The weekly examiner., 1901-06-29
THE GAMBLING EVIL.
Dr. Talmage Arraigns the Spirit o1
 Wild Speculation.
He Gives Some Account of the Finan4 ciaI Ruin of Other Days-Money
 a Golden Breasted -4sEzEaa Bird. -s..s
[Copyright, 1901, by Louis Klopsch, N. Y.1
 Washington, June 9.

EalgnS the Sp1r1t or Wild SpecuIaI1on
 and gives some account of the fnan- cial ruin of other days; Proverbs 23-5:
 "Riches certainly make themselves
 wings; they fly away as an eagle
 toward heaven"
 Money is a golden-breasted bird with. silver beak. It alights on the
 office desk or on the parlor center table. Men and women stand and admire it. They do not notice that 1t has wings larger than ravens, larger than a famingo's, larger than an eagles. One wave of the hand of misfortune and it spreads it's
 beautiful plumage and is gone-"as an eagle toward heaven," my text says, though sometimes I think it 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. It 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, specuiators 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 off 8 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 s$1 1000 or $2,oo0 or $10,- 900 go into, Wall street and lose all. And if there ever was time for the pulpit to speak out in regard to cer- 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 em- 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 gages 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 compliment it is to the healthy condition of our country that these recent disasters have in nowise depressed tradei I thank God that Wall streets capacity to blast this country has gone forever.
 First of all, Wall street stands as type in this country for tried integrity and the most outrageous villa;ny. Farmers who have only few hundred dollars worth of produce to put on the market have but little to test their character, but put a man into the seven times heated furnace of Wall street excitement and he either comes out Shadrach, with hair unsinged, or be is burned into a black 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- cial debauchery, and they hardly dare go near the streetior walk up or down it unless they have buttoned up their last pocket and had their lives insured or religiously crossed themselves. Yet if you start at either end of the street and read the business signs you will find the names of more men of in- tegrity 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 ed, when breadstuffs were wanted for furnishing Ireland, when colleges were to be endowed and churches were to be supported and missionary societies were to be equipped for their work of sending the Gospel all around the world, the first street to respond has been Wall street, and the largest re- sponses in all the land have come from Wall street.
 BuI While InaL street. IS type C1 tried integrity on one hand it is also a type of unbounded swindle on the other. There are the spiders that wait for innocent flies. There are the croco- diles that crawl up through the slime to cranch the calf. There are the Anacondas, with lifted loop, ready to crush the unwary. There are financial wreckers, who stand on the beach praying for a Caribbean whirlwind to sweep over our commercial interests.
 Let me say it is no place for man to go into business unless his moral principle is thoroughly settled. That is no place for a man to go into busi- ness who does not know when he is overpaid five dollars by mistake wheth- CT he had better take it back again or not Thai is no nlace for man to 20