Happy is the man who lives within his means, and who is contented with
the legitimate rewards of endeavor. The dreadful panic that checks the
progress of civilization and paralyzes the commerce of the world, is the
death angel that follows speculation. Everything is staked and hazarded
on contingences that are as baseless as the fabric of a dream. The day
of settlement comes and nobody is able to settle. The borrower is
powerless to meet his note in the bank; the banker is powerless to pay
his depositors, and confidence is stampeded like a herd of cattle. The
timid and suspicious old farmer catches the wild note of alarm, and
deserting his plow and sleepy steers in the field, he mounts his mule,
and urging him on with pounding heels, rushes pell-mell to the bank, and
with bulging eyes, demands his money. The excitement spreads like fire.
The blacksmith leaves his anvil, the carpenter his bench, and the tailor
his goose. The tanner deserts his hide, and the shoemaker throws down
his last to save his all. The mason with his trowel in his hand, rushes
from the half-finished wall; Pat drops his hod between heaven and earth
and slides down the ladder, muttering: "Oi'll have me moaney or _Oi'll_
have blood!" The fat phlegmatic Dutchman, dozing behind his bar, wakes
to the situation and waddles down the street, puffing and blowing like
an engine, and muttering: "Mine Got in Himmel--mine debosit ish
boosted!" And thus they make the run on the bank, gathering about it
like the hosts of Armageddon. The bottom drops out, and millionaires
go under like the passengers of a wrecked steamer.
"BUNK CITY."
Did you ever pass the remains of a "boom" town in your travels? Did you
never gaze upon the remains of "Bunk City," where but yesterday all was
life and bustle, and to-day it looks like the ruins of Babylon? The
empty fields for miles and miles around are laid off and dug up in
streets, and look like they had been struck with ten thousand streaks
of chain lightning. Standing here and there are huge frames holding up
mammoth sign boards, bearing the names of land companies, but the land
companies are gone. Half driven nails are left to rust in a few old
skeleton buildings, the brick lies unmortared in half finished walls,
and tenantless houses stand here and there like the ghosts of buried
hope. Down by the river stands the furnace, grim and silent as the
extinct crater of Popocatepetl; and the great hotel on the hill looks
like the tower of Babel two thousand years after the confusion of
tongues. The last of the speculators, with his blue nose and his old
battered plug hat which resembles an accordion that has been yanked by
a cyclone, stands on the corner and contemplates his old sedge fields
which have shrunk in value from one hundred dollars a front foot, to one
_dollar for a hundred front acres_, and balefully sings a new song:
"After the boom is over, after the panic's on,
After the fools are leavin', after the money's gone,
Many a bank is "busted," if we could see in the room,
Many a pocket is empty, after the boom."
"YOUR UNCLE."
[Illustration: COMING.]
An impecunious speculator once flooded a town with handbills and posters
containing this announcement: "Your Uncle is coming." The streams of
passers-by looked at the bill boards and wondered what it meant. The
speculator rented the theatre, and one day a new flood of handbills and
posters made this announcement: "Your Uncle is here." He gave orders
to his stage manager to raise the curtain exactly at eight o'clock.
The speculator himself stood in the door and received the admission fees
and then disappeared. In their curiosity to see the performance of "Your
Uncle," the villagers filled every seat in the theatre long before the
hour for the performance arrived. The curtain rose at the appointed
hour, and lo! on a board, in the center of the stage, was a card bearing
this announcement in large letters: "_Your Uncle is gone._"
What a splendid illustration of modern speculation and its willing
victims who are so easily led into the "Paradise of Fools!"
[Illustration: GONE.]