Washington Standard

Croakers.

Croakers have always existed and done their utmost to retard the wheels of progress. An incident related by Ben Franklin a century ago, shows that they did not differ materially in his day from the pestilential specimens exhibited occasionally on our streets, engaged in undermining the fair fame of Olympia.

Franklin says: There lived in Philadelphia, a person of note, an elderly man, with a wise and very grave manner of speaking. This gentleman, a stranger to me, stopped one day at my door, and asked me if I was the young man who had lately opened a new printing-office. Being answered in the affirmative, he said he was sorry for me, because it was an expensive undertaking, and the expense would be lost; for Philadelphia was a sinking place, the people already half bankrupt, if not quite so; all appearances to the contrary, such as new buildings and the rise of rents, being, to his certain knowledge, fallacious; for they were, in fact, among the things that would soon ruin us. And he gave me such a detail of misfortunes then existing and would soon exist, that he left me melancholy and dispirited. Had I known him before I engaged in the business, probably I never would have done it. This man continued to live in that decaying place and to declaim in the same strain, refusing for many years to buy a house there, because everything was going to destruction: and at last I had the pleasure of seeing him give five times as much for it as he might have bought it for when he first began his croaking.

If this will not be the experience of some of our croakers, a few years hence, we are not gifted with the spirit of prophesy.