You will find many a merchant who, while he is so careful that he would not take a yard of cloth or a spool of cotton from the counter without paying for it, and who, if a bank cashier should make a mistake and send in a roll of bills five dollars too much would dispatch a messenger in hot haste to return the surplus, yet who will go into a stock company in which after a while he gets control of the stock, then waters the stock and makes $100,000 appear like $200,000.
He only stole $100,000 by the operation. Many of the men of fortune made their wealth in that way. One of those men, engaged in such unrighteous acts, that evening, the evening of the very day when he watered the stock, will find a wharf-rat stealing a Brooklyn Eagle from the basement doorway, and will go out and catch the urchin by the collar, and twist the collar so tightly the fellow can’t talk, but grip the collar tighter and tighter, saying, “I have been looking for you a long while; you stole my paper four or five times, didn’t you? you miserable wretch.”
And then the old stock gambler, with a voice they can hear three blocks away, will cry out, “Police, police!” Prisons for sins insectile, but palaces for crimes dromedarian. No mercy for sins animalcule in proportion, but great leniency for mastodon iniquity. A poor boy slyly takes from the basket of a market woman a choke pear—saving some one else from the cholera—and you smother him in the horrible atmosphere of Raymond street jail, or New York Tombs, while his cousin, who has been skillful enough to steal $50,000 from the city, you will make a candidate for the New York Legislature.—TALMAGE.
