236. Doings in Wall Street

Doings in Wall Street

Pro_23:5 : ’93Riches certainly make themselves wings; they fly away as an eagle toward heaven.’94

Money is a golden-breasted bird with silver beak. It alights on the office-desk, or in the counting-room, or on the parlor center-table. Men and women stand and admire it. They do not notice that it has wings larger than a raven’92s, larger than a flamingo’92s, larger than an eagle’92s. One wave of the hand of misfortune and it spreads its beautiful plumage and is gone’97’94as an eagle toward heaven,’94 my text says, though sometimes I think it goes in the other direction!

What verification we have had of the flying capacity of riches in Wall Street! Encouraged by the revival of trade, and by the fact that Wall Street disasters of other years were so far back as to be forgotten, speculators run up the stocks from point to point until innocent people on the outside supposed that the stocks would always continue to ascend. They gather in from all parts of the country. Large sums of money are taken into Wall Street, and small sums of money. The crash comes, thank God, in time to warn off 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 five hundred dollars or one thousand dollars or two thousand dollars or ten thousand dollars, go into Wall Street and lose all. And if there ever was a time for the pulpit to speak out in regard to certain 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 printing-press and the pulpit of the Lord Jesus Christ give emphatic utterance. My counsel is to countrymen, so far as they may hear of this discourse, if they have surplus, to invest it in first mortgages and in government bonds, and to stand clear of the Wall Street vortex, where so many have been swamped and swallowed. What a compliment it is to the healthy condition of our country that these recent disasters have in no wise depressed trade! I thank God that Wall Street’92s capacity to blast this country is gone forever.

Across the island of New York, in 1685, a wall made of stone and earth, and cannon-mounted, was built to keep off the savages. Along by that wall a street was laid out, and as the street followed the line of the wall, it was appropriately called Wall Street. It is narrow, it is short, it is unarchitectural, and yet its history is unique. Excepting Lombard Street, London, it is the mightiest street on this planet. There the Government of the United States was born. There Washington held his levees. There Mrs. Adams and Mrs. Caldwell and Mrs. Knox and other brilliant women of the Revolution displayed their charms. There Witherspoon and Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield sometimes preached. There Dr. Mason chided Alexander Hamilton for writing the Constitution of the United States without any God in it. There negroes were sold in the slave-mart. There criminals were harnessed to wheelbarrows, and, like beasts of burden, compelled to draw, or were lashed through the street behind carts to which they were fastened. There, fortunes have come to coronation or burial, since the day when reckless speculators, in powdered hair and silver shoe-buckles, dodged Dugan, the Governor-General of his Majesty, clear down to yesterday at three o’92clock. The history of Wall Street is to a certain extent the financial, commercial, agricultural, mining, literary, artistic, moral, and religious history of this country. Only a few blocks long, it has reached from the Canadas to the Gulf of Mexico, from San Francisco to Bangor. There are the best men in this country, and there are the worst. Everything, from unswerving integrity to tip-top scoundrelism’97everything, from heaven-born charity to bloodless Shylockism. I want this morning to put the plough in at the curbstone of Trinity and drive it clear through to Wall Street ferry; and so it shall go, if the horses are strong enough to draw the plough.

First of all, Wall Street stands as a type in this country for tried integrity and the most outrageous villainy. Farmers who have only a few hundred dollars’92 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 a Shadrach, with hair unsinged, or he is burned into a black moral cinder. No half-way work about it. If I wanted to find integrity bomb-proof, I would go among the bankers and merchants of Wall Street; yet, because there have been such villainies enacted there at different times, some men have supposed that it is a great financial debauchery, and they hardly dare go near the street, or walk up and 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 integrity 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 wounded, when breadstuffs were wanted for famishing 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 responses in all the land have come from Wall Street.

