whom he is going to give the choice of his money or his life. [Sidenote: THE SELFISHNESS AND HARD-HEARTEDNESS OF THE PROFESSIONAL SPECULATOR.] If he intends to buy a large amount of stock, which he knows is going to rise, he throws off the cloak of secrecy when he enters the market to sell, and depresses the price as a preliminary feint, so that the contemplated rigging of the price may be as little encumbered by bulls as possible. When it is known in a market that a great speculator is selling, weak bulls are speedily frightened out, and when he has such an object in view it is his “game” to intimidate with all the force of his prestige and the power of his capital. Such a man must have a concrete hardness of indifference through which nothing can penetrate to his heart. It is as necessary to the success of his operations that he possess no more regard for the feelings or pockets of other people than a hungry tiger would for him if he were airing himself unconcernedly in a Bengal jungle. He has a purpose in view, just as a surgeon has when the amputation of a leg has been decided upon. The speculator’s sole aim in the operation is the profit, towards which he cuts his way, regardless of the nature of the obstacles to be overcome, just as the knife is plunged into the flesh, severing the arteries, muscles, and sinews that surround the bone which it is the object to reach and saw through. For a man to tread a path in which he must systematically not only disregard the interest of other people, but deliberately calculate upon the weaknesses of human nature which characterize the crowd, in order to work upon them for his own ends, it is obvious that he must be constituted in a quite exceptional manner, and not in a way that it is at all desirable that others should attempt to imitate. If uninitiated people who enter the arena in which some of the professional speculators flourish, were to spend some months in gathering information and in close observance of the _modus operandi_, so far as they can get to see and hear, many of them would soon be persuaded that they were utterly useless at such work, and would retire, thanking their stars they had been sensible enough to look on at the game before hazarding anything themselves. From the very fact that but few are successful as professional speculators, it can be safely argued that but few are competent to engage in the business at all, even when educated in all the tricks and deceptions necessary as collateral aids to the machinery which we have shown, and shall show more in detail, to be a _sine qua non_. Those qualities which have, more particularly in the past, characterized the successful diplomatist are also of the utmost importance to the speculator. Successful diplomatists in all times, with few exceptions, have been men who have never scrupled to resort to finessing, chicanery, and the _ruse de guerre_ in every form under cover of a saintly innocence that would shame the devil.