Speculation | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Oct 26, 1869

Speculation.

The New York Journal of Commerce, in an editorial on “the Results of Speculation,” has the following just and excellent remarks:

Speculation—the desire to obtain money not fairly earned—is the crying evil in the land, and every man who engages in it exposes himself to sin and shame. A Christian character is a strong bulwark, but it is easily sapped and undermined the moment its possessor admits this greed of unlawful gain. Thousands of speculators have come to grief this year, who have not made free with trust funds, and whose friends little know at what terrible expense they have acquired their bitter experience. Every such downfall of a solid reputation as has furnished the text for this article, brings to the editors of this paper the most touching acknowledgments from those who have tampered with this temptation, and have been saved through the instrumentality of our appeals and warnings against this monster vice. We have memorials from all classes of people—merchants, clerks, doctors, lawyers, clergymen and laborers—who, at various times, were seized with the general thirst, and were rushing madly after the fortune offered to the successful speculator, and who yet paused and renounced the struggle as we set before them its guilt and perils.

We sound the note of warning again. The mightiest become weak and irresolute when once the victims of this raging desire. They see an end that blinds them to the guilt and folly of the readiest means, and thus one after another they fall and are ruined. No station is exempt; no principles can resist when the path is fairly entered. It is like the letting out of water; it creates the tide which prevents the return to safety. Work is honorable, and poverty is no disgrace; but speculation, sooner or later, is grief, shame and ruin.