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But, funguses, not oaks, grow up in a day: the laws of nature cannot be evaded; and a low propensity, once made the master passion, will prove a viper to the bosom that nourishes it. We have thus nourished acquisitiveness, and now, is it not making us feel its sting? How many an aching head lay last night upon a sleepless pillow; how many a man hath this day gazed sadly upon house and furniture, which; e'en his children call theirs, but which he knows may tomorrow be another's, how many a heart is at this moment, agonised with doubts and apprehension, which it dares not whisper to its fellow heart of the wife's bosom? These are the legitimate and inevitable results of allowing one passion, and that a low one, to have full sway over the mind; it destroys the moral equilibrium; it is incompatible with true dignity: for he is not a man -- a man, as nature would have made him, who can be harassed and overwhelmed by the disappointment of so low a propensity as that of gain, or be driven to intemperance, despair, or suicide, because he seems to his neighbors not to have more than enough of the world's dross.

But, should the evil be greater than it is; should the present commercial embarrassment do what it cannot do, materially lessen the intrinsic value of real property; should the pain and distress now felt through the community, be but a tithe of that which succeeding weeks and months must witness; it will be a great blessing to the country, if it sears like a hot iron the foul ulcer which caused it, to the very bottom; if it cures the moral disease which has spread over the whole land.

It may be safely said, that nineteen twentieths of those who are to be prostrated by the coming storm, whose airy castles are to be demolished, and whose extravagant expectations blasted, will be better and happier men ten years hence, than they would have been, had all their dreams been realised, and they put in possession of immense fortunes.

A successful speculation is oftener an evil than a blessing; it upsets all one's notions of the value of time, of industry, and of money; it is a moral evil, because it violates the law of nature, which requires, that a part of every day, and every year of one's life, should be devoted to procuring the means of subsistence for the day and year; and he who, by what he calls a lucky hit, secures to himself what he calls a fortune, sometimes cuts off from the remainder of his days a wholesome and natural source of pleasure. If he have devoted all his powers and energies to Mammon for the best part of his life, he is sold to him, and can no more live tranquilly without his stimuli, than can he who has been excited for years by alcohol, give up the stimulus of drink. Hence you find such men uneasy and fretful in old age; hence often it is, that they are envious and vexed at the sight of happiness in others; and that they seem to think a poor man has no right to enjoy himself more than they can, who have earned a hundred thousand dollars.

But, a word more for the actual state of things: we find that it is not our country alone which is affected; and it is in vain to seek for the origin of the present distress in any partial and particular measures of any government or any institution; the causes lie deeper, they are in the very nature and spirit of the modern method of business. Governments, and Institutions, and particular edicts, may, and doubtless have done much to hasten the crisis: certainly some of them are very like an order that all waters shall run up hill; but though they had been ever so preposterous and absurd, not to say wilful and wicked, they could not have produced the convulsion that is now rocking our firmest houses like an earthquake, if men had conducted business in that spirit which looks only to the natural and certain reward of prudent industry.

It will be answered, that men must act according to the spirit of the time and place; and that they have a right to count upon the permanence of any national law or commercial regulation. Aye! but when such laws and regulations run counter to the course of nature, they must, and will be frustrated; and he who puts more faith in the laws and regulations of man than in those of nature, must take the consequences of his choice.

The fact is, the present generation has been agitated and swayed by passion as much the most remarkable ones in history: veneration and combativeness once stirred up Europe to madness, and sent her raving with the cross in one hand, and the sword in the other, upon benighted Asia: love of approbation, and combativeness caused France to raise the storm of war which shook the world, -- which made the rivers of the south run red with blood, and stained the snows of the north with gore: and now, love of approbation, riding on acquisitiveness is making the world equally mad in the chase for money. America leads in the van -- she mortgages her unexplored lands, and her unborn generations, to raise funds for the present: Europe follows hard after -- she pawns her regalia, she sells her titles, she grubs in the battle-fields, and converts the bones of her heroes into money: Asia starts up to join the chase, and casts away her turban and her robes, that she may follow the faster; even dead Africa is roused to life, and begins to pull down her pyramids to build up factories. (1)