The Daily Dispatch: June 22, 1861., [Electronic resource]

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Speculating on the wants of others.

--The disposition to thrive on the wants of our fellow-men, to make our purses grow heavy by their real or presumed wants, to make their deprivation minister to our affluence, and to be generally indifferent as to who sinks so we swim, is a feeling implanted in the human breast many millions of years since, even when man first became an institution, and very long anterior to any recorded evidence of Adam's being a little boy. The task of enumerating all articles that have been made subjects of speculation by our dealers since the present war commenced, is one that we do not propose to enter on; suffice that they embrace all things that we eat and wear, and all articles of every kind fabricated in times of peace for the necessary but bloody purpose of taking human life. Holders have, with characteristic industry, graduated their demands only by the wants presumed or imaginary of the community. Their own reckonings have been as severe as if they thought they had passed a state of accountability themselves. Not to speak of twenty different things that can only be had at most outrageous prices, we may mention the fact that sugar can now be bought cheaper by the pound in the inland town of Raleigh, N. C., than it can be by the hogshead in the ‘"Big City of Richmond."’ Some of our merchants are most essentially touched with the Yankee, if they are not indeed the genuine article itself.