Page 1 Advertisements Column 4

Otago Witness, Issue 155, 6 May 1854, Page 1

Men of business ! Get money. Get an abundance of it; but get it honourably. Elevate your business. Remember that the more elevated the business character, the more easy it will be to get money. .Talk not of the baseness of commerce, or the corrupting nature of business. It is men's willingness to be corrupted that makes them corrupt; it is men's dishonourable actions that cast a stigma upon business. Let each one who believes in the right take his stand and boldly maintain it. Frown down all tricks ; all cunning ; all those winding and crooked courses, " the goings of the serpent, which goeth basely upon the belly and not upon the feet," Brand the man who violates confidence and abuses trust, as a thief. Remember the public credit of the nation is in your keeping. If you are tricky, faithless, and dishonourable, such will be the character of your country in all parts of the globe. Let your shops, warehouses and marts, be temples dedicated to honour. Inscribe over the doors : " Who comes within these walls is safe." Let it be said of business-men, as it was said of ancient Tyre, " Her merchants were princes, and her traffickers the honourable of the earth." j People who cannot be Astonished. — I pit/ the man who cannot be astonished. Yet there are many such men — people of so non-mirabolant a nature, so fishy in temperament, that they marvel at, are perplexed, or are bewildered by nothing. If the ghost of their grandmother were to rise before them, they would request the apparition to shut the door and be seated. If the sky were to rain potatoes, they would simply thank Heaven for its bounties, and perhaps give themselves the trouble to entreat that, next time it rained, it would rain upward^ instead of downwards. As Murat said (or is said to to have said) of Talleyrand— you might kick them in the back for hours without the slightest change of countenance passing over them. An earthquake in Regent-street, a maeltfom in Chelsea-reach, a sirocco in Pall-mall, the sea-serpent in the Fleet Ditch, an alligator in Fetter-lane, snow in July, I and sun-strokes in January — all these marvels would draw from them no observation more denoting agitation than a languid " dear me !" or a feeble " How curious !" If the earth were to stand still, and the sun to turn green, they would, with a minute's reference to their almanacs, take the phenomena for granted. With them the world is a ball on which they live ; and what there may be inside it, or underneath it, or above it, is no concern of theirs. In society they are known as*" people who mind. their own business;" and, being a rather numerous class and comprising within their ranks many peers and landed proprietors, bankers, and merchants, are highly esteemed and respected for their want of curiosity and discreet immobility. They make money ; and as for the poor people who can be and are astonished, and who£e astonishification, leading them from inquiry to discovery, and thence to the invention of machines, to the elucidation of scientific truths, and to the perfection of the arts which adorn and humanize society — they live up steep nights of stairs, and don't dine every day. — Dicke?is's Household Words. A lady given to tattling from house to house, says she never tells anything except to two. class.ea.of people — those who ask her, and those who 4onlt,