I looked at the calendar--seventeen days
until the reorganization scheme would be announced, only seventeen days!
Less than three business weeks, and I should be out of the storm and
sailing safer and smoother seas than I had ever known. "To indulge in vague
_hopes_ is bad," thought I, "but not to indulge in _a_ hope, especially
when one has only it between him and the pit." And I proceeded to plan on
the not unwarranted assumption that my Coal hope was a present reality.
Indeed, what alternative had I? To put it among the future's uncertainties
was to put myself among the utterly ruined. Using as collateral the Coal
stocks I had bought outright, I borrowed more money, and with it went still
deeper into the Coal venture. Everything or nothing!--since the chances in
my favor were a thousand, to practically none against me. Everything or
nothing!--since only by staking everything could I possibly save anything
at all.
The morality of these and many of my other doings in those days will no
doubt be condemned. By no one more severely than by myself--now that the
necessities which then compelled me have passed. There is no subject on
which men talk and think, more humbug than on that subject of morality.
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