The Hillsborough Recorder

The Vicissitudes of Commerce.—A few months since a partner of a commercial house in this city was taken to a lunatic asylum, utterly deranged, and it was said, by unparalleled prosperity in business. During the year previous his firm had cleared $1,300,000. He died in the asylum, and his own estate was valued at $2,500,000 all invested in the concern of which he was partner. The firm itself failed the other day, and is now said to be utterly insolvent. One item of the assets of the deceased's estate was a thousand shares of the Illinois Central Railroad stock, which was selling at the time of his decease at $140 a share, and which was worth, after paying up the installments, $500,000. The same property sold yesterday at public sale at $50,000. All this occurred within eighteen months—the prosperity, the insanity, the decease, and the insolvency.

New York Evening Post.

Reliable statistics show that of those who have engaged in commercial pursuits in Boston, not more than three in a hundred have become independent. The records of the Probate Office, where there the estates of all persons who die in the possession of property are registered, show that ninety per cent. of all such are insolvent at death. These facts give a different idea of the "solid men of Boston" to that which one would form from seeing the splendid style in which many of them live, and the general aspect of wealth presented by the city itself. It is not improbable that the statistics of other cities in the North would show a still more "beggarly account." While commerce is centering in the North, and individual fortunes are amassed by the operations of trade, the real wealth of the country is in the South. A distribution of the property of each section, among its citizens, gives a dividend to the Southerner. It may be added, too, that the diffusion of wealth is more general in the South—so much so that scarcely a household is to be found not provided with the means of comfortable existence.

Petersburg Intelligencer.