"After the boom is over, after the panic's on, After the fools are leavin', after the money's gone, Many a bank is "busted," if we could see in the room, Many a pocket is empty, after the boom." "YOUR UNCLE." [Illustration: COMING.] An impecunious speculator once flooded a town with handbills and posters containing this announcement: "Your Uncle is coming." The streams of passers-by looked at the bill boards and wondered what it meant. The speculator rented the theatre, and one day a new flood of handbills and posters made this announcement: "Your Uncle is here." He gave orders to his stage manager to raise the curtain exactly at eight o'clock. The speculator himself stood in the door and received the admission fees and then disappeared. In their curiosity to see the performance of "Your Uncle," the villagers filled every seat in the theatre long before the hour for the performance arrived. The curtain rose at the appointed hour, and lo! on a board, in the center of the stage, was a card bearing this announcement in large letters: "_Your Uncle is gone._" What a splendid illustration of modern speculation and its willing victims who are so easily led into the "Paradise of Fools!" [Illustration: GONE.] FOOLS. But why mourn and brood over broken fortunes and the calamities of life? Why tarry in the doldrums of pessimism, with never a breeze to catch your limp and drooping sails and waft you on a joyous wave? Pessimism is the nightmare of the world. It is the prophet of famine, pestilence, and human woe. It is the apostle of the Devil, and its mission is to impede the progress of civilization. It denounces every institution established for human development as a fraud. It stigmatizes law as the machinery of injustice; it sneers at society as hollow-hearted corruption and insincerity; it brands politics as a reeking mass of rottenness, and scoffs at morality as the tinsel of sin. Its disciples are those who rail and snarl at everything that is noble and good, to whom a joke is an assault and battery, a laugh is an insult to outraged dignity, and the provocation of a smile is like passing an electric current through the facial muscles of a corpse. God deliver us from the fools who seek to build their paradise on the ashes of those they have destroyed. God deliver us from the fools whose life work is to cast aspersions upon the motives and characters of the leaders of men. I believe the men who reach high places in politics are, as a rule, the best and brainiest men in the land, and upon their shoulders rest the safety and well-being of the peace-loving, God-fearing millions. I believe the world is better to-day than it ever was before. I believe the refinements of modern society, its elegant accomplishments, its intellectual culture, and its conceptions of the beautiful, are glorious evidences of our advancement toward a higher plane of being.