But while that street type is a type of 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 crocodiles 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 a man to go into business unless his moral principle is thoroughly settled. That is no place for a man to go into business who does not know when he is overpaid five dollars by mistake, whether he had better take it back again or not. That is no place for a man to go who has large funds in trust, and who is all the time tempted to speculate with them. That is no place for a man to go who does not quite know whether the laws of the State forbid usury or patronize it. Oh! how many men have risked themselves in the vortex and gone down, for the simple reason their integrity had not been thoroughly established. Remember poor Ketcham, how soon the flying hoofs of his iron grays clattered with him to his destruction. Remember poor Gay, at thirty years of age astonishing the world with his fortunes and his forgeries. Remember that famous man whose steamboats and whose opera-houses could not atone for his adulterous rides through Central Park in the face of decent New York, and whose behavior on Wall Street, by its example, has blasted tens of thousands of young men of this generation.

I hold up the polluted memory to warn young men, whose moral principles are not thoroughly settled, to keep out of Wall Street. It is no place for a man who shivers under the blast of temptation. Let me say also to those who are doing legitimate business on that or similar streets of which that is a type, to stand firm in Christian principle. You are in a great commercial battlefield. Be courageous. There is such a thing as a hero of the bank and a hero of the Stock Exchange. You be that hero. I have not so much admiration for the French Empress who stood in her balcony in Paris, and addressed an excited mob and quelled it, as I have admiration for that venerable banker on Wall Street who, in 1864, stood on the steps of his moneyed institution and quieted the fears of depositors, and bade peace to the angry wave of commercial excitement. God did not allow the lions to hurt Daniel, and he will not allow the ’93bears’94 to hurt you. Remember, my friend, that all these scenes of business will soon have passed away, and by the law of God’92s eternal right all the affairs of your business life will be adjudicated. Honesty pays best for both worlds.

Again: I have to remark that Wall Street is a type throughout the country of legitimate speculation on the one hand, and of ruinous gambling on the other. Almost every merchant is to some extent a speculator. He depends, not only upon the difference between the wholesale price at which he gets the goods and the retail at which he disposes of them, but also upon the fluctuation of the markets. If the markets greatly rise, he greatly gains. If the markets greatly sink, he greatly loses. It is as honest to deal in stocks as to deal in iron or coal or hardware or dry-goods. He who condemns all stock-dealings as though they were iniquities simply shows his own ignorance. Stop all legitimate speculation in this country, and you stop all banks, you stop all factories, you stop all storehouses, you stop all the great financial prosperities of this country. A stock-dealer is only a commission merchant under another name. He gets his commission on one style of goods. You, the grocer, get your commission on another style of goods. The dollar that he makes is just as bright and fair and honest a dollar as the dollar earned by the day laborer.

But here we must draw the line between legitimate speculation and ruinous gambling. You, a stock operator without any property behind you, financially irresponsible, sell one hundred dollars of nothing and get paid for it. You sell one hundred shares at ten thousand dollars at thirty days. If at the end of thirty days you can get the scrip for nine thousand dollars, you have made a thousand. If at the end of thirty days you have to pay eleven thousand, then you have lost a thousand. Now that is trafficking in fiction, that is betting on chances, that involves the spirit of gambling as much as anything that ever goes on in the lowest gambling hell of New York or Brooklyn.

At certain times, almost every prosperous merchant wakes up, and he says: ’93Now, I have been successful in my line of trade, and I have a tolerable income; I think I shall go down to Wall Street and treble it in three weeks. There’92s my neighbor. He was in the same line of business; he has his three or four hundred thousand dollars from the simple fact he went into Wall Street. I think I shall go too.’94 Here they come, retired merchants, who want to get a little excitement in their lethargic veins. Here they come, the trustees of great property, to fool everything away. Here they come, men celebrated for prudence, to trifle with the livelihoods of widows and orphans. Do you wonder that sometimes they become insane? It is insanity. Do you know there are hundreds of young men in Brooklyn and New York who are perishing under the passion for stock-gambling? Do you know that in all Christian lands this is one of the greatest curses?

