their sensitiveness. Such disreputable practices should be discountenanced by all good gamblers, the same as putting sand in sugar, discriminating in freights, and salting a mine.
The evils of stock gambling, ruining thousands upon thousand of families in the city and throughout the land, as compared with those of professional gambling, are infinitely against the former. Nowhere as in this mad desire to be suddenly and immensely rich were the souls of men so staked. It was worse than Mephistopheles betting with the Lord that the integrity of Faust should fail him, or Satan laying a like wager in regard to Job.
Notwithstanding that mining since the world began has been a hundred times proven the most ruinous of speculations, to this day wherever is a discovery of the precious metals, thither may be seen a rush from every quarter.
"A man who subjects things to chance rather than to the operation of definite and calculable laws, gambles," says Beecher.
Here in California the advice of Plautus, " Habeas ut nactus: nota mala res optima' st," " keep what you've got; the evil that we know is best," was sadly out of place. To be "stuck in stocks," made sweating sore by them, screwed tighter in them than the village villain's feet in that old-time punishing-machine, was at one time common to all.
In stock speculation there" is wanting that same element of utility which we find lacking in faro and monte, and by which alone society is benefited in the interchange of values among its members. In ordinary transactions, he who makes money is not benefited as much as he suffers who loses it, and in gambling the difference is largely increased.
What is it that causes the price of stocks to change ? What is it that causes any fluctuations in values when there has been no corresponding development in the mines or change in the money market?
