no honors, nor his services contribute anything to the jurisprudence of the country. Law left the country in disguise, fleeing before the multitudes who had been ruined by his profligacy. Chase shifted his responsibility, and, entering upon his new career, exemplified precisely the same ability for the judicial ermine, that he had shown for the exchequer to defile and destroy it. As a Chief Justice of a Court before which all disputes must be adjudicated, he anticipated his judgments in Bank, in his political harangues among crazy, illiterate barbarians, in New Orleans, Charleston and Washington; and in like manner before New England colleges, upon the very questions upon which he would be called to decide, as the principal member of the Court of last resort. William Sprague, a young, stupid and wealthy inebriate, who represents Rhode Island in the United States Senate, married the daughter of the Secretary, and controlled the speculations in cotton, amounting to many millions of dollars. To accommodate an evening party, Mrs. Sprague built a special house for her ball-room, for an evening carousal, at a heavy cost, and tore it away the next morning, in imitation of the extravagance of the reign of Nero, which every Department seemed anxious to emulate.

CHAPTER IX.

SQUANDERING THE PUBLIC LANDS THE BASIS OF STOCK-GAMBLING.

THE PRETEXT FOR STOCK-GAMBLING IN THE UNITED STATES TO PREVENT THE EARLY PAYMENT OF THE PUBLIC DEBT.

THE history of stock gambling, which has been many times written by graphic pens, would justify repetition, if not amplification, did time and space permit.

The great power and evil of this system, is, that it enables companies and individuals to treat the public credits and debts as gamblers do cards, giving to stocks a public value different from the real value, making due allowances for the possible rise or fall in the market. In these transactions there are always two persons engaged :-the one who understands well the market, and the other who thinks that he does, but does not; - in simple language, the shrewd who win, and the conceited who lose.

This system is the source of fabulous wealth, and embraces all of the modern theories of banking tariff, wars, and consequent public debts and credits. It is the faro bank of our present system of politics. It capitalizes everything, and places a prospective, rather than an actual value upon all property; and upon the products, profits and appreciations of property, audits combinations, and pretends to fairly divide the difference between the present and prospective value of representative paper.

Since the invention of old-fashioned falsehood in the infernal regions, there has perhaps never been a system of such universal fraud, as that of stock-gambling. It is the first-born child of paper money, and the parent of all the evils, crimes and deceptions, corruptions and frauds, incident to periodical and widespread bankruptcy, in which the great body of a people are

ruined in their property, which has been absorbed by the cunning few. This form of wickedness and source of sorrow, cannot exist without debt and public calamities, upon which it feeds and

creates.

The art of printing facilitates this mode of gambling in latter times, when it embraces in its range, railroads, telegraphs, salt, oil, cotton, woolen and iron manufactures, and everything which has a doubtful or problematical value.

The debt of Great Britain, contracted by the Revolution of 1688, was perhaps the foundation of extensive stock-gambling in England. Upon this the Bank of England was established in 1697, which loaned the amount of its capital stock to the government. The ambrotypes of this debt were issued in the form of bank notes. From that day to this, in every country where confidence can be commanded, to mortgage property upon the facile promises of gentlemen, bank notes are freely issued, and other forms of security enter into the circulating medium.

The South Sea Joint Stock Company, John Law's Mississippi bubble, with its explosion of business and its train of miseries, which the great common sense of Colbert, the financial experience of Turgot, and versatile genius of Necker, could only baffle, until the elements of discord sought vent in Revolution. This Revolution, having no money upon which to carry on its wars, gave rise to a stock-jobbing, which reached the fabulous sum of $8,437,535,000.

The stock-gambling of the world has been reduced to a system, and has its markets, and boards of trade. Boards of trade were established in France, at Toulon in 1549, at Rouen 1556, in London by Elizabeth in person in 1566. The Parisian Bourse was established in 1724.

The first stock-gambling in America grew out of the Continental money, which was issued to the amount of $359,000,000, in a population of not more than 3,500,000. This vast amount of irredeemable paper was reduced by a certain kind of funding, to $76,000,000 in 1795; and finally to $39,135,000 in 1812. The necessities of the war of the Revolution induced this system, but the determined virtue of our fathers, who were weary and ruined by a paper wealth, made them restive under its perpetuity.

There was, however, one mode in which the most extravagant profligacy might be indulged unsuspected, under various false pretences, and build up a system of stock-gambling in the distribution of the public lands.

The public lands were given in trust by the older States for the payment of the public debt, and held sacred for that purpose.

In our earlier history, from this there was no digression.

But for several years these lands had been used as the basis of a system of stock-gambling, under the shallow and false pretense of giving bounties to soldiers. This commenced in the payment of the soldiers of the earlier wars, then to the Mexican soldiers, then was extended to the surviving soldiers of the war of 1812, then to soldiers of the Black Hawk, Florida, and other Indian wars.

These gifts were ostensibly bestowed upon the soldier or his legal representatives, but in fact, was a scrip issued for the benefit of stock-gamblers, bought up for a few drinks of whiskey, in the certificates of discharge; and of all the scrip issued, not one soldier, or his family, in every fifty, received any benefit from this scrip, and it was not intended that they should. The whole scheme was one laid by Congressmen and speculators, to swindle both the soldiers and the government, and the scheme was a success. You may now see homeless Mexican soldiers wandering through the land, who sold their certificates of discharge for a meal's victuals or a night's lodging, under the very shadow of palaces reared by the money coined of their blood. In this way the double wrong was perpetrated, the soldier robbed of his legitimate pension, and the government defrauded of the richest mineral mountains, and the most productive valleys upon the face of the earth.

Just at the time when this sacred trust-fund should have been scrupulously appropriated to the payment of the public debt, now frightfully augmenting, it was under charitable pretences converted into scrip, which soon found its way into the coffers of the brokers.

Lands were granted to build agricultural colleges, under pretence of educating the poor of the country, to till the land. This was a double fraud in the interest of stock-gambling.

First. These pieces of scrip were sold at less than one-half of the accredited land office value, to build these colleges. Second. When the colleges are built, they will be appropriated to the use of the children of the rich, precisely as the military academy at West Point and other military institutions have been, and for the purposes of education, be the merest farce.

These grants were unjust in principle and wrong in policy. If the general government has power to educate the States in specific learning, then the money should have been directly appropriated, without sacrifice of value.

These lands were, in like manner, given for homesteads with equal injustice. The government had no more power to give away the public lands, than it had to appropriate the money with which they are bought, to buy blacksmiths', carpenters', or bricklayers' tools for young people just entering the trade.

This extravagant waste of the resources of the country is but a part of the funding system, to make stock-jobbing a perpetual institution, for which it is not improbable that the government may establish a bureau; and, like the French, subjected to government espionage, as they have already disposed of other gaming, houses of prostitution, &c.

This is a humiliating commentary upon both our wealth and prosperity, that the greatest gold producing country of modern times, is cursed with a worthless, irredeemable currency, without a dollar of gold for business, exchange, or commerce. But this comes of stock-gambling, and will continue with it.

Is this not sorrowful, that in less than five years from the beginning of our indebtedness, we were paying more interest upon our debt than any other government upon the face of the earth? With a population and resources greatly inferior to that of Great Britain, Russia, or France, that all of the property, labor, and accumulation of three centuries, is squandered in the fraudulent enforcement of a political vagary by incompetent men,—all for a war which may be repeated at every period when force is chosen, instead of reason, for the arbitrament of disputes, until the country is left without military force, financial credit, or the semblance of justice in the government, or freedom in the spirit of the people, and the public lands held to secure the payment squandered without a purpose.