil. I ask, in the name of all past history, what toil on earth is more severe, exhausting, and tremendous than that toil of the needle to which for ages she has been subjected? The battering-ram, the sword, the carbine, the battle-axe have made no such havoc as the needle. I would that these living sepulchres in which women have for ages been buried might be opened, and that some resurrection trumpet might bring up these living corpses to the fresh air and sunlight.

Go with me, and I will show you a woman who, by hardest toil, supports her children, her drunken husband, her old father and mother, pays her house-rent, always has wholesome food on her table, and, when she can get some neighbor on the Sabbath to come in and take care of her family, appears in church, with hat and cloak that are far from indicating the toil to which she is subjected.

Such a woman as that has body and soul enough to fit her for any position. She could stand beside the majority of your salesmen and dispose of more goods. She could go into your wheelwright shops and beat one-half of your workmen at making carriages. We talk about woman as though we had resigned to her all the light work, and ourselves had shouldered the heavier. But the day of judgment, which will reveal the sufferings of the stake and inquisition, will marshal before the throne of God and the hierarchs of heaven the martyrs of wash-tub and needle.

Now, I say, if there be any preference in occupation, let woman have it. God knows her trials are the severest. By her acuter sensitiveness to misfortune, by her hour of anguish, I demand that no one hedge up her pathway to a livelihood. O the meanness, the despicability of men who begrudge a woman the right to work anywhere, in any honorable calling!

I go still further, and say that women should have equal compensation with men. By what principle of justice is it that women in many of our cities get only two-thirds as much pay as men, and in many cases only half? Here is the gigantic injustice—that for work equally well, if not better done, woman receives far less compensation than man. Start with the National Government: women clerks in Washington get nine hundred dollars for doing that for which men receive eighteen hundred.

To thousands of young women of New York to-day there is only this alternative: starvation or dishonor. Many of the largest mercantile establishments of our cities are accessory to these abominations; and from their large establishments there are scores of souls being pitched off into death; and their employers know it!

Is there a God? Will there be a judgment? I tell you, if God rises up to redress woman's wrongs, many of our large establishments will be swallowed up quicker than a South-American earthquake ever took down a city. God will catch these oppressors between the two mill-stones of his wrath, and grind them to powder!

Why is it that a female principal in a school gets only eight hundred and twenty-five dollars for doing work for which a male principal gets sixteen hundred and fifty?

I hear from all this land the wail of woman-hood. Man has nothing to answer to that wail but flatteries. He says she is an angel. She is not. She knows she is not. She is a human being, who gets hungry when she has no food, and cold when she has no fire. Give her no more flatteries: give her justice!

There are thirty-five thousand sewing-girls in New York and Brooklyn. Across the darkness of this night I hear their death-groan. It is not such a cry as comes from those who are suddenly hurled out of life, but a slow, grinding, horrible wasting away. Gather them before you and look into their faces, pinched, ghastly, hunger-struck! Look at their fingers, needle-picked and blood-tipped! See that premature stoop in the shoulders! Hear that dry, hacking, merciless cough!

At a large meeting of these women, held in a hall in Philadelphia, grand speeches were delivered, but a needle-woman took the stand, threw aside her faded shawl, and, with her shrivelled arm, hurled a very thunder-bolt of eloquence, speaking out of the horrors of her own experience.

Stand at the corner of a street in New York at half-past five or six o'clock in the morning, as the women go to their work. Many of them had no breakfast except the crumbs that were left over from the night before, or a crust they chew on their way through the street. Here they come! the working girls of New York and Brooklyn! These engaged in bead-work, these in flower-making, in millinery, enamelling, cigar making, book-binding, labelling, feather-picking, print-coloring, paper-box making, but, most overworked of all, and least compensated, the sewing-women. Why do they not take the city-cars on their way up? They cannot afford the five cents! If, concluding to deny herself something else, she get into the car, give her a seat! You want to see how Latimer and Ridley appeared in the fire: look at that woman and behold a more horrible martyrdom, a hotter fire, a more agonizing death! Ask that woman how much she gets for her work, and she will tell you six cents for making coarse shirts, and finds her own thread!

Last Sabbath night, in the vestibule of my church, after service, a woman fell in convulsions. The doctor said she needed medicine not so much as something to eat. As she began to revive in her delirium, she said, gaspingly: "Eight cents! Eight cents! Eight cents! I wish I could get it done! I am so tired! I wish I could get some sleep, but I must get it done! Eight cents! Eight cents!" We found afterwards that she was making garments for eight cents apiece, and that she could make but three of them in a day! Hear it! Three times eight are twenty-four! Hear it, men and women who have comfortable homes!

Some of the worst villains of the city are the employers of these women. They beat them down to the last penny, and try to cheat them out of that. The woman must deposit a dollar or two before she gets the garments to work on. When the work is done it is sharply inspected, the most insignificant flaws picked out, and the wages refused, and sometimes the dollar deposited not given back. The Women's Protective Union reports a case where one of these poor souls, finding a place where she could get more wages, resolved to change employers, and went to get her pay for work done. The employer says: "I hear you are going to leave me?"—"Yes," she said, "and I have come to get what you owe me." He made no answer. She said: "Are you not going to pay me?"—"Yes," he said, "I will pay you;" and he kicked her down the stairs.

How are these evils to be eradicated? What have you to answer, you who sell coats, and have shoes made, and contract for the Southern and Western markets? What help is there, what panacea, what redemption? Some say: "Give women the ballot." What effect such ballot might have on other questions I am not here to discuss; but what would be the effect of female suffrage upon woman's wages? I do not believe that woman will ever get justice by woman's ballot.

Indeed, women oppress women as much as men do. Do not women, as much as men, beat down to the lowest figure the woman who sews for them? Are not women as sharp as men on washerwomen, and milliners, and mantua-makers? If a woman asks a dollar for her work, does not her female employer ask her if she will not take ninety cents? You say "only ten cents difference;" but that is sometimes the difference between heaven and hell. Women often have less commiseration for women than men. If a woman steps aside from the path of virtue, man may forgive,—woman never! Woman will never get justice done her from woman's ballot.

Neither will she get it from man's ballot. How, then? God will rise up for her. God has more resources than we know of. The flaming sword that hung at Eden's gate when woman was driven out will cleave with its terrible edge her oppressors.

But there is something for our women to do. Let our young people prepare to excel in spheres of work, and they will be able, after a while, to get larger wages. If it be shown that a woman can, in a store, sell more goods in a year than a man, she will soon be able not only to ask but to demand more wages, and to demand them successfully. Unskilled and incompetent labor must take what is given; skilled and competent labor will eventually make its own standard. Admitting that the law of supply and demand regulates these things, I contend that the demand for skilled labor is very great, and the supply very small.

Start with the idea that work is honorable, and that you can do some one thing better than any one else. Resolve that, God helping, you will take care of yourself. If you are, after a while, called into another relation, you will all the better be qualified for it by your spirit of self-reliance; or if you are called to stay as you are, you can be happy and self-supporting.

Poets are fond of talking about man as an oak, and woman the vine that climbs it; but I have seen many a tree fall that not only went down itself, but took all the vines with it. I can tell you of something stronger than an oak for an ivy to climb on, and that is the throne of the great Jehovah. Single or affianced, that woman is strong who leans on God and does her best. The needle may break; the factory-band may slip; the wages may fail; but, over every good woman's head there are spread the two great, gentle, stupendous wings of the Almighty.

Many of you will go single-handed through life, and you will have to choose between two characters. Young woman, I am sure you will turn your back upon the useless, giggling, painted nonentity which society ignominiously acknowledges to be a woman, and ask God to make you an humble, active, earnest Christian.

What will become of this godless disciple of fashion? What an insult to her sex! Her manners are an outrage upon decency. She is more thoughtful of the attitude she strikes upon the carpet than how she will look in the judgment; more worried about her freckles than her sins; more interested in her bonnet-strings than in her redemption. Her apparel is the poorest part of a Christian woman, however magnificently dressed, and no one has so much right to dress well as a Christian. Not so with the godless disciple of fashion. Take her robes, and you take everything. Death will come down on her some day, and rub the bistre off her eyelids, and the rouge off her cheeks, and with two rough, bony hands, scatter spangles and glass beads and rings and ribbons and lace and brooches and buckles and sashes and frisettes and golden clasps.