It is not peculiar to mercurial Americans. Oh, no! Almost every nation has indulged in it. The Hollanders, the most phlegmatic people in the world, had their gambling seizure in 1683. It was called the tulip mania. It was a speculation in tulips. Properties worth half a million dollars turned into tulips. All the Holland nation either buying or selling tulips. One tulip root sold for two hundred dollars, another for two thousand. Excitement rolling on and rolling on until history tells us that one Amsterdam tulip, which was supposed to be the only one of the kind in all the world, actually brought in the markets one million eight hundred and sixteen thousand dollars! That is a matter of history. Of course the crash came, and all Holland went down under it.

But France must have its gambling expedition, and that was in 1716. John Law’92s Mississippi scheme it was called. The French had heard that this American continent was built out of solid gold, and the project was to take it across the ocean and drop it in France. Excitement beyond anything that had yet been seen in the world. Three hundred thousand applicants for shares. Excitement so great that sometimes the mounted military had to disperse the crowds that had come to buy the stock. Five hundred temporary tents built to accommodate the people until they could have opportunity of interviewing John Law. A lady of great fashion had her coachman upset her near the place where John Law was passing, in order that she might have an interview with that benevolent and sympathetic gentleman! Stocks went up to two thousand and fifty per cent., until one day suspicion got into the market, and down it all went’97John Law’92s Mississippi scheme’97burying its projector and some of the greatest financiers in all France, and was almost as bad as a French revolution.

Sedate England took its chance in 1720. That was the South Sea bubble. They proposed to transfer all the gold of Peru and Mexico and the islands of the sea to England. Five millions’92 worth of shares were put on the market at three hundred pounds a share. The books open, in a few days it is all taken, and twice the amount subscribed.

Excitement following excitement, until all kinds of gambling projects came forth under the wing of this South Sea enterprise. There was a large company formed with great capital for providing funerals for all parts of the land. Another company with large capital, five million pounds of capital, to develop a wheel in perpetual motion. Another company with a capital of four million pounds, to insure people against loss by servants. Another company with two million five hundred thousand pounds capital to transplant walnut trees from Virginia to England. Then, to cap the climax, a company was formed for ’93a great undertaking, nobody to know what it is.’94 And lo! six hundred thousand pounds in shares were offered at one hundred pounds a share; books were opened at nine o’92clock in the morning and closed at three o’92clock in the afternoon, and the first day it was all subscribed. ’93A great undertaking, nobody to know what it is.’94 An old magazine of those days describes the scene (Hunt’92s Magazine). It says: ’93From morning until evening ’91Change Alley was full to overflowing with one dense moving mass of living beings, composed of the most incongruous materials, and in all things save the mad pursuit wherefor they were employed utterly opposite in their principles and feelings, and far asunder in their stations in life and the professions they follow. Statesmen and clergymen deserted their high stations to enter upon this great theater of speculation and gambling. Churchmen and dissenters left their fierce disputes and forgot their wranglings upon church government in the deep and hazardous game they were playing for worldly treasures and for riches, which, if gained, were liable to disappear within an hour of their creation. Whigs and Tories buried their weapons of political warfare, discarded party animosities, and mingled together in kind and friendly intercourse, each exulting as their stocks advanced in price, and grumbling when fortune frowned upon them. Lawyers, physicians, merchants, and traveling men forsook their employment, neglected their business, disregarded their engagements, to whirl along in the stream, to be at last ingulfed in the wild sea of bankruptcy. Females mixed with the crowd, forgetting the station and employment which nature had fitted them to adorn, and dealt boldly and extensively, and like those by whom they were surrounded, rose from poverty to wealth, and from that were thrown down to beggary and want, and all in one short week, and perhaps before the evening which terminated the first day of their speculation. Ladies of high rank, regardless of every appearance of dignity, and blinded by the prevailing infatuation, drove to the shops of their milliners and haberdashers, and there met their stockbrokers, whom they regularly employed, and through whom extensive sales were daily negotiated. In the midst of the excitement all distinctions of party and religion and circumstances and character were swallowed up.’94

