Resolve

RESOLVE to gain all you can, by fair or foul means, and keep all you get. Cheat everybody who is capable of being cheated, and do not trade much with those whom you cannot cheat. Perhaps the first time you drive a hard bargain with a poor man you may have some scruple of conscience about the justness of such cause; but persevere, and the next time you cheat your conscience will speak lower. Load your money at the highest legal rate, and then make the borrower pay you back a bonus of ten dollars on a hundred for being so obliging as to accommodate him; take a mortgage and his farm for security; watch your opportunity, sell when a money crisis occurs, or the mortgage is nicely paid off, foreclose and grab the whole. The law will bear you out in it, and there is no redress for the sufferer.

Speculate. There are a thousand ways to do it, buy up old horses for a trifle, saw off their teeth, doctor all the ring-bones, fat them up, and then swear round that they are sound every way, and just seven years old last spring. A lie well stuck to is as good as the truth. If you conclude to get rich on the three cent. Seale, if just as well. You may need a little more time to bring it about, but will be quite as likely to pass for an honest man. There are a thousand ways to get rich. “In saving of candle-ends and sich*.” Never let a pound of butter quite turn the scale, and ask a penny more per pound than anybody else. If you have any worthless eggs, work one or two into every dozen you sell; it will be considered as an oversight. When you sell a load of hard wood, be sure and mix in as many sticks of pine as policy will admit, and say ‘twas so badly mixed as a lot that you could not load it without getting it mixed. Note – let the measure fall a little short. If you are a grocer, always weigh the wrapping paper with whatever you sell, and keep your salt fish down cellar. If you are a manufacturer, open a general store, hire your help as cheap as possible, and give them orders on your rates for pay. Then, as in duty bound, charge more for the goods than you would if you sold for cost. Put by soiled postage-stamps into the contribution box, unless you have a “shin-plaster” from some merchant that has failed. Never give to benevolent objects, unless the giving will raise the value of your real estate, or in any other way bring money into your pocket. Always keep a good look-out for No. 1.

Give five dollars a year towards the support of preaching, but manage to sell your minister a cow for ten dollars more than she is worth; thus you will make a nice profit of five dollars. Sell your light grain, which will “fill out well,” by measure, but heavy grain by weight.

Never be in a hurry to pay your school-teacher or the doctor. Hire your girls in the kitchen a month’s trial; then say they will not answer your purposes, and discharge them without pay. Never take a newspaper if you can borrow one. If you do subscribe for one take it a year or two, then say you do not like that political article and you won’t pay for it. Let the publisher ….

*sich means such.