SUDDEN RUIN.
In a former paper ([April 19, 1884]), instances were cited of fortunes suddenly made, not by inheritance or industry, but by what people are pleased to call luck. Cases of sudden ruin are less frequent, for, generally speaking, the wreck of a man’s fortune is like that of a ship: some rock is touched; water flows in; frantic attempts are made to lighten the vessel or to steer it into port; and finally, the foundering is slow. The striking upon a rock, however, is commonly with fortunes, as with ships, a sudden accident. It may be the result of careless or incapable steering; or it may be caused by a combination of adverse tides and winds, which no human skill can stem, and which hurry on the ship helplessly to destruction, inevitable, though it is not always foreseen. The rock, in whatever way it may be reached, is the determining cause of ruin; and when we speak of a man having been suddenly ruined, we mean that the calamity which brought him to poverty by degrees more or less rapid, occurred at a time and in a manner which took himself and his friends by surprise.
We are happily exempt in this country from those overwhelming disasters occasioned by political convulsions. Those who witnessed the flight of French ladies and gentlemen from their country upon the downfall of the Second Empire heard tales of misfortune not easily to be forgotten. Senators and prefects who, in July 1870, were living in luxury and power, drawing large salaries, and secure of the future, were towards the middle of September huddling in lodging-houses of towns on the English south coast; and along with them were bankers who had been obliged to suspend payment, and manufacturers and landowners of the eastern provinces who had fled from the tide of invasion, after seeing their factories or fields burnt, ravaged, and overrun by the enemy.
In most of these cases, ruin had been sudden and irremediable, so much so, as to appal sympathising British minds. And yet vicissitudes quite as pitiable had been witnessed in London a few years before—that is, on the Black Friday of May 1866, when, within a single day, hundreds of fortunes were wrecked in the City. For the most part, the people who were ruined on this awful Friday had had no warning of the fate impending over them; and this must needs be so whenever banks or financial companies fail. The credit of these establishments is like a piece of glass, which must remain undamaged, or there is an end to its value. For self-preservation, banks and companies feel bound to conceal their difficulties till these are past mending; and thus it generally happens that whenever a House suspends payment, almost all its customers are utterly unprepared. What this means, we all know, if not from personal experience, at least from misfortunes which have fallen upon persons of our acquaintance. Our country neighbour who lived in such grand style, returns from town one evening with a haggard face. A few days later it is announced that his house is to let; there is a sale; a notice among the bankruptcies in the Gazette; the family quietly leave their home; and from that time, only intimate friends know for certain what has become of them. Perhaps, years afterwards, somebody who knew the neighbour in great wealth, finds him eking out a penurious existence in the suburbs of some large city. Among the hundreds of acres of cheap houses which form the outskirts of London, the people ‘who have seen better days’ are an unnumbered multitude. Every suburban clergyman and doctor knows some, and generally too many of them; every bachelor in quest of furnished lodgings is pretty sure to stumble upon several people in this plight. Auctioneers and brokers, however, know them best of all, for it is they who play the chief part in the closing act of the drama of Ruin, when the last waifs of former wealth—the pieces of good old furniture, the pictures, china, books, and other such long-treasured valuables, have to be sold off to buy necessaries.
One of the most frequent and deplorable agents of sudden ruin is the dishonest partner. No business can be managed without mutual confidence between those who conduct it; and though, when we hear that a commercial man has brought himself within reach of the law, we are inclined to doubt if his partner can have been unaware of his malpractices, yet it must be obvious that the dishonesty of one partner too often arises from the unsuspicious simplicity of the other. There are even instances in which no amount of sagacity will save a man from the enterprises of a roguish partner. The following is a very common case: A and B being partners, A dies, and his son succeeds to his share of the business. So long as A was alive, the speculative tendencies of B were kept in check; but young A has not the same experience as his father; he has learned to respect B; he looks to him for guidance; and if B has made up his mind to extend the business of the firm by new methods, now that he is head-partner, the junior partner will generally be a mere tool in his hands. If young A be more fond of pleasure than business, he will of course be even less than a tool—a mere cipher; and B will be left to manage matters as he pleases, until he succeeds in his schemes, and proposes to buy A out of the business; or fails, and brings A to poverty and disgrace. It is a cruel thing that if B has absconded, A will have to bear the entire brunt of creditors’ wrath, and perhaps be criminally punished for his innocence. But partners have learned this lesson so often, that it is almost a wonder how any sane man can assume responsibilities without ascertaining the nature and extent of them. It is certainly not for the public interest that the sudden ruin of an honest partner should be pleaded in extenuation for his ignorance or carelessness.
Let us take some other causes of sudden ruin. We may set aside the destruction of property by fire or flood, as offering examples too many and obvious; nor does the sudden ruin of spendthrifts by cards or betting call for notice. But the ruin which comes to a man through sudden loss of character in his trade or profession is always most lamentable, especially when the offence perpetrated was unintentional, and did not appear to call for so heavy a punishment. The chemist who asked to be discharged from serving on the jury in ‘Bardell v. Pickwick’ on the ground that his assistant would be selling arsenic to the customers, expressed an alarm in which there was nothing jocular at all. We know of a chemist whose assistant committed this very mistake of supplying arsenic for some other drug, and three children were poisoned in consequence. The chemist was totally ruined. A coroner’s jury having brought in a verdict of manslaughter against him, he took his trial at the assizes, and was acquitted. But doctors ceased to recommend him; the public avoided his shop; his appointment as local postmaster was taken from him, and in a short time he became bankrupt. Poisoning by inadvertence has been the ruin of many a chemist, and of not a few country doctors who supply their own medicines.
