67.  Now, supposing you to have a plenty; to have a fortune beyond your wants, would not the money which you would save in this way be very well applied in acts of real benevolence?  Can you walk many yards in the streets; can you ride a mile in the country; can you go to half-a-dozen cottages; can you, in short, open your eyes, without seeing some human being, some one born in the same country with yourself, and who, on that account alone, has some claim upon your good wishes and your charity; can you open your eyes without seeing some person to whom even a small portion of your annual savings would convey gladness of heart?  Your own heart will suggest the answer; and, if there were no motive but this, what need I say more in the advice which I have here tendered to you?

68.  Another great evil arising from this desire to be thought rich; or, rather from the desire not to be thought poor, is the destructive thing which has been honoured by the name of ‘speculation;’ but which ought to be called Gambling.  It is a purchasing of something which you do not want either in your family or in the way of ordinary trade:  a something to be sold again with a great profit; and on the sale of which there is a considerable hazard.  When purchases of this sort are made with ready money, they are not so offensive to reason and not attended with such risk; but when they are made with money borrowed for the purpose, they are neither more nor less than gambling transactions; and they have been, in this country, a source of ruin, misery, and suicide, admitting of no adequate description.  I grant that this gambling has arisen from the influence of the ‘Goddess’ before mentioned; I grant that it has arisen from the facility of obtaining the fictitious means of making the purchases; and I grant that that facility has been created by the system under the baneful influence of which we live.  But it is not the less necessary that I beseech you not to practise such gambling; that I beseech you, if you be engaged in it, to disentangle yourself from it as soon as you can.  Your life, while you are thus engaged, is the life of the gamester; a life of constant anxiety; constant desire to over-reach; constant apprehension; general gloom, enlivened, now and then, by a gleam of hope or of success.  Even that success is sure to lead to further adventures; and, at last, a thousand to one, that your fate is that of the pitcher to the well.

69.  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,