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contempt is the redeeming virtue of the calling, but its whole spirit is immoral.

Of course, like other deflections from the highest moral standard, in those cases in which it has long established forms, nature, if we may so speak, confines the evil to the smallest compass. Her sweet vegetation clusters round, and perhaps hides, the deformity which she cannot remove. The untruth of the advocate, indefensible in itself, is found to coexist with perfect veracity in all other relations of life; and for other virtues, where are they to be found in more vigour and abundance than amongst practitioners of the law? In the long and illustrious line of English judges, there is probably not one who has not repeatedly lent his learning or his eloquence to what he must have known to be injustice. Yet he would be a bold moralist who would venture to cast a stone at a Hale or a Denman. So of the turf. An English horse-race is better than a Spanish bull-fight, much better than those intense excitements of the Roman amphitheatre, whose overpowering charm was felt even by St. Augustine. It is inferior, but inferior only, to the Olympic games. Yet, whatever Mr. Disraeli may think, the turf is not the training place for an English statesman. Lord George Bentinck was very much the worse for his gambling. It is the curse of the English nobles, to have no readier outlet for their energies. Here again, however, the omnipotent influence of custom makes itself felt. Innumerable things may combine in England with betting,—the national and manly passion for noble horses—the ambition for a recognised and real distinction, "the blue riband of the turf"-and that contagious sympathy with a great common interest, which none escape all neutralizing the influence of the evil upon the general life.

But extract the essential principle from these customary forms -let the greedy appetite for gain without toil or return, have some new field of exercise, in which, custom providing no vesture, it must work in its naked deformity, and then its result can be nothing but demoralization; the commencement of a cancerous

process, which goes on in widening circles, eating away all that is sound in the social life. This happens to a great extent in all speculative periods, and each leaves behind a corrupt deposit which the next enlarges.

Line between Commerce and Gambling.

But all commerce is speculation. Where is the line to be drawn? The main principle is clear, though its detailed application is difficult. All that can be done is to show the point of divergence, and then leave each man to choose his own road at his peril.

Whatever aids the distribution of goods is commerce. Any mode of operating upon prices that cannot have that tendency is gambling. But the simple holding over of stocks, such as grain, so far from being gambling, is often, in spite of the popular prejudice, one of the best services that commerce renders to society-the equable sharing out of short stores amongst a shipwrecked crew. All sorts of time bargains therefore, it need scarcely be said, whether of securities, railway shares, or produce, where no realities pass or are intended to pass, are as purely gambling as rouge et noir and roulette. As for rigging the market," and similiar expedients, frequent enough in times of mania, they are not gambling, but fraud; and if the law could grasp delicately enough to seize the perpetrators, the proper place for them is the bar of the Old Bailey.

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Whatever immediately or remotely brings about the condition in which these things are done-in which being done first by the shameless, they are done afterwards by others less degraded, until class after class is sucked into the vortex-is to be dreaded and guarded against as one of the greatest of national calamities.

Speculation by the non-trading Classes.

All that has been hitherto described of the machinery of the money market, shows its extraordinary tendency to favour speculation by ever-recurring and growing temptations. The abundance of the market furnishes the means, but the moving powers in every speculation must be those highly contagious passions of the human mind which prompt men to seek sudden accessions of wealth-which seem to have their times of afflux and reflux-and which, whenever they set in, go flooding even into the remote nooks and corners of society. The quiet maiden annuitant, the hard-worked country surgeon, the plodding clerk who has cut pens over the same desk for a quarter of a century, nay, the parson himself, when there is nothing to be done with a little hoard of savings, the product of much self-denial, but to buy consols at 100, feels his blood begin to mount, and the fever to set in, when the El Dorados of Capel Court and its neighbourhood are opened to his imagination. The temptation is strong, but the result, if he yields, is generally deplorable. The chances are a hundred to one that he is bit. For where there is really some great and sure gain to be made, the Argus-eyed capitalists on the spot have known and secured it before any simple rustic can come in for a share. Their intelligence, indeed, is not infallible. When the London and Birmingham Railway was yet but a thought, there were men in London familiar with the heights and depths of speculation, who could not easily see how prolific of wealth that thought was soon to be found. Stories are told of individuals, eminent for speculative foresight, who, being tempted to take some of the early shares in that great concern, timidly sold them not very long before the whole world awoke to a perception of their value. But if such men can miscalculate, what security can there ever be for the distant rural adventurer, who knows nothing but what is in the county newspaper'?

The speculators during the Bank Restriction period were a favourite theme with Cobbett, and some of his sketches were thrown off with a vigour which he

Speculation in the North.

With respect to the railways, the truth was first seen and the lead taken by the sanguine, impetuous, over-mastering energy of Lancashire; an energy, the like of which is not to be found in the whole world, except in the kindred region of North America. It will appear in a succeeding page that the relation of Lancashire to all England is becoming more than ever a practical question. The men of Lancashire are not the wisest in England, but they have most WILL, and when they happen to be in the right, nothing can stand before them. Unquestionably, in the matter of the Corn Laws, Mr. Cobden and his Ironsides rode over the country gentlemen very much in the fashion of Cromwell over the Cavaliers at Marston Moor. Marston Moor and Free Trade are both worthy of national commemoration; but it is worthy of note, that a purely Cromwellian régime was not to the taste of the English people. They could not brook to have the stream of their rich and varied life compelled to flow in one exclusive channel. They chose rather that it should be free to spread abroad even into swamps and noisome pools under the harlots and sybarites of the Restoration.

This is no digression, but only a winding in the road, which opens a glimpse into another part of the region under survey. alone possessed. Here is a short passage from the “Advice to Young Men.”— “The great temptation to this gambling is, as is the case in other gambling, the success of the few. As young men who crowd to the army, in search of rank and renown, never look into the ditch that holds their slaughtered companions, but have their eye constantly fixed on the General-in-chief; and as each of them belongs to the same profession, and is sure to be conscious that he has equal merit, every one deems himself the suitable successor of him who is surrounded with Aides des camps, and who moves battalions and columns by his nod; so with the rising generation of speculators: they see the great estates that have succeeded the pencil-box and the orange-basket; they see those whom nature and good laws made to black shoes, sweep chimneys or the streets, rolling in carriages, or sitting in saloons surrounded by gaudy footmen with napkins twisted round their thumbs; and they can see no earthly reason why they should not all do the same; forgetting the thousands and thousands who, in making the attempt, have reduced themselves to that beggary which, before their attempt, they would have regarded as a thing impossible."

Amongst the manufacturing districts of England, the tendency to gambling speculation is probably more constantly ready to start into life than elsewhere, and when in movement to go greater lengths. In 1845 many provincial stock exchanges were established for the first time, and the persons who operated on those exchanges at Leeds, Manchester, and Liverpool, seemed to have made up their minds, that it should go hard with them, if they did not better every lesson that was set by the metropolis.

Wherever the eye is turned, therefore, it would seem to find nothing but causes calculated to produce speculation. Radiating inwards to the great centres of commercial life, the several currents seem to flow as if under an irresistible impulse. Is this necessary? Is it our destiny? The question is terrible. All the fibres of the money power have been traced rudely, but accurately enough to show their lines of direction. Still there remains their point of highest concentration upon which we have said nothing. That point is the BANK OF ENGLAND.

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