Excerpt from Glimpses of the Future: Suggestions as to the Drift of Things The author of this work was fortunate enough to predict in 1871 the panic of 1873, designating the railroad corporation which would first come to grief and the banking house which would probably be the first to suspend payment. He was also rather lucky in guessing the probable result of elections. This ability to forecast the future in a certain way was of use to him when managing a leading daily paper in New York. When ill-health forced him to give up daily journalism, his friend, Clinton W. Sweet, invited him to do some editorial writing on the Record and Guide. A "Prophetic Department" was commenced, in which an attempt was made to forecast the future of business and politics. As it would not do to commit either the writer or the paper to authoritative statements, subjects were treated in a rather off-hand manner by a "Sir Oracle," the name, of course, implying that the writer was probably a bumptious sort of person, who was as likely to be wrong as right. The department proved attractive to the readers of the Record and Guide, and the predictions were often fortunate. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.