The dying actress whose life had been vicious said: "The scene closes. Draw the curtain." Generally the tragedy comes first, and the farce afterward; but in her life it was first the farce of a useless life, and then the tragedy of a wretched eternity.

Compare the life and death of such an one with that of some Christian aunt that was once a blessing to your household. I do not know that she was ever offered the hand in marriage. She lived single, that untrammelled she might be everybody's blessing. Whenever the sick were to be visited, or the poor to be provided with bread, she went with a blessing. She could pray, or sing "Rock of Ages," for any sick pauper who asked her. As she got older, there were days when she was a little sharp, but for the most part Auntie was a sunbeam—just the one for Christmas-eve. She knew better than any one else how to fix things. Her every prayer, as God heard it, was full of everybody who had trouble. The brightest things in all the house dropped from her fingers. She had peculiar notions, but the grandest notion she ever had was to make you happy. She dressed well—Auntie always dressed well; but her highest adornment was that of a meek and quiet spirit, which, in the sight of God, is of great price. When she died, you all gathered lovingly about her; and as you carried her out to rest, the Sunday-school class almost covered the coffin with japonicas; and the poor people stood at the end of the alley, with their aprons to their eyes, sobbing bitterly; and the man of the world said, with Solomon, "Her price was above rubies;" and Jesus, as unto the maiden in Judea, commanded: "I SAY UNTO THEE, ARISE!"



PICTURES IN THE STOCK GALLERY.

[NOTE.—This chapter, though largely devoted to "Oil," is to be construed as reaching any other "Kite" that the stock gambler flies—any other scheme which his unprincipled ideas of right and wrong will permit him to work to his own gain and others' loss. The oil mania was only a more popular or attractive vice of the stock-boards, which is reproduced, in spirit and motive, almost every month of the year.]

At my entrance upon this discussion, I must deplore the indiscriminate terms of condemnation employed by many well-meaning persons in regard to stock operations. The business of the stock-broker is just as legitimate and necessary as that of a dealer in clothes, groceries, or hardware; and a man may be as pure-minded and holy a Christian at the Board of Brokers as in a prayer-meeting. The broker is, in the sight of God, as much entitled to his commissions as any hard-working mechanic is entitled to his day's wages. Any man has as much right to make money by the going up of stocks as by the going up of sugar, rice, or tea. The inevitable board-book that the operator carries in his hand may be as pure as the clothing merchant's ledger. It is the work of the brokers to facilitate business; to make transfer of investment; to watch and report the tides of business; to assist the merchant in lawful enterprises.

Because there are men in this department of business, sharp, deceitful, and totally iniquitous, you have no right to denounce the entire class. Importers, shoe-dealers, lumbermen, do not want to be held responsible for the moral deficits of their comrades in business. Neither have you a right to excoriate those who are conscientiously operating through the channels spoken of. If they take a risk, so do all business men. The merchant who buys silk at five dollars per yard takes his chances; he expects it to go up to six dollars; it may fall to four dollars. If a man, by straightforward operations in stocks, meets with disaster and fails, he deserves sympathy just as much as he who sold spices or calicoes, and through some miscalculation is struck down bankrupt.

We have no right to impose restrictions upon this class of men that we impose upon no other. What right have you to denounce the operation "buyer—ten days" or "buyer—twenty days," when you take a house, "buyer—three hundred and sixty-five days?" Perhaps the entire payment is to be made at the end of a year, when you do not know but that, by that time, you will be penniless. Give all men their due, if you would hold beneficent influence over them. Do not be too rough in pulling out the weeds, lest you uproot also the marigolds and verbenas. In the Board of Brokers there are some of the most conscientious, upright Christian men of our cities—men who would scorn a lie, or a subterfuge. Indeed, there are men in these boards who might, in some respects, teach a lesson of morality to other commercial circles.

I will not deny that there are special temptations connected with this business even when carried on legitimately. So there are dangers to the engineer on a railroad. He does not know what night he may dash into the coal-train. But engines must be run, and stocks must be sold. A nervous, excitable man ought to be very slow to undertake either the engine or the Stock Exchange.

A clever young man, of twenty-five years of age, bought ten shares in the Pennsylvania Central Railroad. The stock went up five dollars per share, and he made fifty dollars by the operation. His mother, knowing his temperament, said to him, "I wish you had lost it." But, encouraged, he entered another operation, and took ten shares in another railroad and made two hundred dollars. By this time he was ready for the wildest scheme. He lost, in three years, forty thousand dollars, ruined his health, and broke his wife's heart. Her father supports them chiefly now. The unfortunate has a shingle up, in a small court, among low operators. Such a man as this is unfit for this commercial sphere. He would have been unfit for a pilot, unfit for military command, unfit for any place that demands steady nerve, cool brain, and well-balanced temperament.

But, while there is a legitimate sphere for the broker and operator, there are transactions every day undertaken in our cities that can only be characterized as superb outrage and villany; and there are members of Christian churches who have been guilty of speculations that, in the last day, will blanch their cheek, and thunder them down to everlasting companionship with the lowest gamblers that ever pitched pennies for a drink.

It is not necessary that I should draw the difficult line between honorable and dishonorable speculation. God has drawn it through every man's conscience. The broker guilty of "cornering" as well knows that he is sinning against God and man, as though the flame of Mount Sinai singed his eyebrows. He hears that a brother broker has sold "short," and immediately goes about with a wise look, saying: "Erie is going down—Erie is going down; prepare for it." Immediately the people begin to sell; he buys up the stock; monopolizes the whole affair; drags down the man who sold short; makes largely, pockets the gain, and thanks the Lord for great prosperity in business. You call it "cornering." I call it gambling, theft, highway robbery, villany accursed.

It is astonishing how some men, who are kind in their families, useful in the church, charitable to the poor, are utterly transformed of the devil as soon as they enter the Stock Exchange. A respectable member of one of the churches of the city went into a broker's office and said: "Get me one hundred shares of Reading, and carry it; I will leave a margin of five hundred dollars." Instead of going up, according to anticipation, the stock fell. Every few days the operator called to ask the broker what success. The stock still declined. The operator was so terribly excited that the broker asked him what was the matter. He replied: "To tell you the truth, I borrowed that five hundred dollars that I lost, and, in anticipation of what I was sure I was going to get by the operation, I made a very large subscription to the Missionary Society."

The nation has become so accustomed to frauds that no astonishment is excited thereby. The public conscience has for many years been utterly debauched by what were called fancy stocks, morus multicaulis, Western city enterprises, and New England developments.

If a man find on his farm something as large as the head of a pin, that, in a strong sunlight, sparkles a little, a gold company is formed; books are opened; working capital declared; a select number go in on the "ground floor;" and the estates of widows and orphans are swept into the vortex. Very little discredit is connected with any such transaction, if it is only on a large scale. We cannot bear small and insignificant dishonesties, but take off our hats and bow almost to the ground in the presence of the man who has made one hundred thousand dollars by one swindle. A woman was arrested in the streets of one of our cities for selling molasses candy on Sunday. She was tried, condemned, and imprisoned. Coming out of prison, she went into the same business and sold molasses candy on Sunday. Again she was arrested, condemned, and imprisoned. On coming out—showing the total depravity of a woman's heart—she again went into the same business, and sold molasses candy on Sunday. Whereupon the police, the mayor and the public sentiment of the city rose up and declared that, though the heavens fell, no woman should be allowed to sell molasses candy on Sunday. Yet the law puts its hands behind its back, and walks up and down in the presence of a thousand abominations and dares not whisper.

There are scores of men to-day on the streets, whose costly family wardrobes, whose rosewood furniture, whose splendid turn-outs, whose stately mansions, are made out of the distresses of sewing-women, whose money they gathered up in a stock swindle. There is human sweat in the golden tankards. There is human blood in the crimson plush. There are the bones of unrequited toil in the pearly keys of the piano. There is the curse of an incensed God hovering over all their magnificence. Some night the man will not be able to rest. He will rise up in bewilderment and look about him, crying: "Who is there?" Those whom he has wronged will thrust their skinny arms under the tapestry, and touch his brow, and feel for his heart, and blow their sepulchral breath into his face, crying: "Come to judgment!"

