at all unless prices are high, led these same judicious students to sell the same stocks during the prevalence of high prices, both the stocks which they owned and large amounts which they did not own. Again, the study of facts led to wise conclusions, and these ended in successful results. Both as bulls and as bears the wise students have fared well. The careless and superficial public, coming in too late as bulls, found themselves at last compelled to become unwilling sellers at greater or less losses, in some cases so severe as to shatter households and drive citizens to ruin.

Thus the person who studies real values must not be content with that alone. He must also study the facts that in times of stress and storm make real values fluctuate as wildly in manner, if not in amount, as those of the most fanciful securities, and he must learn that no operation on margin is really safe unless the margin is large beyond the ordinary run, and is backed by equally large reserves. Some financial teachers lay it down that your risks should not exceed 25 per cent. of your capital. This is excessive prudence; but the man who keeps half a mile away from the edge of a cliff will never fall from it. One who has studied the share market carefully has eventually found that if he is able to pay one half the market price of his holdings, he need have little fear as to the other half; that is, on judicious selections of properties.

No mention is made here of shares that sell in December at 72 and in March at 30. Whoever buys such goods should pay for them and put them away, and let them incubate with such patience as is attributed to the hopeful setting hen.

The student of the stock market has at certain periods no easy task before him. Imports are sometimes large, and exports small. We sell to foreigners a million per week of cotton, and buy from them two millions per week of coffee, the cotton yielding us a small profit, the coffee yielding foreigners an immense profit. Other nations at times do not seem to prefer our grains to those of Russia and the East, despite those foreign markets of bewildering extent and good prices which exist, I fear, only in the imagination of free-traders. Then, too, the

indebtedness of corporations and individuals acts as a constant menace to the natural tendency of loose capital to be lent out to useful enterprises.

Yet, at the bottom of all this turbulent mass of facts there are natural laws at work which, if we study them in relation to the objects which they control, will be found to be as sure in their operation as sunrise. The collapse of the iniquitous coal combination, as cruel as one to raise the price of water or air, was the result of natural law, and the same laws are busy to-day, and the facts are always with us. It is the business of the diligent to find them and to profit thereby.

Next to the unwisdom of selecting and following bad or incompetent advisers in matters of speculation and investment, there are also certain persons whom, if you wish to do well and make a fortune honestly, you should be careful to avoid. You will not always know them by their appearance; in fact, that is often the worst rule to go by, for they are generally well disguised. It is in their walk, talk, and conversation that you will find them out, and, that this be the easier, I have made a collection of their characteristics, as follows:

Avoid a man

Who vilifies his benefactor;

Who unjustly accuses others of bad deeds;
Who never has a good word for anybody;
Who is always prating about his own virtues;
Who, when he drinks, habitually drinks alone;
Who boasts of the superiority of his family;

Who talks religion down-town in connection with his daily business affairs;

Who talks recklessly against the virtue of respectable

women;

Who runs in debt with no apparent intention of paying; Who borrows small sums on his note or check dated ahead ; Who won't work for an honest living;

Who looks down upon those who do;

Who imputes bad motives to those trying to do good;
Who betrays confidence ;

Who lies;

Who is honest only for policy's sake;

Who deceives his wife and boasts of it to others;
Who chews tobacco in a public conveyance ;

Who gets intoxicated in public places;

Who partakes of hospitality and talks behind his entertainer's back;

Who borrows money from a friend and then blackguards the lender.

With a population of 80,000,000 people, which this country now has, it is easy to find associates in life without selecting men possessed of any of these characteristics, and life is the better worth living without them.

You will both save and make money by strict observance of this short catalogue of avoidances. You are not called upon to do anything or to risk any money in the exercise of this discretion. It simply consists in letting such people severely alone, and if you have been in the habit of being imposed upon by such characters, you will find your happiness as well as your treasury greatly increased by prudently avoiding them.

CHAPTER III.

MONEY AND USURY.

Various opinions regarding interest and usury. Why should not compensation for the use of money be left to the freedom of contract untrammeled by restrictive laws? Views of Lord Bacon and Lord Mansfield on usury and interest.—The word "interest" not known in Bacon's time. All laws against usury capable of evasion. — Various rates and the laws of usury pertaining to different states. Freedom of contract the true doctrine in money-lending and borrowing.

"M

[ONEY and Usury" is a subject that has perhaps been more extensively discussed than any other within the sphere of trade and finance, and usury has been the fertile theme of a great amount of both sense and nonsense, as well as of a large number of foolish laws.

In times gone by the word "usury" was employed in the same sense as "interest" is now, and Lord Bacon, in his essay on usury, evidently attaches this signification to it, as he makes a distinction between high and low "rates of usury," and the context shows he was unacquainted with the term "interest." He criticises pretty severely the critics on usury, and says: "Many have made witty invectives against usury. They say that it is a pity the devil should have God's part, which is the tithe, that the usurer is the great Sabbath-breaker because his plough goeth every Sunday."

So we see from Bacon's opinion that the prejudice against paying for the use of other people's money is as old as it is unreasonable.

We have no record of any period when within the confines of civilization men were not in the habit of paying for the use of the property of other men; in fact, such compensation marks the dawn of civilization a time when it was discovered to be

better to hire another man's goods or lands than to kill him for the sake of becoming their owner. An equivalent for the use of lands or buildings we style rent; for the use of chattels, hire; for the use of money, interest. One of the most noticeable facts about the last-named equivalent is that in almost all communities its amount, as related to the material for the use of which it is paid, has been made the subject of legislation. Laws have never been enacted regulating the prices of rents or of the hire of chattels, but statutes regulating the interest of money are beyond computation as to number, and their existence dates back to epochs beyond which public record and the memory of mankind run not to the contrary.

Since this is an undeniable fact, there must be a reason for its origin and its persistent vitality. May not this be the reason? - that money not being a commodity, but the representative of all commodities, capable of passing through all metamorphoses of lands, houses, cattle, grain-in short, of all transferable things whatsoever may be said to have a value free from such changes as other commodities are constantly undergoing; therefore, while the owner of these may lawfully demand any price he pleases for the use of such property, and take all he can get, the owner of money must not demand or take more than a certain price, which price shall be stated by the lawmakers of the community. This is the probable basis of usury laws, though we should not assert that laws are enacted solely in order to assert a principle. As a matter of fact, they are kept on the statute books in deference to a sentiment which is supposed to pervade the public mind, that poor people must be protected from the rapacity of money-lenders.

It will not be difficult to show that the alleged principle on which usury laws are based is illogical; and further, that, as a matter of fact, these laws do not prevent poor borrowers, or borrowers upon hazardous pledges, from paying high prices for the use of money. That money is not a commodity because it is the representative and summary and equivalent of all commodities, is a conclusion which is not only open to doubt, may be with reason flatly denied. That the greater includes

but