The great Republic might have survived even such horrors as these had
it not been for the out-breaking of another craze more terrible far
than an army with gattling guns, I refer to the most destructive of
all scourges, the mania for stock-gambling. The crafty, unscrupulous
managers of bucket-shops, stock-exchanges, and brokerages filled the
columns of the press with manufactured accounts of vast fortunes
made in an hour by imaginary investors of small sums, and at once
multitudes of farmers, mechanics, and even teachers abandoned their
honest pursuits to squander their hard earnings in the vain attempts
to "buck the tiger," and "beard the lion in his den."
The inevitable result followed: the lion and the lamb lay down
together, with the lamb inside the lion, thousands of formerly
well-to-do people were pauperized. Thousands of farms were abandoned,
hundreds of factories were deserted, while the fiendish, cheating
boss-gambler sharks were gorged to repletion with their infamous
plunder; then followed a frenzy of hatred on the part of the masses
against the classes: city treasuries were depleted to feed the
starving with free soup, the cities were crowded with the desperate,
hungry multitudes who had lost their all, and bloody riots capped the
climax of a hell on earth.
From the cupola of the State House in Boston, a little group of
citizens gazed upon a scene which would daunt the stoutest heart;
these five men standing motionless and speechless under the gilded
dome are of widely differing stations in life, as far apart as the
poles in culture, education, and creed, but their faces wore the same
expressions of profound sadness mingled with stern determination.
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