|
rsa, has been the victim of anything but fortune's assaults; his money has been as deliberately stolen as if his pocket had been picked.
So certain is eventual loss to the cover-speculator that I would endorse the saying of an esteemed friend of mine, a merchant in St. Joseph, Missouri, who when a young man boasted of gaining a large sum by dealing in ' corners in grain' (a system precisely similar to the cover system, only the varying prices of particular kinds of grain, instead of the prices of particular stocks, decide the question of loss or gain), told the lucky gambler that the very best thing he could do with his winnings was to fling them into the Missouri.
To fine, no one has any but the minutest chance of failing to lose largely by cover-speculation--unless he is prepared to speculate with such knowledge as would make every transaction a villainy.
FALLACIES AND COINOIDENCES.
EVERY one is familiar with the occasional occurrence of coincidences, so strange--considered abstractly--that it appears difficult to regard them as due to mere casualty. The mind is dwelling on some person or event, and suddenly a circumstance happens which is associated in some altogether unexpected, and as it were improbable, manner with that person or event. A scheme has been devised which can only fail if some utterly unlikely series of events should occur, and precisely those events take place. Sometimes a coincidence is utterly trivial, yet attracts attention by the singular improbability of the observed events. We are thinking of some circumstance, let us say, in which two or three persons are concerned, and the first book or paper we turn to shows, in the very first line we look at, the names of those very persons, though really relating to others in no way connected with them; and so on, with many other kinds of coincidence, equally trivial and equally singular. Yet again, there are other coincidences which are rendered striking by their frequent recurrence. It is to such recurring coincidences that common superstitions owe their origin, while the special superstitions
|
