The Farmville herald. [volume] (Farmville, Va.) 1890-1934, 1901-12-06

cial ruin of other days; Proverbs 23-j.
Riches certainly make themselves
wings; they fly away as an eagle
toward heaven"
Money is a golden-breasted bird
with silver beak. 1t alights on the
Office desk or on the parlor center
table. Men and women stand and
admire it. They do not notice that
IL has wings larger than a raven s.
larger than fiamingo's, larger than
an eagles. One wave of the hand
Of misfortune and it spreads its
beautiful plumage and is gone-"as
an eagle toward heaven my text
says, though sometimes / think il
goes in the other direction.
What a verification we have had
of the flying capacity of riches in
Wall street. And Wall street is one
of the longest streets in the world.
1t does not begin at the foot of
Trinity church, New York, and end
at the East river, as many suppose.
1t reaches through all our Ameri-
can cities and across the sea. En-
couraged by the revival of trade and
by the fact that Wall street disas-
ters of other years were so far back
as TO be forgotten, spectators run
up the stocks from point to point
until innocent people on the outside
suppose that the stocks would al
ways continue to ascend. They
gather in from all parts of the coun-
try. Large sums of money are
taken into Wall street and small
sums of money. The crash comes,
thank God, in time to warn OIL a
great many who were on their way
thither, for the sadness of the thing
is that a great many of the young
men of our cities who save a little
money for the purpose of starting
themselves in business, and who
have $500 or $1,000 or $4,000 or S1O,-
600 go into Wall street and lose all.
And if there ever was a time for the
pulpit to speak out in regard TO GER
tain kinds of nefarious enterprises
now is the time.
Stocks rose and fell, and now they
begin to rise again, and they will
fall again until thousands of young
men will be ruined unless the print
ing press and the pulpit give en-
phatic utterance. My counsel is to
countrymen, so far as they may
hear OF this discourse, if they have
surplus TO invest it in first mort
cages and in moneyed institutions
which, though paying comparative
ly small interest, are sound and safe
beyond dispute, and to stand clear
of the Wall street vortex, where so
many have been swamped and swal-
lowed. What a compliment it is to
the healthy condition of our country
that these recent disasters have in
nowise depressed tradel l thank
God that Wall streets capacity to
blast this country has gone forever.
First of all, Wall street stands as a
type in this country for tried integrity
and the most outrageous villainy.
Farmers who have only few hundred
dollars worth of produce TO put on the
market have but little to test their
character, but put man into the
seven times heated furnace of Wall
street excitement and he either comes
out a Shadrach, with hair unsinged, or
he is burned into a blaek moral cinder.
No halfway work about it. If want
ed to find integrity bombproof.
would go among the bankers and mer-
chants of Wall street; yet because
there have been such villainies enacted
there at different times some men
have supposed that it is great finan-
,ial debauchery, and they hardly dare
20 near the street or walk up or down
Ii unless they have buttoned up their
last pocket and had their lives insured
or religiously crossed themselves. Yet
# you start at either end of the street
md read the business signs you will
ind the names of more men of in
.egritv and Christian benevolence than
you can find in the same space in any
street Of any of our cities. When the
Christian commission and the sanitary
commission wanted money to send
Medicine and bandages to the wound
.d. when breadstuffs were wanted for
'amishing ireland. when colleges were
% be endowed and churches were TO be
supported and missionary societies
we're to be equipped for their work of
.ending the Gospel all around the
world. the first street to respond has
,een Wall street, and the largest re-
.ponses in all the land have come from
Wall street.
But while that street is type OF
ried integrity on one hand it is also
ype of unbounded swindle on the
,tber. There are the spiders that wait
or innocent flies. There are the croco-
lies that crawl up through the slime
o. cranch the calf. There are the
nacondas. with lifted loop, ready to
rush the unwary. There are financial
who stand on the beach
,raving for a Caribbean whirlwind to
weep over our commercial interests.
Let me say it is no place for man
% 90 into business unless his moral
principle is thoroughly settled. That
S no place for a man to go into busi-
less who does not know when he is
verpaid five dollars by mistake wheth-
r he had better take il back again or
lot. That is no place for a man to 60
Who has large funds in trust and who
5 all the time tempted to speculate
- N. l. !. L. IL q % fnr. q rrn