For the warning of young men, I shall specify but two of the world's most gigantic swindles—one English, and the other American. In England, in the early part of the last century, reports were circulated of the fabulous wealth of South America. A company was formed, with a stock of what would be equal to thirty millions of our dollars. The government guaranteed to the company the control of all the trade to the South Sea, and the company was to assume the entire debt of England, then amounting to one hundred and forty millions of dollars. Magnificent project! The English nation talked and dreamed of nothing but Peruvian gold and Mexican silver, the national debt liquidated, and Eldorados numberless and illimitable! When five million pounds of new stock was offered at three hundred pounds per share, it was all snatched up with avidity. Thirty million dollars of the stock was subscribed for, when there were but five millions offered. South Sea went up, until in the midsummer month the stock stood at one thousand per cent. The whole nation was intoxicated. Around about this scheme, as might have been expected, others just as wild arose. A company was formed with ten million dollars of capital for importing walnut trees from Virginia. A company for developing a wheel to go by perpetual motion, with a capital of four million dollars. A company for developing a new kind of soap. A company for insuring against losses by servants, with fifteen million dollars capital. One scheme was entitled: "A company for carrying on an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is—capital two million five hundred thousand dollars, in shares of five hundred each. Further information to be given in a month."

The books were opened at nine o'clock in the morning. Before night a thousand shares were taken, and two thousand pounds paid in. So successful was the day's work, that that night the projector of the enterprise went out of the business, and forever vanished from the public. But it was not a perfect loss. The subscribers had their ornamented certificates of stock to comfort them. Hunt's Merchant's Magazine, speaking of those times, says "that from morning until evening 'Change Alley was filled to overflowing with one dense mass of living beings composed of the most incongruous materials, and, in all things save the mad pursuit in which they were employed, the very opposite in habits and conditions."

What was the end of this chapter of English enterprise? Suddenly the ruin came. Down went the whole nation—members of Parliament, tradesmen, physicians, clergymen, lawyers, royal ladies, and poor needle-women—in one stupendous calamity. The whole earth, and all the ages, heard that bubble burst.

But I am not through. Our young men shall hear more startling things. We surpass England in having higher mountains, deeper rivers, greater cataracts, and larger armies. Yea, we have surpassed it in magnitude of swindles. I wish to unfold before the young men of the country, and before those in whose hands may now be the price of blood, the wide-spread, ghastly, and almost infinitely greater wickedness of the gamblers in oil stock. Now, the obtaining of lands, the transporting of machinery, and the forming of companies for the production of oil, is just as honorable as any organization for the obtaining of coal, iron, copper, or zinc. God poured out before this nation a river of oil, and intended us to gather it up, transport it, and use it; and there were companies formed that have withstood all commercial changes, and continued, year after year, in the prosecution of an honorable business. I have just as much respect for the man who has made fifty thousand dollars by oil as I have for him who has made it by spices.

Out of twelve hundred petroleum companies, how many do you suppose were honestly formed and rightfully conducted? Do you say six hundred? You make large demands upon one's credulity; but let us be generous, and suppose that six hundred companies bought land, issued honest circulars, sent out machinery, and plunged into the earth for the rightful development of resources. To form the other six hundred companies, only three or four things were necessary: First, an attractive circular, regardless of expense. It must have all the colors and hues of earth, and sea, and heaven. Let the letters flame with all the beauty of gold, and jasper, and amethyst. It must state the date of incorporation, and the fact that "all subscribers shall get the benefit of the original undertaking. While it does not make so much pretension as some other companies, it must be distinctly announced that this is a safe and permanent investment." The circular must state that "there are a goodly number of flowing wells, and others which the company are happy to say have a very good smell of oil." "The books will be open only five days, as there are only a few shares yet to be taken." Connected with this circular is an elaborate map, drawn by the artist of the company. Never mind the geography of the country. Our map must have a creek running through it, so crooked as to traverse as much of the land as possible, and make it all water-front. "Ah!" said one man to his artist, "you make only one creek."—"Well," said the artist, "if you want three creeks you can have them at very little expense. There—you have them now—three creeks!"

Then the circular must have good names attached to it. How to get them? The president and directors must be prominent men. If celebrated for piety, all the better. The estimable man approached says: "I know nothing about this company."—"Well," says the committee waiting on him, "we will give you five hundred dollars' worth of shares." Immediately the estimable man begins to "know about it," and accepts the position of president. Three or four directors are obtained in the same way. Now the thing is easy. After this you can get anybody. Ordinary Christians and sinners feel it a joy to be in such celebrated society.

Another thing important is that the company purchase three or four vials of oil to stand in the window—some in the crude state, the rest clarified. Genuine specimens from Venango County.

Another important thing: there must be a large working capital, for the company do not mean to be idle. They have derricks already building; and there will be large monthly dividends. Let it be known that there were companies in some cities who, claiming to have a capital of four hundred thousand dollars, yet had that capital exhausted when they had sunk one well costing five thousand dollars. But never mind. The thing must be right, for some of the directors are eminent for respectability. You say it is certainly important that there be some land out of which the oil is to be obtained. Oh! no. Why be troubled with any land at all? It is an expense for nothing. You have the circular, and the glowing map, with the creeks and three vials of oil in the window, and a flaming advertisement in the newspapers. Now let the books be opened! Better if you can have a half-dozen offices in one room; then the agent can accommodate you with anything you desire. If you want to take a "flyer" in this and a "flyer" in that, you shall have it.

Coming in from the country are farmers, dairymen, day-laborers. Great chances now for speedy emoluments. Pour in the hard-earned treasures. Sure enough, a dividend of one per cent. per month! Forthwith, another multitude are convinced of the safety of the investment. The second month another dividend. The third month another. Whence do these dividends come? From the product of the wells? Oh! no. It is your own money they are paying you back. How generous of this company to give you five dollars back, when you might have lost it all!

But the dividends stop. What is the matter? Instead of the advertisement which covered a whole column of the newspapers, there comes a modest little notice that "a special meeting of the stockholders will be held for the purpose of transacting business of importance." Perhaps it may be to assess the stockholders for the purpose of keeping the little land they have, if they have any. Or it may be for the election of a new group of officers, for the present incumbents do not want to be always before the public. They are modest men. They believe in rotation of office. They cannot consent any longer to serve. Where have they gone to? They are busy putting up a princely mansion at Long Branch, Germantown, or Chelsea. They have served their day and generation, and have gone to their flocks and herds. Where is the Church of God, that she allows in her membership such gigantic abominations? Were the thirty pieces of silver that Judas received denounced as unfit, and shall the Church of God have nothing to say about this price of blood? Is sin to be excused because it is as high as heaven, or deep as hell? The man who allows his name to be used as president or director in connection with an enterprise that he knows is to result in the sale of twenty thousand shares of an undeveloped nothing—God will tear off the cloak of his hypocrisy, and in the last day show him to all the universe—a brazen-faced gambler. His house will be accursed. God's anathemas will flash in the chandelier, and rattle in the swift hoofs of his silver-bitted grays; and the day of fire will see him willing to leap into a burning oil-well to hide himself from the face of the Lamb. The hundred thousand dollars gotten in unrighteousness will not be enough to build a barricade against the advance of the divine judgments.

Think of the elder in a church who, from the oil regions, sends an exciting telegram, so that one man buys a large amount of stock at twelve, on Wednesday. The next day it is put on the stock-board at six. The enterprising man, who sold it at twelve, goes out to buy one of the grandest estates within ten miles of the city. The man who bought it goes into the dust; and the secret gets out that the exciting telegram sent by the elder arose, not from any oil actually discovered, but because in boring they had found a magnificent odor of oil.

If he who steals a dollar from a money-drawer is a thief, then he who by dishonesty gets five hundred thousand dollars is five hundred thousand times more a thief. And so the last day will declare him.

