This extravagance in living does not always involve the same amount of culpability. It is sometimes done through ignorance. There is a lamentable want of information among the mass of the people, as to what expenditure the labor and real estate of a country can sustain. Fourfifths of mankind must live on the wages of labor. Now the avails of the labor of an individual can not be much extended beyond a certain sum. In this country, from the favorable circumstances of a fresh soil, a thin population, and the great perfection of the mechanic arts, the wages of ordinary labor may procure some two or three times the comforts they will in any other part of the globe. The houses of the laboring population of this country present an aspect which would astonish the same class in any other part of the world. Then our republican institutions, while they produce the noblest fruits, in elevating every class, by decreeing a political equality, are attended by this evil result, that they produce the strongest degree of emulation, as to the outward insignia of rank and consequence. It is this feeling, and not the struggle for the necessaries, or even the conveniences of life, that has produced most of the mischiefs under which our country is groaning at the present time-a struggle to come up to an artificial standard, set up by mere fashion, or a perverted public opinion. Those who pos

sess, in addition to their personal exertions, productive property, either by hereditary right or by their own economy, must have the power to live in a more expensive manner than those who depend solely upon labor. But in a republican country, there seems to be a greater reluctance to acquiesce in this necessary and inevitable difference of conditions, than in any other. There is a greater struggle to keep up appearances, and, of course, a greater tendency to live beyond their means. The pursuit of this kind of ambition is absolutely endless; for, whatever scale of expenditure you may reach, there is another just beyond it, quite as tempting as that you have already attained. The inevitable consequence of this universal ambition is, debt, embarrassment, and ruin, on a great scale. Then comes a period of hard times, equal in duration to the period of extravagance.

This state of things is greatly promoted by a low state of information among the people, and by a want of education and intelligence among the masses. I know of nothing in this world which requires greater wisdom, than to know how to spend money. It is the easiest thing imaginable to get rid of, and in the most foolish manner; and people are apt to make a foolish use of it, just in proportion to their want of general information. Put any considerable sum of money into the hands of an ignorant, uneducated

person, and it is usually the means of plunging him into swift destruction. If he is accustomed

to get his living by labor, instead of investing it profitably and continuing his labors, nothing will be done until he has got rid of it in some way or other; generally in the purchase of low and corrupting pleasures. This is one great cause of the general prevalence of poverty in the world-the want of wisdom in the expenditure. Those who have no wisdom, in this respect, are necessarily poor; because, if they get any thing, they expend it immediately for their own hurt. Therefore it is that Providence doles out to them what he gives them by little and little, enough to purchase the necessaries, and some of the conveniences of life, and no more, lest they use their earnings to the injury of themselves and families. As it is, how much of the earnings of the laboring population of this country, has gone, for the last twenty years, to buy liquid madness, to ruin both soul and body, and turn a peaceful home into an abode of misery! Popular ignorance, then, is one of the causes of hard times; an ignorance, which knows not how much to expend, and on what to expend it; an ignorance, which makes men improvident of the future; which makes the most prosperous state the gauge of average expenditure, instead of the season of the most limited income. People may be growing poor

without knowing it, by adopting a style of living which the soil and the labor of the country will not sustain. Most especially, were our countrymen liable to do this within the last ten years, when two hundred millions worth of luxuries have been poured into the country, for which no other equivalent has been returned but scraps of paper, containing promises to pay!

Another cause of hard times is, a low state of the public morals. Not only is intelligence necessary to guide people in the right expenditure of money, but moral principle. It requires a high pitch of virtue to sustain great prosperity in the individual. Much more does it so in a nation. As soon as any surplus is created which might be employed for good purposes, there is always something invented to turn it to bad ones. The young, as soon as they become possessed of means, instead of employing them in personal improvement or honorable enterprise, are apt to plunge into reckless dissipation, corrupt all who come within the sphere of their influence, and, sooner or later, themselves become a burden upon society. Who are the tenants of our poor-houses, our prisons, and our penitentiaries? They are the wrecks of our young men, who have spent their best years in riotous living. Every dramshop, then, which you see throughout the length and breadth of

this vast country, where the laborer spends the money which should buy his children's bread, or the idler drops in to waste the money he never earned, in purchasing the means of transforming himself from an idler into a sot, a vagabond, and a brute, is a cause of hard times. Every knot of gamblers which you see at the corners of the streets, shining in the spoils of honest industry, and gloating on the wreck of families and fortunes, is a cause of hard times. Every lottery office, whose doors and windows are plastered all over with lies and deception, where the servant and the housemaid, the porter and the drayman, are cheated out of the wages of their sufferings and their toils, is a cause of hard times. Every horse race, which collects together a cloud of profligates, high and low, just as the carcass draws together a multitude of obscene and filthy birds, where old villains come to exercise their vocation, and young ones come to learn theirs, is a cause, and a most prolific cause, of hard times. Every establishment, which decency forbids me to name, where angels are changed to fiends, which are sustained by ill-gotten gains or downright plunder, which themselves not only breathe forth a deadly pestilence, but are the very mouth and entrance to the bottomless abyss, are so many causes of hard times, blighting, in early youth, hundreds and thousands, who should have been the orna