The "Goldfish" / Being the Confessions af a Successful Man

by Arthur Cheney Train

Most of my own time is spent in untangling mixed puzzles of law and fact, and my clients are comparatively few in number, though their interests are large. Thus I see the same faces over and over again. I lunch daily at a most respectable eating club; and here, too, I meet the same men over and over again. I rarely make a new acquaintance downtown; in fact I rarely leave my office during the day. If I need to confer with any other attorney I telephone. There are dozens of lawyers in New York whose voices I know well—yet whose faces I have never seen.

My office is on the nineteenth floor of a white marble building, and I can look down the harbor to the south and up the Hudson to the north. I sit there in my window like a cliffdweller at the mouth of his cave. When I walk along Wall Street I can look up at many other hundreds of these caves, each with its human occupant. We leave our houses uptown, clamber down into a tunnel called the Subway, are shot five miles or so through the earth, and debouch into an elevator that rushes us up to our caves. Only between my house and the entrance to the Subway am I obliged to step into the open air at all. A curious life! And I sit in my chair and talk to people in multitudes of other caves near by, or caves in New Jersey, Washington or Chicago.

Louis XI used to be called "the human spider" by reason of his industry, but we modern office men are far more like human spiders than he, as we sit in the center of our webs of invisible wires. We wait and wait, and our lines run out across the length and breadth of the land—sometimes getting tangled, to be sure, so that it is frequently difficult to decide just which spider owns the web; but we sit patiently doing nothing save devising the throwing out of other lines.

We weave, but we do not build; we manipulate, buy, sell and lend, quarrel over the proceeds, and cover the world with our nets, while the ants and the bees of mankind labor, construct and manufacture, and struggle to harness the forces of Nature. We plan and others execute. We dicker, arrange, consult, cajole, bribe, pull our wires and extort; but we do it all in one place—the center of our webs and the webs are woven in our caves.

I figure that I spend about six hours each day in my office; that I sleep nearly nine hours; that I am in transit on surface cars and in subways at least one hour and a half more; that I occupy another hour and a half in bathing, shaving and dressing, and an hour lunching at midday. This leaves a margin of five hours a day for all other activities.

Could even a small portion of this time be spent consecutively in reading in the evening, I could keep pace with current thought and literature much better than I do; or if I spent it with my son and daughters I should know considerably more about them than I do now, which is practically nothing. But the fact is that every evening from the first of November to the first of May the motor comes to the door at five minutes to eight and my wife and I are whirled up or down town to a dinner party—that is, save on those occasions when eighteen or twenty people are whirled to us.

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This short recital of my daily activities is sufficient to demonstrate that I lead an exceedingly narrow and limited existence. I do not know any poor men, and even the charities in which I am nominally interested are managed by little groups of rich ones. The truth is, I learned thirty years ago that if one wants to make money one must go where money is and cultivate the people who have it. I have no petty legal business—there is nothing in it. If I cannot have millionaires for clients I do not want any. The old idea that the young country lawyer could shove a pair of socks into his carpetbag, come to the great city, hang out his shingle and build up a practice has long since been completely exploded. The best he can do now is to find a clerkship at twelve hundred dollars a year.

Big business gravitates to the big offices; and when the big firms look round for junior partners they do not choose the struggling though brilliant young attorney from the country, no matter how large his general practice may have become; but they go after the youth whose father is a director in forty corporations or the president of a trust.

In the same way what time I have at my disposal to cultivate new acquaintances I devote not to the merely rich and prosperous but to the multi-millionaire—if I can find him—who does not even know the size of his income. I have no time to waste on the man who is simply earning enough to live quietly and educate his family. He cannot throw anything worth while in my direction; but a single crumb from the magnate's table may net me twenty or thirty thousand dollars. Thus, not only for social but for business reasons, successful men affiliate habitually only with rich people. I concede that is a rather sordid admission, but it is none the truth.