"What cannot a cunning head devise, to spoil paper with! Trade is a racer,
gentlemen, and merchants the jockeys who ride. He who carries most weight
may lose; but then nature does not give all men the same dimensions, and
judges are as necessary to the struggles of the mart as to those of the
course. Go, mount your gelding, if you are lucky enough to have one that
has not been melted into a weasel by the heartless blacks, and ride out to
Harlaem Flats, on a fine October day, and witness the manner in which the
trial of speed is made. The rogues of riders cut in here, and over there;
now the whip and now the spur; and though they start fair, which is more
than can always be said of trade, some one is sure to win. When it is neck
and neck, then the neat is to be gone over, until the best bottom gains
the prize."
"Why is it then that men of deep reflection so often think that commerce
flourishes most when least encumbered?"
"Why is one man born to make laws, and another to break them?--Does not
the horse run faster with his four legs free, than when in hopples? But in
trade, Master Seadrift, and Captain Cornelius Ludlow, each of us is his
own jockey; and putting the aid of custom-house laws out of the question,
just as nature has happened to make him. Fat or lean, big bones or fine
bones, he must get to the goal as well as he can. Therefore your heavy
weights call out for sandbags and belts, to make all even.
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