But we remember an instance of a young doctor destroying his career by means just the contrary of this—that is, by suspecting that poison had been administered, when such was not the case. One of his patients, a lady, who seemed to have nothing worse than a cold, died very suddenly. The doctor had reason to believe that this lady and her husband had been living on bad terms, so he not only refused to certify as to the causes of death, but openly hinted his suspicions that there had been foul-play. At the inquest, however, it was proved that the lady had died from heart-disease; and the reports about her having been on bad terms with her husband were shown to have proceeded from the malicious tattle of a busybody. As a result of this affair, the doctor lost almost all his patients. It was thought that he had not behaved with discretion; and his ruin was consummated by an action for slander brought against him by the widower, whom he had too hastily accused of poisoning.
This action for slander reminds us of another case of ruin which had some comical features, and was in fact related to us in a very humorous way by a French journalist. The gentleman in question had accepted the editorship of a small daily newspaper published in a Belgian city. His salary was to be twenty pounds a month, with free board and lodging in the house of his employer, a notary, who owned the newspaper. Our friend discharged his duties to everybody’s satisfaction for about five years, when a bustling young journalist of the locality became intimate with the notary, and pointed out to him that he—the bustling one—could edit the paper quite as well as our friend, and for half the money. Our friend had just applied for an increase of salary; so the notary, with unreflecting parsimony, resolved to dispense with his services, and installed the bustling young man in his chair. But not more than a fortnight afterwards, the Bustling One, either from negligence, or because he had some private grudge to pay off, inserted a libellous paragraph against a banker in the town. An action was instituted. The proprietor of the paper was sentenced to pay a large sum by way of damages, with all the costs of the trial, and the advertisement of the judgment—filling about two columns of small print—in twenty newspapers of France and Belgium. This heavy fine, the numberless worries attendant upon the action for libel, and the loss of professional status which accrued to the lawyer from the whole thing, proved the death of the newspaper. As our friend remarked: ‘I think the notary would have found it cheaper to raise my salary.’
It may happen, however, that to make inopportune demands for an increase of salary will ruin not him who refuses, but him who asks. A case starts to our recollection of a man who had an excellent appointment in the City. He was drawing one thousand pounds a year for work which required some talent, but was pretty easy and pleasant; moreover, he was on the fair way to better things. But he was too impatient. His employers bore with him for a while, and in fact raised his salary four times within three years, for they fully appreciated his services. A day came, however, when they had to tell him plainly that his demands were unreasonable; upon which he stood on his dignity and resigned. He quite expected that he would instantly find in the City another situation as good as that which he had left; but he was not able to get an appointment at so much as half of his former salary. Everywhere his presumption in asking for twelve hundred pounds a year was laughed at; and he soon had to acknowledge to himself that in the former situation which he had so foolishly thrown up he had been most generously overpaid. Deeply mortified, too proud to return to his old employers, who would have been willing to take him back, the misguided man became a City loafer; he tried to set up in business for himself without sufficient capital, and, after a series of luckless speculations, took to drinking, and was no more heard of. This story points a moral, which ambitious young men do not always sufficiently lay to heart—namely, that to resign a good berth before making sure of a better is to run the risk of being left out in the cold. It is by no means a recommendation to a man out of place to have formerly received a high salary and to have served under first-rate employers. All the persons to whom he applies will naturally conclude that he must have left his good appointment for unavowable reasons; and even the best certificates of character from his old masters will not serve to dispel this notion. We knew an unwise young man, who, leaving a good place out of pure caprice, was earnestly advised by his employer to think twice of what he was doing. ‘You will find it a positive disadvantage to have served in our House,’ said his employer; ‘for we are known to be just masters, and nobody will believe that you left us of your own accord.’ The young man would not heed the warning; and the upshot was that he had to emigrate, having failed in all his endeavours to get another situation.
The ruin which is produced by business competition does not come within the scope of this paper. Everybody must sympathise with the snug old-fashioned inn which is suddenly brought to nought by the big Railway Hotel, and with the petty tradesmen who are impoverished by the establishment in their midst of some colossal ‘universal provider;’ but these are unavoidable incidents in the battle of life. An interesting class of sufferers remains to be specified in persons who own house-property, and find the value of their houses suddenly depreciated by causes beyond their control. Let a sensational murder be committed in a respectable street, and the rents of the houses in that street will probably fall twenty-five per cent.; while the house in which the deed was done will in all likelihood remain untenanted for years. A murder, the perpetrator of which escaped detection, naturally marks a house with almost indelible disrepute; people do not like to inhabit such a place; and the landlord is often reduced to giving up the house at a mere nominal rent to be the abode of some charity. An epidemic, again, will play havoc with the value of houses, by getting a whole locality noted as unhealthy; and this it may be said is the fault of the landlords; but it is not always so. We were acquainted with a gentleman who became possessed by inheritance of a row of houses, as to the antecedents of which he knew nothing. Soon after he had got this property, typhoid fever broke out in one of the houses and spread down the row. The drains were examined, and found in good order; but under one of the houses was discovered a vast cesspool, caused by the drains of two large houses which had formerly stood near the site. The emptying of this pool, the building of new foundations to several of the houses, the laying down of new water-pipes, &c., proved a very costly piece of work, and brought little profit when it was finished; for the row of houses had got a bad name, and years elapsed before the landlord could find good tenants for them even at much reduced rents. This was really a hard case; and the harder because the landlord, being a high-principled man, felt bound to pay substantial indemnities to those who had suffered through the bad condition of his property.