Did not the law right the injured man? No! The poor who were wronged would not undertake a suit against a company that could bring fifty thousand dollars to the enlightenment of judge, jury, and lawyer; while, on the other hand, the affluent who had been gouged would not go to the courts for justice. Why! how would it sound, if it got out, that Mr. So and So, one of the first merchants on Wall, or Third, or State street, had got swindled? They will keep it still.

The guilty range to-day undisturbed through society, and will continue to do so until the Lord God shall bring them to an unerring settlement, and proclaim to an astonished universe how many lies they told about the land, about the derricks, about the yield, about the dividends. What shall such an one say, when God shall, in the great day of account, hold up before him the circular, and the map, and the newspaper advertisement? Speechless!

Before that day shall come I warn you—Disgorge! you infamous stock gamblers! Gather together so many of your company as have any honesty left, and join in the following circular:—"We the undersigned, do hereby repent of our villainies, and beg pardon of the public for all the wrongs that we have done them; and hereby ask the widows and orphans whom we have made penniless to come next Saturday, between ten and three o'clock, and receive back what we stole from them. We hereby confess that the wells spoken of in our circular never yielded any oil; and that the creeks running through our ornamented map were an entire fiction; and that the elder who piously rolled up his eyes and said it was a safe investment, was not as devout as he looked to be. Signed by the subscribers at their office, in the year of our Lord 1871."

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.

Worse than all, it destroys the soul. The day must come when the worthless scrip will fall out of the clutches of the stock-gambler. Satan will play upon him the "cornering" game which, down on Wall street, he played upon a fellow-operator. Now he would be glad to exchange all his interest in Venango County for one share in the Christian's prospect of heaven. Hopeless, he falls back in his last sickness. His delirium is filled with senseless talk about "percentages" and "commissions" and "buyer, sixty days," and "stocks up," and "stocks down." He thinks that the physician who feels his pulse is trying to steal his "board book." He starts up at midnight, saying: "One thousand shares of Reading at 116-1/2. Take it!" Falls back dead. No more dividends.... Swindled out of heaven. STOCKS DOWN!



LEPROUS NEWSPAPERS.

The newspaper is the great educator of the nineteenth century. There is no force compared with it. It is book, pulpit, platform, forum, all in one. And there is not an interest—religious, literary, commercial, scientific, agricultural, or mechanical—that is not within its grasp. All our churches, and schools, and colleges, and asylums, and art-galleries feel the quaking of the printing-press. I shall try to bring to your parlor-tables the periodicals that are worthy of the Christian fireside, and try to pitch into the gutter of scorn and contempt those newspapers that are not fit for the hand of your child or the vision of your wife.

The institution of newspapers arose in Italy. In Venice the first newspaper was published, and monthly, during the time that Venice was warring against Solyman the Second in Dalmatia. It was printed for the purpose of giving military and commercial information to the Venetians. The first newspaper published in England was in 1588, and called the English Mercury. Others were styled the Weekly Discoverer, the Secret Owl, Heraclitus Ridens, etc.

Who can estimate the political, scientific, commercial, and religious revolutions roused up in England for many years past by Bell's Weekly Dispatch, the Standard, the Morning Chronicle, the Post, and the London Times?

The first attempt at this institution in France was in 1631, by a physician, who published the News, for the amusement and health of his patients. The French nation understood fully how to appreciate this power. Napoleon, with his own hand, wrote articles for the press, and so early as in 1829 there were in Paris 169 journals. But in the United States the newspaper has come to unlimited sway. Though in 1775 there were but thirty-seven in the whole country, the number of published journals is now counted by thousands; and to-day—we may as well acknowledge it as not—the religious and secular newspapers are the great educators of the country.

In our pulpits we preach to a few hundreds or thousands of people; the newspaper addresses an audience of twenty thousand, fifty thousand, or two hundred thousand. We preach three or four times a week; they every morning or evening of the year. If they are right, they are gloriously right; if they are wrong, they are awfully wrong.

I find no difficulty in accounting for the world's advance. Four centuries ago, in Germany, in courts of justice, men fought with their fists to see who should have the decision of the court; and if the judge's decision was unsatisfactory, then the judge fought with the counsel. Many of the lords could not read the deeds of their own estates. What has made the change?

"Books," you say.

No, sir! The vast majority of citizens do not read books. Take this audience, or any other promiscuous assemblage, and how many histories have they read? How many treatises on constitutional law, or political economy, or works of science? How many elaborate poems or books of travel? How much of Boyle, or De Tocqueville, Xenophon, or Herodotus, or Percival? Not many!

In the United States, the people would not average one such book a year for each individual!

Whence, then, this intelligence—this capacity to talk about all themes, secular and religious—this acquaintance with science and art—this power to appreciate the beautiful and grand? Next to the Bible, the newspaper,—swift-winged, and everywhere present, flying over the fences, shoved under the door, tossed into the counting-house, laid on the work-bench, hawked through the cars! All read it: white and black, German, Irishman, Swiss, Spaniard, American, old and young, good and bad, sick and well, before breakfast and after tea, Monday morning, Saturday night, Sunday and week day!

I now declare that I consider the newspaper to be the grand agency by which the Gospel is to be preached, ignorance cast out, oppression dethroned, crime extirpated, the world raised, heaven rejoiced, and God glorified.

In the clanking of the printing-press, as the sheets fly out, I hear the voice of the Lord Almighty proclaiming to all the dead nations of the earth,—"Lazarus, come forth!" And to the retreating surges of darkness,—"Let there be light!" In many of our city newspapers, professing no more than secular information, there have appeared during the past ten years some of the grandest appeals in behalf of religion, and some of the most effective interpretations of God's government among the nations.

That man has a shrivelled heart who begrudges the five pennies he pays to the newsboy who brings the world to his feet. There are to-day connected with the editorial and reportorial corps of newspaper establishments men of the highest culture and most unimpeachable morality, who are living on the most limited stipends, martyrs to the work to which they feel themselves called. While you sleep in the midnight hours, their pens fly, and their brains ache in preparing the morning intelligence. Many of them go, unrested and unappreciated, their cheeks blanched and their eyes half quenched with midnight work, toward premature graves, to have the "proof-sheet" of their life corrected by Divine mercy, glad at last to escape the perpetual annoyances of a fault-finding public, and the restless, impatient cry for "more copy."

"Nations are to be born in a day." Will this great inrush come from personal presence of missionary or philanthropist? No. When the time comes for that grand demonstration I think the press in all the earth will make the announcement, and give the call to the nations. As at some telegraphic centre, an operator will send the messages, north and south, and east and west, San Francisco and Heart's Content catching the flash at the same instant; so, standing at some centre to which shall reach all the electric wires that cross the continent and undergird the sea, some one shall, with the forefinger of the right hand, click the instrument that shall thrill through all lands, across all islands, under all seas, through all palaces, into all dungeons, and startle both hemispheres with the news, that in a few moments shall rush out from the ten thousand times ten thousand printing-presses of the earth: "Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good-will toward men!"

You see, therefore, that, in the plain words to be written, I have no grudges to gratify against the newspaper press. Professional men are accustomed to complain of injustice done them, but I take the censure I have sometimes received and place it on one side the scales, and the excessive praise, and place it on the other side, and they balance, and so I consider I have had simple justice. But we are all aware that there is a class of men in towns and cities who send forth a baleful influence from their editorial pens. There are enough bad newspapers weekly poured out into the homes of our country to poison a vast population. In addition to the home manufacture of iniquitous sheets, the mail-bags of other cities come in gorged with abominations. New York scoops up from the sewers of other cities, and adds to its own newspaper filth. And to-night, lying on the tables of this city, or laid away on the shelf, or in the trunk, for more private perusal, are papers the mere mention of the names of which would send a blush to the cheek, and make the decent and Christian world cry out: "God save the city!"

There is a paper published in Boston of outrageous character, and yet there are seven thousand copies of that paper coming weekly to New York for circulation. I will not mention the name, lest some of you should go right away and get it. It is wonderful how quick the fingers of the printer-boy fly, but the fingers of sin and pollution can set up fifty thousand types in an instant. The supply of bad newspapers in New York does not meet the insatiable appetite of our people for refuse, and garbage, and moral swill. We must, therefore, import corrupt weeklies published elsewhere, that make our newspaper stands groan under the burden.

