This branch of the subject can be almost indefinitely elaborated, but it may be concluded by one remark, which contains the pith of the whole thing, as applicable to speculation. Speculation as practised by the multitude is no better, in any market, than pitch and toss, and it is only by the aid of experience and more native skill, that some in the long run will lose less than others. One golden rule with reference to “tips,” no matter from whom they proceed, or by what alleged incontrovertible facts they are supported, is this: when you are told to buy go and sell. CHAPTER XI. SPECULATION BY MACHINERY. [Sidenote: MACHINERY IN EXISTENCE FOR DIRECTING HUMAN VOLITION.] [Sidenote: THE PATRICIAN INVESTOR.] Everything, in these times, is done by machinery, and there is consequently no need for astonishment at finding that machinery is in existence for directing human volition. Such mechanism has for a long time been in working order, although it is scarcely realized by the community as a body. The most accomplished professional speculators make it their business to study the peculiar tendencies of people who have any money over and above what they immediately require for necessities. Firms, with numbers of clerks, exist in our day, who have forty, fifty, and as many sixty thousand names of people duly registered in their books, with their place of abode, duration of residences, means, style of living, trade, or profession, and other particulars, enabling a judgment to be formed of the kind of investment which is likely to suit them. These names are all duly marshalled under different heads, and when a certain kind of undertaking is to be brought before the notice of the public, in the form of a prospectus, that class of people for whom it is thought a suitable investment, have one sent to them by post. Experience has shown that it is unwise to scatter prospectuses broadcast over the country, trusting to some portion of them bringing applications. A wholesale scattering of prospectuses among a class of people who are not at all likely to read them even, will injure the credit of the scheme for which it is desired to raise the capital in proportion to the number of prospectuses that are thus wasted. As in everything else, in business great care must be taken to offer the right sort of investment to the persons addressed. A man, for instance who lives in a fine house in a country parish, owns land, and moves among the patricians of the district, would not think of looking at a new undertaking, if he knew a prospectus had come by the same post to a man who touches his hat to him, and lives in a small way outside the gates of the great man’s estate. A man who is higher up in life than his neighbour’s endeavours, as a rule, to mark the distinction by having everything that belongs to him of a superior type. The man of high degree would consider himself insulted if he were classed indiscriminately with the man of low degree, in sending