Rensselaer Union, Volume 9, Number 26, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 15 March 1877 — Stock Gambling in San Francisco. [ARTICLE]

Stock Gambling in San Francisco.

Everything is not gold that glitters, especially in San Francisco, and Ban Francisco is California, just as Parisis France. All the wealth and commerce, all the misery and poverty, center in San Francisco. To a casual observer San Francisco seems a Paradise. To the careful student of its institutions and resources it is a silvered sepulcher, for which Nevada furnishes the silvering and the dear public the corpse. And the sepulcher isjfast filling up with the corpses of the killed at the Stock Exchange. Everything written about the wonderful resources and the immense advantages offered here are creations of fancy. Hundreds of men with capital, large and small, continually arrive here, lured on by the highly-colored reports of the advantages enjoyed here, only to find that their credulity has proved stronger than their sense. And when tney find that ordinaiy investments are not as remunerative as they supposed, they do as thousands have done before and thousands will do hereafter—they gamble in stocks; vet they can easily find out that the proportion of those making fortunes to those; that lose them is about one to a thousand. Stock-gambling is a mania here. The grocer who sells a pennyworth of tea also sells and buys stocks. The eminent merchant who disposes of the product of other countries examines the stock report as carefully as he does his invoices. Every boot-black is an embryo stock-broker, and every waiter an expectant millionaire. The daily papers are examined more closely for stock quotations than for the news.'and the paper having the largest circulation is toe Stock Reporter. The state of the weather, whether cold or warm, whether rain or sunshine, makes no apparent difference to toe San Franciscan. He is insensible to Nature’s beauties, and watches only one variation, and that of the stocks he deals in. The San Franciscan, in fact, sees the world through stock prospectuses and stock reports. Yet he considers himself blessed over other mortals, and occasionally tells you so. Outwardly considered, he is a fair specimen of humanity. He is well built, and broad shouldered, and if he is not, his tailor soon makes him so. He is generally well dressed, wears a clean shirt, occasionally drinks twenty-five-cent champagne cocktails and smokes twenty-five-cent cigars. The increase of the wealth and prosperity of other cities is, in his mind, problematical, but that ’Frisco, as he calls it, will soon be the hub and spoke of toe universe, is with him a certainty.— San Francisco Cor. Chicago Tribune.