But we need not go abroad. There are papers in New York that long ago came to perfection of shamelessness, and there is no more power in venom and mud and slime to pollute them. They have dashed their iniquities into the face of everything decent and holy. And their work will be seen in the crime and debauchery and the hell of innumerable victims. Their columns are not long and broad enough to record the tragedies of their horrible undoing of immortal men and women.

God, after a while, will hold up these reeking, stenchful, accursed sheets, upon which they spread out their guilt, and the whole universe will cry out for their damnation. See the work of bad newspapers in the false tidings they bring! There are hundreds of men to-day penniless, who were, during the war, hurled from their affluent positions by incorrect accounts of battles that shook the money-market, and the gold gamblers, with their hoofs, trampled these honest men into the mire. And many a window was hoisted at the hour of midnight as the boy shouted: "Extra! Extra!" And the father and mother who had an only son at the front, with trembling hand, and blanched cheek, and sinking heart, read of battles that had never occurred. God pity the father and mother who have a boy at the front when evil tidings come! If an individual makes a false statement, one or twenty persons may be damaged; but a newspaper of large circulation that wilfully makes a misstatement in one day tells fifty thousand falsehoods.

The most stupendous of all lies is a newspaper lie.

A bad newspaper scruples not at any slander. It may be that, to escape the grip of the law, the paragraphs will be nicely worded, so that the suspicion is thrown out and the damage done without any exposure to the law. Year by year, thousands of men are crushed by the ink-roller. An unscrupulous man in the editorial chair may smite as with the wing of a destroying angel. What to him is commercial integrity, or professional reputation, or woman's honor, or home's sanctity? It seems as if he held in his hand a hose with which, while all the harpies of sin were working at the pumps, he splashed the waters of death upon the best interests of society.

The express-train in England halts not to take in water, but between the tracks there is a trough, one-fourth of a mile in length, filled with water; and the engine drops a hose that catches up the water while the train flies. So with bad newspapers that fly along the track of death without pausing a moment, yet scooping up into themselves the pollution of society, and in the awful rush making the earth tremble.

The most abandoned man of the city may go to the bad newspaper and get a slander inserted about the best man. If he cannot do it in any other way, he can by means of an anonymous communication. Now, a man who, to injure another, will write an anonymous letter, is, in the first place, a coward, and, in the second place, a villain. Many of these offensive anonymous letters you see in the bad newspaper have been found to be written in the editorial chair.

The bad newspaper stops not at any political outrage. It would arouse a revolution, and empty the hearts of a million brave men in the trenches, rather than not have its own circulation multiply. What to it are the hard-earned laurels of the soldier or the exalted reputation of the statesman? Its editors would, if they dared, blow up the Capitol of the nation if they could only successfully carry off the frieze of one of the corridors. There are enough falsehoods told at any one of our autumnal elections to make the "Father of Lies" disown his monstrous progeny. Now it is the Mayor, then the Governor, now the Secretary of State, and then the President, until the air is so full of misrepresentation that truth is hidden from the view, as beautiful landscapes by the clouds of summer insects blown up from the marshes.

The immoral newspaper stops not at the unclean advertisement. It is so much for so many words, and in such a sheet it will cost no more to advertise the most impure book than the new edition of Pilgrim's Progress. A book such as no decent man would touch was a few months ago advertised in a New York paper, and the getter-up of the book, passing down one of our streets the other day, acknowledged to one of my friends that he had made $18,000 out of the enterprise.

In one column of a paper we see a grand ethical discussion, and in another the droppings of most accursed nastiness. Oh! you cannot by all your religion, in one column, atone for one of your abominations in another! I am rejoiced that some of our papers have addressed those who have proposed to compensate them for bad use of their columns, in the words of Peter to Simon Magus: "Thy money perish with thee!" But I arraign the newspapers that give their columns to corrupt advertising for the nefarious work they are doing. The most polluted plays that ever oozed from the poisonous pen of leprous dramatist have won their deathful power through the medium of newspapers; the evil is stupendous!

O ye reckless souls! get money—though morality dies, and society is dishonored, and God defied, and the doom of the destroyed opens before you—get money! Though the melted gold be poured upon your naked, blistered, and consuming soul—get money! Get money! It will do you good when it begins to eat like a canker! It will solace the pillow of death, and soothe the pangs of an agonized eternity! Though in the game thou dost stake thy soul, and lose it forever—get money!

The bad newspaper hesitates not to assault Christianity and its disciples. With what exhilaration it puts in capitals, that fill one-fourth of a column, the defalcation of some agent of a benevolent society! There is enough meat in such a carcass of reputation to gorge all the carrion-crows of an iniquitous printing-press. They put upon the back of the Church all the inconsistencies of hypocrites—as though a banker were responsible for all the counterfeits upon his institution! They jeer at religion, and lift up their voices until all the caverns of the lost resound with the howl of their derision. They forget that Christianity is the only hope for the world, and that, but for its enlightenment, they would now be like the Hottentots, living in mud hovels, or like the Chinese, eating rats.

What would you think of a wretch who, during a great storm, while the ship was being tossed to and fro on the angry waves, should climb up into the light-house and blow out the light? And what do you think of these men, who, while all the Christian and the glorious institutions of the world are being tossed and driven hither and thither, are trying to climb up and put out the only light of a lost world?

The bad newspaper stops not at publishing the most damaging and unclean story. The only question is: "Will it pay?" And there are scores of men who, day by day, bring into the newspaper offices manuscripts for publication which unite all that is pernicious; and, before the ink is fairly dry, tens of thousands are devouring with avidity the impure issue. Their sensibilities deadened, their sense of right perverted, their purity of thought tarnished, their taste for plain life despoiled—the printing-press, with its iron foot, hath dashed their life out! While I speak, there are many people, with feet on the ottoman, and the gas turned on, looking down on the page, submerged, mind and soul, in the perusal of this God-forsaken periodical literature; and the last Christian mother will have put the hands of the little child under the coverlet for the night, before they will rouse up, as the city clock strikes the hour of midnight, to go death-struck to their prayerless pillows.

One of the proprietors of a great paper in this country gave his advice to a young man then about to start a paper: "If you want to succeed," said he, "make your paper trashy, intensely trashy,—make it all trash!"

Brilliant advice to a young man just entering business!

It is very often that, as a paper purifies itself, its circulation decreases, and sometimes when a paper becomes positively religious, it becomes bankrupt, unless some benevolent and Christian men come up to sustain it by contributions of money and means. But few religious newspapers in this country are self-supporting. The reason urged is—the country cannot stand so much religion! Hear it! Christian men and philanthropists!

Many papers that are most rapidly increasing to-day are unscrupulous. The facts are momentous and appalling. And I put young men and women and Christian parents and guardians on the look-out. This stuff cannot be handled without pollution. Away with it from parlor, and shop, and store! There is so much newspaper literature that is pure, and cheap, and elegant; shove back this leprosy from your door.

Mark it well: a man is no better than the newspaper he habitually reads.

You may think it a bold thing thus to arraign an unprincipled printing-press, but I know there are those reading this who will take my counsel; and, in the discharge of my duty to God and man, I defy all the hostilities of earth and hell!

Representatives of the secular and religious press! I thank you, in the name of Christianity and civilization, for the enlightenment of ignorance, the overthrow of iniquity, and the words you have uttered in the cause of God and your country. But I charge you in the name of God, before whom you must account for the tremendous influence you hold in this country, to consecrate yourselves to higher endeavors. You are the men to fight back this invasion of corrupt literature. Lift up your right hand and swear new allegiance to the cause of philanthropy and religion. And when, at last, standing on the plains of judgment, you look out upon the unnumbered throngs over whom you have had influence, may it be found that you were among the mightiest energies that lifted men upon the exalted pathway that leads to the renown of heaven. Better than to have sat in editorial chair, from which, with the finger of type, you decided the destinies of empires, but decided them wrong, that you had been some dungeoned exile, who, by the light of window iron-grated, on scraps of a New Testament leaf, picked up from the hearth, spelled out the story of Him who taketh away the sins of the world.

IN ETERNITY, DIVES IS THE BEGGAR!



