Chapter 10 IN WHAT MANNER MR. ZACHARIAH LONGSTRAW DETERMINED TO IMPROVE HIS FORTUNE.

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And now, the question occurring to me, I demanded into what kind of business we should enter.

"That," said Jonathan, "is a question more easily made than answered, seeing that there are so many ways of making money in this wicked world, that an honest man can scarce tell which to choose among them;" and then proceeded with great gravity to indicate divers callings, which he pronounced the most gainful in the world, and all or any of which, he thought, Abel could easily turn his hand to.

The first he advised was quackery-the making and vending of nostrums to cure all manner of diseases, including corns and the toothache; which was a business that had the merit of requiring no previous study or education, a tinker or cobbler being just as fit to follow it as a man that had read Paracelsus; and which, besides, as was evident from the speed with which its professors in general stepped from the kitchen-pot to the carriage, was the quickest way of making a fortune that could be imagined. I should have thought the young man was joking (for he had that vice in him to the last), had it not been for the fervour with which he pointed out the advantages of the vocation. A great recommendation, he averred, was, that it required no capital beyond a few hundred dollars, to be laid out in bottles and logwood, or some other colouring material. Pump-water, he said, was cheap; and as for the other sovereign ingredient, it was furnished by the buyer himself. "Yes!" said Jonathan, "faith is furnished by the buyer, who pays us for the privilege of swallowing it; we sell men their own conceits, bottled up with green, red, and brown water; and thereby we make them their own doctors. Who then can say the calling of the quack is not honest-nay, even philanthropic? He is a public benefactor-a friend even of physicians; for he frees them from the painful necessity of killing, by making men their own executioners."

And thus he went on until I cut him short by averring, that the whole business was little better than wholesale cheating and murder. He then recommended we should make Abel a tailor, solemnly declaring that, next to quackery, tailoring, which was a quackery of another sort, was the most profitable trade that could be followed; the mere gain from cabbaging, considering that an ingenious tailor got at least one inch of cloth out of every armhole, without counting the nails cribbed from other parts of a coat, being immense, and his profits, seeing that he lost nothing by a bad customer that he did not charge to a good one, as certain and immutable as the laws of the Medes and Persians.

In short, my nephew Jonathan was in the mood for expatiating on the merits of all money-making vocations; in which I should follow him, were I not urged by the exigencies arising from limited time and space to adhere to my story. He made divers recommendations, none of which I thought of weight; and upon Abel, who had heard him with gravity and attention, I was at last forced to call for advice and assistance. It was his opinion, and he advised accordingly, that all the money I could raise should be thrown into the stock-market, where, being applied to purchase and sale in the usual way, he had no doubt it could be made to yield a revenue of at least twenty per cent., and perhaps twice as much; and this proposal, strange as it may seem to the reader, after the experience Abram Skinner had given me in such matters, I did, after sundry doubts and hesitations, finally agree to.

"Verily," said I, "this is a gainful business, friend Abel; but, of a surety, neither honest nor humane, seeing that it is practised at the expense of the ignorant, and often the needy."

"Verily, no," said Abel Snipe, with fervour; "it shall be at the expense of the rich and niggardly-the man that is a miser and uncharitable-the broker and the gambler-the bull and the bear. Our dealings shall not be with the poor and ignorant man that dabbleth in stocks; but him will we charitably pluck from the grasp of the covetous, and thus protect, while drawing from the covetous man those alms of benevolence which he would never himself apply to the use of the afflicted."

"Verily," said I, pleased with the idea, "if we can make the covetous man charitable, it will be a good thing; and if we can protect the foolish ignorant person from his grasp, it will be still better. But, of a surety, Abel Snipe, this business will be as gambling?"

"Yea, and verily," said Abel Snipe, "it is as gambling when a gambler follows it; but in the hands of an honest man it is an honest profession. Is not money, bagged up in stocks and other investments, as merchandise? and, as merchandise, shall it not be lawfully bought and sold?"

"And moreover," said Jonathan, with equal earnestness, "if it be no better than cheating and swindling, this same buying and selling, are we not embarking in it out of charity? Verily, uncle Zachariah, in such a case as this, the end sanctifies the means. Behold what is the crying evil arising from money that is chartered in stocks, whether it be in banks, rail-roads, loans, or otherwise. This is money that is not taxed for charitable purposes; it is money appropriated solely to the purposes of gain. Why is it that a private man should be taxed to support the poor, and a bank, that has greater facilities for making money, be not taxed for the purpose at all? Verily, uncle Zachariah, we will do what the commonwealth should be doing; we will impose a tax upon the gains of chartered money, and distribute the proceeds among the needy."

To make short work of the matter, I will not pursue our debate further, but merely state that I was soon brought to consider Abel Snipe's scheme the best, honestest, and most philanthropic in the world, and to agree that he should open an office as a stock-broker, turning a penny or two in that way, while making much more by buying and selling on his own account. To this I was brought, in a great measure, by the representations and arguments of Jonathan, among which I esteem as still worthy of consideration that which stands above expressed in his own words. I am still of opinion that a tax, and a round one, should be imposed upon the profits of all banks and other money-making corporations, the same to be specifically appropriated to hospitals, and other charitable foundations, and perhaps also to public schools. In this way evil might be made productive of good, and our avarice rendered the parent of benevolence and knowledge. Of a verity, my philanthropy is not yet got out of me!

The aforementioned arrangement was made at an early period of my new existence, that is to say, at the close of spring; and the faithful Abel soon began to render a good account of his stewardship, by handing me over divers handsome sums of money, the profits of his speculations, which Jonathan and myself disbursed with rival enthusiasm. The experiment was continued in a prosperous manner until the month of September, when there happened a catastrophe not less unexpected than calamitous.

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