neer at that still larger debt owed to
their fellow-creatures, and make some eldest son their principal heir.
Charity may get a few niggardly thousands from them, and handsome
bequests usually go to their younger children; yet the bulk of the big
gambler's treasure passes intact to one who will most probably guard
with avid custody the alleged prestige of its possession.

But we should remember that on many occasions it is not even a game of
chance with these potentates of Wall Street. They play, as it were,
with marked cards, and can predict to a certainty, having such mighty
capital at their disposal, just how and when particular stocks will
rise or fall. Spreading abroad deceitful rumors through their little
subservient throngs of henchmen brokers, they create untold ravage and
despair. Fearful cruelty is shown by them then. The law cannot reach
it, though years of imprisonment would be far too good for it.
Families are plunged into penury by their subtly circulated frauds;
forgery and embezzlement in hundreds of individual cases result; banks
are betrayed and shattered; disgrace and suicide are sown broadcast
like seeds fecund in poison. One often marvels that assassination does
not spring up in certain desperate human hearts as a vengeance against
these appalling wrongs. Murder is ghastly enough, in whatever shape it
meets us, and from whatever cause. But if Lincoln and Garfield fell
the prey of mad fanatics, it seems all the stranger, as it is all the
more fortunate, that agonized and ill-governed human frenzy should
thus far happily have spared us new public shudders at new public
crimes.

Conjecture may indeed waste its liveliest ardors in seeking to
determine what place this nineteenth century of ours will hold among
the centuries which have preceded and are destined to follow it. But
there is good reason to believe, after all, that in one way it will be
held remarkable, perhaps even unique,--as an age of violent contrasts,
violent extremes. Here we are, seeking (however pathetically) to
grapple with problems whose solution would wear an almost millennial
tinge. There are men among us--and men of august intellects, too--who
urge upon society the adoption of codes and usages which would assume,
if practically treated, that the minds and characters of mortals are
little short of angelic. And coevally with these dreamers of grand
socialistic improvement, we are met by such evidence as that of Wall
Street, its ai