THE FATAL TEN-STRIKE.

While among my readers are those who have passed on into the afternoon of life, and the shadows are lengthening, and the sky crimsons with the glow of the setting sun, a large number of them are in early life, and the morning is coming down out of the clear sky upon them, and the bright air is redolent with spring blossoms, and the stream of life, gleaming and glancing, rushes on between flowery banks, making music as it goes. Some of you are engaged in mercantile establishments, as clerks and book-keepers; and your whole life is to be passed in the exciting world of traffic. The sound of busy life stirs you as the drum stirs the fiery war-horse. Others are in the mechanical arts, to hammer and chisel your way through life; and success awaits you. Some are preparing for professional life, and grand opportunities are before you; nay, some of you already have buckled on the armor.

But, whatever your age or calling, the subject of gambling, about which I speak in this chapter, is pertinent.

Some years ago, when an association for the suppression of gambling was organized, an agent of the association came to a prominent citizen and asked him to patronize the society. He said, "No, I can have no interest in such an organization. I am in no wise affected by that evil."

At that very time his son, who was his partner in business, was one of the heaviest players in "Herne's" famous gaming establishment. Another refused his patronage on the same ground, not knowing that his first book-keeper, though receiving a salary of only a thousand dollars, was losing from fifty to one hundred dollars per night. The president of a railroad company refused to patronize the institution, saying—"That society is good for the defence of merchants, but we railroad people are not injured by this evil;" not knowing that, at that very time, two of his conductors were spending three nights of each week at faro tables in New York. Directly or indirectly, this evil strikes at the whole world.

Gambling is the risking of something more or less valuable in the hope of winning more than you hazard. The instruments of gaming may differ, but the principle is the same. The shuffling and dealing of cards, however full of temptation, is not gambling, unless stakes are put up; while, on the other hand, gambling may be carried on without cards, or dice, or billiards, or a ten-pin alley. The man who bets on horses, on elections, on battles—the man who deals in "fancy" stocks, or conducts a business which extra hazards capital, or goes into transactions without foundation, but dependent upon what men call "luck," is a gambler.

It is estimated that one-fourth of the business in London is done dishonestly. Whatever you expect to get from your neighbor without offering an equivalent in money or time or skill, is either the product of theft or gaming. Lottery tickets and lottery policies come into the same category. Fairs for the founding of hospitals, schools and churches, conducted on the raffling system, come under the same denomination. Do not, therefore, associate gambling necessarily with any instrument, or game, or time, or place, or think the principle depends upon whether you play for a glass of wine, or one hundred shares in Camden and Amboy. Whether you employ faro or billiards, rondo and keno, cards, or bagatelle, the very idea of the thing is dishonest; for it professes to bestow upon you a good for which you give no equivalent.

This crime is no newborn sprite, but a haggard transgression that comes staggering down under a mantle of curses through many centuries. All nations, barbarous and civilized, have been addicted to it. Before 1838, the French government received revenue from gaming houses. In 1567, England, for the improvement of her harbors, instituted a lottery, to be held at the front door of St. Paul's Cathedral. Four hundred thousand tickets were sold, at ten shillings each. The British Museum and Westminster Bridge were partially built by similar procedures. The ancient Germans would sometimes put up themselves and families as prizes, and suffer themselves to be bound, though stronger than the persons who won them.

But now the laws of the whole civilized world denounce the system. Enactments have been passed, but only partially enforced. The men interested in gaming houses wield such influence, by their numbers and affluence, that the judge, the jury, and the police officer must be bold indeed who would array themselves against these infamous establishments. Within ten years the House of Commons of England has adjourned on "Derby Day" to go out to bet on the races; and in the best circles of society in this country to-day are many hundreds of professedly respectable men who are acknowledged gamblers.

Hundreds of thousands of dollars in this land are every day being won and lost through sheer gambling. Says a traveller through the West—"I have travelled a thousand miles at a time upon the Western waters and seen gambling at every waking moment from the commencement to the termination of the journey." The South-west of this country reeks with this abomination. In New Orleans every third or fourth house in many of the streets is a gaming place, and it may be truthfully averred that each and all of our cities are cursed with this evil.

In themselves most of the games employed in gambling are without harm. Billiard-tables are as harmless as tea-tables, and a pack of cards as a pack of letter envelopes, unless stakes be put up. But by their use for gambling purposes they have become significant of an infinity of wretchedness. In New York city there are said to be six thousand houses devoted to this sin; in Philadelphia about four thousand; in Cincinnati about one thousand; at Washington the amount of gaming is beyond calculation. There have been seasons when, by night, Senators, Representatives, and Ministers of Foreign Governments were found engaged in this practice.

Men wishing to gamble will find places just suited to their capacity, not only in the underground oyster-cellar, or at the table back of the curtain, covered with greasy cards, or in the steamboat smoking cabin, where the bloated wretch with rings in his ears deals out his pack, and winks in the unsuspecting traveller,—providing free drinks all around,—but in gilded parlors and amid gorgeous surroundings.

This sin works ruin, first, by unhealthful stimulants. Excitement is pleasurable. Under every sky, and in every age, men have sought it. The Chinaman gets it by smoking his opium; the Persian by chewing hashish; the trapper in a buffalo hunt; the sailor in a squall; the inebriate in the bottle, and the avaricious at the gaming-table.

We must at times have excitement. A thousand voices in our nature demand it. It is right. It is healthful. It is inspiriting. It is a desire God-given. But anything that first gratifies this appetite and hurls it back in a terrific reaction is deplorable and wicked. Look out for the agitation that, like a rough musician, in bringing out the tune, plays so hard he breaks down the instrument!

God never made man strong enough to endure the wear and tear of gambling excitement. No wonder if, after having failed in the game, men have begun to sweep off imaginary gold from the side of the table. The man was sharp enough when he started at the game, but a maniac at the close. At every gaming-table sit on one side Ecstasy, Enthusiasm, Romance—the frenzy of joy; on the other side, Fierceness, Rage, and Tumult. The professional gamester schools himself into apparent quietness. The keepers of gambling rooms are generally fat, rollicking, and obese; but thorough and professional gamblers, in nine cases out of ten, are pale, thin, wheezing, tremulous, and exhausted.

A young man, having suddenly heired a large property, sits at the hazard-table, and takes up in a dice-box the estate won by a father's lifetime sweat, and shakes it, and tosses it away.

Intemperance soon stigmatizes its victim—kicking him out, a slavering fool, into the ditch, or sending him, with the drunkard's hiccough, staggering up the street where his family lives. But gambling does not, in that way, expose its victims. The gambler may be eaten up by the gambler's passion, yet only discover it by the greed in his eyes, the hardness of his features, the nervous restlessness, the threadbare coat, and his embarrassed business. Yet he is on the road to hell, and no preacher's voice, or startling warning, or wife's entreaty, can make him stay for a moment his headlong career. The infernal spell is on him; a giant is aroused within; and though you bind him with cables, they would part like thread; and though you fasten him seven times round with chains, they would snap like rusted wire; and though you piled up in his path, heaven-high, Bibles, tracts and sermons, and on the top should set the cross of the Son of God, over them all the gambler would leap like a roe over the rocks, on his way to perdition.

Again, this sin works ruin by killing industry.

A man used to reaping scores or hundreds of dollars from the gaming-table will not be content with slow work. He will say, "What is the use of trying to make these fifty dollars in my store when I can get five times that in half an hour down at 'Billy's'?" You never knew a confirmed gambler who was industrious. The men given to this vice spend their time not actively employed in the game in idleness, or intoxication, or sleep, or in corrupting new victims. This sin has dulled the carpenter's saw, and cut the band of the factory wheel, sunk the cargo, broken the teeth of the farmer's harrow, and sent a strange lightning to shatter the battery of the philosopher.

The very first idea in gaming is at war with all the industries of society. Any trade or occupation that is of use is ennobling. The street sweeper advances the interests of society by the cleanliness effected. The cat pays for the fragments it eats by clearing the house of vermin. The fly that takes the sweetness from the dregs of the cup compensates by purifying the air and keeping back the pestilence. But the gambler gives not anything for that which he takes.

