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