But it was left for our own country to surpass all. We have the highest mountains and the greatest cataracts and the longest rivers, and, of, course, we had to have the largest swindle. One would have thought that the nation had seen enough in that direction during the morus multicaulis excitement, when almost every man had a bunch of crawling silkworms in his house out of which he expected to make a fortune. But all this excitement was as nothing compared with what took place in 1864, when a man near Titusville, Pennsylvania, digging for a well, struck oil. Twelve hundred oil companies call for one billion of stock. Prominent members of churches, as soon as a certain amount of stock was assigned them, saw it was their privilege to become presidents or secretaries or members of the board of direction. Some of these companies never had a foot of ground, never expected to have. Their entire equipment was a map of a region where oil might be, and two phials of grease, crude and clarified. People rushed down from all parts of the country by the first train and put their hard earnings in the gulf. A young man came down from the oil region of Pennsylvania utterly demented, having sold his farm at a fabulous price, because it was supposed there might be oil there’97coming to a hotel in Philadelphia, at the time I was living there, throwing down a five-thousand-dollar check to pay for his noonday meal and saying he did not care anything about the change! Then he stepped back to the gasburner to light his cigar with a thousand-dollar note. Utterly insane.

The good Christian people said: ’93This company must be all right, because Elder So-and-So is president of it, and Elder-So-and-So is secretary of it, and then there are three or four highly respected professing Christians in the board of directors. To join this company is almost like joining the church!’94 They did not know that when a professed Christian goes into stock-gambling he lies like sin. But alas! for the country; it became a tragedy, and one thousand million dollars were swamped. There are families today sitting in the shadow of destitution, who but for that great national outrage would have had their cottages and their homesteads. I hold up before the young men of this congregation these four great stock-gambling schemes that they may see to what length men will go smitten of this passion, and I want to show them how all the best interests of society are against it, and God is against it, and will condemn it for time and condemn it for eternity.

O men of Wall Street, and of all streets, stand back from nefarious enterprises, join that great company of Christian men in New York and Brooklyn who are maintaining their integrity, notwithstanding all the pressure of temptation. In the morning, when you open business in the broker’92s office or in the banking-house, ask God’92s blessing, and when you close it pronounce a benediction upon it. A kind of business that a man cannot engage in with prayer is no business for you. I wish that the words of George Peabody, uttered in the hearing of the people of his native town’97Danvers, Massachusetts, I wish that those words could be uttered in the hearing of all the young men of this congregation and all the young men throughout the land. He said: ’93Though Providence has granted me unvaried and universal success in the pursuit of fortune in other lands, I am still in heart the humble boy who left yonder unpretending dwelling. There is not a youth within the sound of my voice whose early opportunities and advantages are not very much greater than were my own, and I have since achieved nothing that is impossible to the most humble boy among you.’94 George Peabody’92s success in business was not more remarkable than his integrity and his great-hearted benevolence. I pray upon you God’92s protecting and prospering blessing. I hope you may all make fortunes for time and fortunes for eternity.

Some day when you come out of your place of business, and you go to the clearing house, or the place of custom or the bank or your own home’97as you come out of your place of business, just look up at the clock of old Trinity and see by the movement of the hands how your life is rapidly going away, and be reminded of the fact that before God’92s throne of inexorable judgment you must yet give account for what you have done since the day you sold the first yard of cloth or the first pound of sugar. I pray for you all prosperity. Stand close by Christ, and Christ will stand close by you. The greater the temptation, the more magnificent the reward. But alas! for the stock-gambler’97what will he do in the judgment? That day will settle everything. That to the stock-gambler will be a ’93break’94 at the ’93first call.’94 No smuggling into heaven. No ’93collaterals’94 on which to trade your way in. Go in through Christ, the Lord, or you will forever stay out. God forbid that after you have done your last day’92s work on earth, and the hushed assembly stands around with bowed heads at your obsequies’97God forbid that the most appropriate text for your funeral oration should be ’93As a partridge sitteth on eggs and hatcheth them not, so he that getteth riches, and not by right, shall leave them in the midst of his days, and at the end he shall be a fool.’94 Or that the most appropriate funeral psalm should be the words of the poet:

Price of many a crime untold,

Gold, gold, gold, gold.

Autor: T. De Witt Talmage