I recall that sentence. He does make a return; but it is disgrace to the man that he fleeces, despair to his heart, ruin to his business, anguish to his wife, shame to his children, and eternal wasting away to his soul. He pays in tears and blood, and agony, and darkness, and woe.

What dull work is ploughing to the farmer, when in the village saloon, in one night, he makes and loses the value of a summer harvest? Who will want to sell tape, and measure nankeen, and cut garments, and weigh sugars, when in a night's game he makes and loses, and makes again, and loses again, the profits of a season?

John Borack was sent as mercantile agent from Bremen to England and this country. After two years his employers mistrusted that all was not right. He was a defaulter for eighty-seven thousand dollars. It was found that he had lost in Lombard street, London, twenty-nine thousand dollars; in Fulton street, New York, ten thousand dollars; and in New Orleans, three thousand dollars. He was imprisoned, but afterwards escaped and went into the gambling profession. He died in a lunatic asylum.

This crime is getting its pry under many a mercantile house in our cities, and before long down will come the great establishment, crushing reputation, home, comfort, and immortal souls. How it diverts and sinks capital may be inferred from some authentic statements before us. The ten gaming-houses that once were authorized in Paris passed through the banks, yearly, three hundred and twenty-five millions of francs! The houses of this kind in Germany yield vast sums to the government. The Hamburg establishment pays to the government treasury forty thousand florins; and Baden Baden one hundred and twenty thousand florins. Each one of the banks in the large gaming-houses of Germany has forty or fifty croupiers standing in its service.

Where does all the money come from? The whole world is robbed! What is most sad, there are no consolations for the loss and suffering entailed by gaming. If men fail in lawful business, God pities, and society commiserates; but where in the Bible, or in society, is there any consolation for the gambler? From what tree of the forest oozes there a balm that can soothe the gamester's heart? In that bottle where God keeps the tears of his children, are there any tears of the gambler? Do the winds that come to kiss the faded cheek of sickness, and to cool the heated brow of the laborer, whisper hope and cheer to the emaciated victim of the game of hazard? When an honest man is in trouble, he has sympathy. "Poor fellow!" they say. But do gamblers come to weep at the agonies of the gambler? In Northumberland was one of the finest estates in England. Mr. Porter owned it, and in a year gambled it all away. Having lost the last acre of the estate, he came down from the saloon and got into his carriage; went back; put up his horses, and carriage, and town house, and played. He threw and lost. He started home, and on a side alley met a friend from whom he borrowed ten guineas; went back to the saloon, and before a great while had won twenty thousand pounds. He died at last a beggar in St. Giles. How many gamblers felt sorry for Mr. Porter? Who consoled him on the loss of his estate? What gambler subscribed to put a stone over the poor man's grave? Not one!

Furthermore, this sin is the source of uncounted dishonesties. The game of hazard itself is often a cheat. How many tricks and deceptions in the dealing of the cards! The opponent's hand is ofttimes found out by fraud. Cards are marked so that they may be designated from the back. Expert gamesters have their accomplices, and one wink may decide the game. The dice have been found loaded with platina, so that "doublets" come up every time. These dice are introduced by the gamblers unobserved by the honest men who have come into the play; and this accounts for the fact that ninety-nine out of a hundred who gamble, however wealthy they began, at the end are found to be poor, miserable, ragged wretches, that would not now be allowed to sit on the door-step of the house that they once owned.

In a gaming-house in San Francisco, a young man having just come from the mines deposited a large sum upon the ace, and won twenty-two thousand dollars. But the tide turns. Intense anxiety comes upon the countenances of all. Slowly the cards went forth. Every eye is fixed. Not a sound is heard, until the ace is revealed favorable to the bank. There are shouts of "Foul! Foul!" but the keepers of the table produce their pistols and the uproar is silenced, and the bank has won ninety-five thousand dollars. Do you call this a game of chance? There is no chance about it.

But these dishonesties in the carrying on of the game are nothing when compared with the frauds which are committed in order to get money to go on with the nefarious work. Gambling, with its greedy hand, has snatched away the widow's mite and the portion of the orphans; has sold the daughter's virtue to get means to continue the game; has written the counterfeit signature, emptied the banker's money vault, and wielded the assassin's dagger. There is no depth of meanness to which it will not stoop. There is no cruelty at which it is appalled. There is no warning of God that it will not dare. Merciless, unappeasable, fiercer and wilder it blinds, it hardens, it rends, it blasts, it crushes, it damns. It has peopled Moyamensing, and Auburn, and Sing Sing.

How many railroad agents, and cashiers, and trustees of funds, it has driven to disgrace, incarceration, and suicide! Witness a cashier of the Central Railroad and Banking Company of Georgia, who stole one hundred and three thousand dollars to carry on his gaming practices. Witness the forty thousand dollars stolen from a Brooklyn bank; and the one hundred and eighty thousand dollars taken from a Wall Street Insurance Company for the same purpose! These are only illustrations on a large scale of the robberies every day committed for the purpose of carrying out the designs of gamblers. Hundreds of thousands of dollars every year leak out without observation from the merchant's till into the gambling hell.

A man in London keeping one of these gambling houses boasted that he had ruined a nobleman a day; but if all the saloons of this land were to speak out, they might utter a more infamous boast, for they have destroyed a thousand noblemen a year.

Notice also the effect of this crime upon domestic happiness. It hath sent its ruthless ploughshare through hundreds of families, until the wife sat in rags, and the daughters were disgraced, and the sons grew up to the same infamous practices, or took a short cut to destruction across the murderer's scaffold. Home has lost all charms for the gambler. How tame are the children's caresses and a wife's devotion to the gambler! How drearily the fire burns on the domestic hearth! There must be louder laughter, and something to win and something to lose; an excitement to drive the heart faster and fillip the blood and fire the imagination. No home, however bright, can keep back the gamester. The sweet call of love bounds back from his iron soul, and all endearments are consumed in the flame of his passion. The family Bible will go after all other treasures are lost, and if his everlasting crown in heaven were put into his hand he would cry: "Here goes, one more game, my boys! On this one throw I stake my crown of heaven."

A young man in London, on coming of age, received a fortune of one hundred and twenty thousand dollars, and through gambling in three years was thrown on his mother for support.

An only son went to New Orleans. He was rich, intellectual, and elegant in manners. His parents gave him, on his departure from home, their last blessing. The sharpers got hold of him. They flattered him. They lured him to the gaming-table and let him win almost every time for a good while, and patted him on the back and said, "First-rate player." But, fully in their grasp, they fleeced him; and his thirty thousand dollars were lost. Last of all he put up his watch and lost that. Then he began to think of home and of his old father and mother, and wrote thus:—

"MY BELOVED PARENTS:—You will doubtless feel a momentary joy at the reception of this letter from the child of your bosom, on whom you have lavished all the favors of your declining years. But should a feeling of joy for a moment spring up in your hearts when you shall have received this from, me, cherish it not. I have fallen deep—never to rise. Those gray hairs that I should have honored and protected I shall bring down with sorrow to the grave. I will not curse my destroyer, but oh! may God avenge the wrongs and impositions practised upon the unwary in a way that shall best please Him. This, my dear parents, is the last letter you will ever receive from me. I humbly pray your forgiveness. It is my dying prayer. Long before you shall have received this letter from me the cold grave will have closed upon me forever. Life is to me insupportable. I cannot, nay, I will not suffer the shame of having ruined you. Forget and forgive is the dying prayer of your unfortunate son."

The old father came to the post-office, got the letter, and fell to the floor. They thought he was dead at first; but they brushed back the white hair from his brow and fanned him. He had only fainted. I wish he had been dead; for what is life worth to a father after his son is destroyed?

When things go wrong at a gaming-table, they shout "Foul! foul!" Over all the gaming-tables of the world I cry out "Foul! foul! Infinitely foul!"

In modern days, in addition to the other forms of gambling, have come up the thoroughly organized and, in some States, legalized institution of lotteries. There are hundreds of citizens on the way to ruin through the lottery system. Some of the finest establishments in town are by this process being demolished, and the whole land feels the exhaustion of this accumulating evil. The wheel of Fortune is the Juggernaut that is crushing out the life of this nation. The records of the Insolvent Court of one city show that, in five years, two hundred thousand dollars were lost by dealing in lottery tickets. All the officers of the celebrated Bank of the United States who failed were found to have expended the money embezzled for lottery tickets.

