Dodge City times. [volume] (Dodge City, Kan.) 1876-1892, 1883-04-19
Stick to Your Trade.

"Stick to your trade" says an ex
change, ''nine-tenths of all the failures
of the last year have come to men who
were dabbling in outside affairs" There
could not be more truth crowded into a
few lines than is contained in the above.
AS general thing when you hear Of
the failure of man in business you can
set it down that he has been dabbline
in something he knew nothing about,
and has sunk the money needed in his
legitimate business. The merchant,
even in country village, who attends
strictly to business, may in time lay by
a snug little sum, but as soon as he
commences to speculate in land, OF
even trade horses, he is liable at any
time to hear something drop on account
of taking the money needed in his bust
ness for speculative purposes. The
farmer who works hard all summer,
sows and reaps good harvest. and puts
the proceeds of the sale of his wheat in
to his pants pocket and goes to specu-
lating in pork, may eventually find
mortgage plastered down over his
property that it will take years OF
frugal industry to remove. You hear
of the failure of a merchant en-
gagged in trade and in nine cases
out of ten you can trace the cause
to the fact that he had few
thousand dollars invested in wheat
when the price tumbled and the bottom
fell out of his scheme for making little
money by outside speculation. A
merchant may be all right, and level
headed in his trade, he can weigh out
Goldfish and sugar, or drive sharp bar
gain in buying a load of green hides OF
ton of butter, but when he has few
thousand dollars invested in wheat, OF
pork, or lumber, and the price takes a
drop, he loses his head and is laid out
colder than mackerel. every man
to his trade is saying as true as it is
ancient. There are instances, OF
course. where men have left their
grocery in the furrow and took up
speculation and struck it rich, OF
where ministers have beat their hymn
books into railroad stocks, and made a
fortune at one strike, but these in
stances are scarce-very scarce. The
cashier of a bank, or Treasurer of a
State, who lays awake nights fixing up
schemes for making a million, dealing
in Futures" or holding hundred
Thousand dollars worth of butter and
eggs for rise, are forever COM
ing to grief, while the men in
similar positions, who salt fifty cents
on every dollar of their salary in
an old stocking, and don't try
70 hn 60, ho~ fIo
fastest horses or the earth, get to the
front and become solid men. There are
men enough to do all the specializing
there is any necessity for doing; men
who have become hardened in the bust
ness, and who lose or make thousands
without a blush or a twitch of the mus
. cles. These men don't, as general
thing. lose their heads and make bad
breaks. They are accustomed to the
business, and the rest of mankind should
be content to let them buy all the stocks
and bonds and wheat and pork, and
make or lose, just as it happens; they
enjoy excitement that would turn some
mems hair gray in forty-eight hours,
and the business and professional men
should be content to let them enjoy it.
There are thousands of men bucking
against fate, trying to make a fortune
= by speculation, who, if they had ten
millions of dollars worth of the best
stocks or bonds in the world, would, in
the shortest possible time, if they per
sisted in specializing, be laid out, finan-
cially. so flat they would be obliged to
work a free lunch route.-Peck'S Sun