A man drew in a lottery fifty thousand dollars, sold his ticket for forty-two thousand five hundred dollars, and yet did not have enough to pay the charges against him for lottery tickets. He owed the brokers forty-five thousand dollars.

An editor writes—"A man who, a few years ago, was blest with about twenty thousand dollars (lottery money), yesterday applied to us for ninepence to pay for a night's lodging."

A highly respectable gentleman drew twenty thousand dollars in a lottery; bought more tickets, and drew again; bought more—drew more largely; then rushed down headlong until he was pronounced by the select men of the village a vagabond, and his children were picked up from the street half starved and almost naked.

A hard-working machinist draws a thousand dollars; thenceforth he is disgusted with work, opens a rum grocery, is utterly debauched, and people go in his store to find him dead, close beside his rum-cask.

It would take a pen plucked from the wing of the destroying angel and dipped in blood to describe this lottery business.

A man committed suicide in New York, and upon his person was found a card of address giving a grog-shop as his boarding house, three blank lottery tickets, and a leaf from Seneca's Morals, containing an apology for self-murder.

One lottery in London was followed by the suicide of fifty persons who held unlucky numbers.

There are men now, with lottery tickets in their pocket, which, if they have not sense enough to tear up or throw into the fire, will be their admission ticket at the door of the damned. As the brazen gates swing open they will show their tickets, and pass in and pass down. As the wheel of eternal Fortune turns slowly round, they will find that the doom of those who have despised God and imperilled their souls will be their awful prize.

God forbid that you, my reader, should ever take to yourself the lamentation of the Boston clerk, who, in eight months, had embezzled eighteen thousand dollars from his employer and expended it all in lottery tickets. "I have for the last seven months gone fast down the broad road. There was a time, and that but a few months since, when I was happy, because I was free from debt and care. The moment of the first steps in my downfall was about the middle of last June, when I took a share in a company, bought lottery tickets whereby I was successful in obtaining a share of one-half of the capital prize, since which I have gone for myself. I have lived and dragged out a miserable existence for two or three months past. Oh, that the seven or eight months past of my existence could be blotted out; but I must go, and, ere this paper is read, my spirit has gone to my Maker, to give an account of my misdeeds here, and to receive the eternal sentence for self-destruction and abused confidence. Relatives and friends I have, from whom I do not wish to part under such circumstances, but necessity compels. Oh, wretch! lottery tickets have been thy ruin. But I cannot add more."

There are multitudes of people who disapprove of ordinary lotteries, yet have been thoroughly deceived by iniquity under a more attractive nomenclature. The lottery in which our most highly respectable and Christian people invest is some "Art Association," or some benevolent "Gift Enterprise," in which they fondly believe there can be no harm in drawing Bierstadt's Yosemite Valley, or Cropsey's American Autumn!

At no time have lottery tickets been sown so broadcast as to-day, notwithstanding the law forbids the old-style lottery.

A few years ago our newspapers flamed with the advertisements of the Crosby Opera House scheme. A citizen of Chicago, finding on his hands an unprofitable building, calls upon the whole country to help him out. Rooms are opened in all the great cities. In rush, not the abandoned and the reprobate (for they like the old styles of swindling better), but the educated and refined and polished, until a host of people are in imminent peril of having thrown upon their hands a splendid Opera House. Philadelphia buys thirty thousand dollars worth of tickets. The portentous day approaches. The rail trains from many of the prominent cities bring in dignified "Committees" who come to see that the great abomination is conducted in a decent and Christian manner. The throng presses in. Hold fast your tickets, all you respectable New Yorkers, Philadelphians, and Bostonians, for the wheel begins to move. The long agony is over. Hundreds of thousands of people have made a narrow escape from being ruined by sudden affluence. Swift horses are despatched, that, foam-lathered, dash up to the house of him who owns the successful ticket. The lightnings tell it to the four winds of heaven, and our weekly pictorials hasten forward the photographers to take the picture of the famous man who owned the ticket numbered 58,600. Multitudes think that there has been foul play, and that, after all, they themselves, if the truth were known, did draw the Opera House. Ten years from now there will stand on the scaffold, or behind the prison door, or in the lonely room in which the suicide writes his farewell to wife or parents, men who will say that the first misstep of their life that put them on the wrong road was the ticket they bought in the Crosby Opera House.

The man who won that prize is already dead of his dissipations, and, strange to say, the beautiful building thus raffled away was found to be owned by its original possessor when all the excitement in regard to the matter had died away.

I care not on what street the office was, nor who were the abettors of the undertaking, nor who bought the tickets. I pronounce the whole scheme to have been a swindle, a crime, and an insult to God and the nation.

In this class of gambler-makers I also put the "gift stores," which are becoming abundant throughout the country. With a book, or knife, or sewing machine, or coat, or carriage there goes a prize. At those stores people get something thrown in with their purchase. It may be a gold watch or a set of silver, a ring or a farm. Sharp way to get off unsalable goods. It has filled the land with fictitious articles and covered up our population with brass finger-rings, and despoiled the moral sense of the community, and is fast making us a nation of gamblers.

The Church of God has not seemed willing to allow the world to have all the advantage of these games of chance. A church fair opens, and towards the close it is found that some of the more valuable articles are unsalable. Forthwith the conductors of the enterprise conclude that they will raffle for some of the valuable articles, and, under pretence of anxiety to make their minister a present, or please some popular member of the church, fascinating persons are despatched through the room, pencil in hand, to "solicit" shares; or perhaps each draws for his own advantage, and scores of people go home with their trophies, thinking that all is right, for Christian ladies did the embroidery, and Christian men did the raffling, and the proceeds went towards a new communion set. But you may depend on it that, as far as morality is concerned, you might as well have won by the crack of the billiard-ball or the turn of the dice-box.

Some good people cannot stand this raffling, and so, at fairs, they go to "voting," sometimes for editors, and sometimes for ministers, at a dollar a vote. Now the Methodist minister is ahead; now the Presbyterian leads, and now the Baptist. But, just at the last moment, when one of the ministers of the more popular sect seems sure to get the prize, the members from some obscure denomination, that do not deserve the prize, come in, and by a large contribution carry off for their minister the silver tea-set.

Do you wonder that churches built, lighted, or upholstered by such processes as that come to great financial and spiritual decrepitude? The devil says: "I helped build that house of worship, and I have as much right there as you have;" and for once the devil is right.

We do not read that they had a lottery for building the church at Corinth or Antioch, or for getting up a gold-headed cane or for an embroidered surplice for Saint Paul. All this I style ecclesiastical gambling. More than one man who is destroyed can say that his first step on the wrong road was when he won something at a church fair.

The gambling spirit has not stopped for any indecency. There lately transpired, in Maryland, a lottery in which people drew for lots in a burying-ground! The modern habit of betting about everything is productive of immense mischief. The most healthful and innocent amusements of yachting and base-ball playing have been the occasion of putting up excited and extravagant wagers. That which to many has been advantageous to body and mind has been to others the means of financial and moral loss. The custom is pernicious in the extreme where scores of men in respectable life give themselves up to betting, now on this boat now on that—now on the Atlantics and now on the Athletics.

Betting, that once was chiefly the accompaniment of the race-course, is fast becoming a national habit, and in some circles any opinion advanced on finance or politics is accosted with the interrogatory—"How much will you bet on that, sir?"

This custom may make no appeal to slow, lethargic temperaments, but there are in the country tens of thousands of quick, nervous, sanguine, excitable temperaments ready to be acted upon, and their feet will soon take hold on death. For some months and perhaps for years they will linger in the more polite and elegant circle of gamesters, but, after a while, their pathway will come to the fatal plunge. Finding themselves in the rapids, they will try to back out, and, hurled over the brink, they will clutch the side of the boat until their finger-nails, blood-tipped, will pierce the wood, and then, with white cheek and agonized stare, and the horrors of the lost soul lifting the very hair from the scalp, they will plunge down where no grappling hooks can drag them out.