I raised my voice slightly as I went on: “The speculators, the gamblers, are the only people who were hurt. Those who sold what they didn't have are paying for their folly. I have no sympathy for them. Blacklock and Company wishes none such in its following, and seizes every opportunity to weed them out. We are in business only for the bona fide investing public, and we are stronger with that public to-day than we have ever been.”
Again I looked from coward to coward of that mob, changed from three hundred strong to three hundred weak. Then I bowed and withdrew, leaving them to mutter and disperse. I felt well content with the trend of events—I who wished to impress the public and the financiers that I had broken with speculation and speculators, could I have had a better than this unexpected opportunity sharply to define my new course? And as Textiles, unsupported, fell toward the close of the day, my content rose toward my normal high spirits. There was no whisper in the Street that I was in trouble; on the contrary, the idea was gaining ground that I had really long ceased to be a stock gambler and deserved a much better reputation than I had. Reputation is a matter of diplomacy rather than of desert. In all my career I was never less entitled to a good reputation than in those June days; yet the disastrous gambling follies, yes, and worse, I then committed, formed the secure foundation of my reputation for conservatism and square dealing. From that time dates the decline of the habit the newspapers had of speaking of me as “Black Matt” or “Matt” Blacklock. In them, and therefore in the public mind, I began to figure as “Mr. Blacklock, a recognized authority on finance,” and such information as I gave out ceased to be described as “tips” and was respectfully referred to as “indications.”
No doubt, my marriage had something to do with this. Probably one couldn't borrow any great amount of money in New York directly and solely on the strength of a fashionable marriage; but, so all-pervading is the snobbishness there, one can get, by making a fashionable marriage, any quantity of that deferential respect from rich people which is, in some circumstances, easily convertible into cash and credit.
I searched with a good deal of anxiety, as you may imagine, the early editions of the afternoon papers. The first article my eye chanced upon was a mere wordy elaboration of the brief and vague announcement Monson had put in the Herald. Later came an interview with old Ellersly.
“Not at all mysterious,” he had said to the reporters. “Mr. Blacklock found he would have to go abroad on business soon—he didn't know just when. On the spur of the moment they decided to marry.” A good enough story, and I confirmed it when I admitted the reporters. I read their estimates of my fortune and of Anita's with rather bitter amusement—she whose father was living from hand to mouth; I who could not have emerged from a forced settlement with enough to enable me to keep a trap. Still, when one is rich, the reputation of being rich is heavily expensive; but when one is poor the reputation of being rich can be made a wealth-giving asset.
Even as I was reading these fables of my millions, there lay on the desk before me a statement of the exact posture of my affairs—a memorandum made by myself for my own eyes, and to be burned as soon as I mastered it. On the face of the figures the balance against me was appalling. My chief asset, indeed my only asset that measured up toward my debts, was my Coal stocks, those bought and those contracted for; and, while their par value far exceeded my liabilities, they had to appear in my memorandum at their actual market value on that day. I looked at the calendar—seventeen days until the reorganization scheme would be announced, only seventeen days!
Less than three business weeks, and I should be out of the storm and sailing safer and smoother seas than I had ever known. “To indulge in vague hopes is bad,” thought I, “but not to indulge in a hope, especially when one has only it between him and the pit.” And I proceeded to plan on the not unwarranted assumption that my Coal hope was a present reality. Indeed, what alternative had I? To put it among the future's uncertainties was to put myself among the utterly ruined. Using as collateral the Coal stocks I had bought outright, I borrowed more money, and with it went still deeper into the Coal venture. Everything or nothing!—since the chances in my favor were a thousand, to practically none against me. Everything or nothing!—since only by staking everything could I possibly save anything at all.
The morality of these and many of my other doings in those days will no doubt be condemned. By no one more severely than by myself—now that the necessities which then compelled me have passed. There is no subject on which men talk and think, more humbug than on that subject of morality. As a matter of fact, except in those personal relations that are governed by the affections, what is morality but the mandate of policy, and what is policy but the mandate of necessity? My criticism of Roebuck and the other “high financiers” is not upon their morality, but upon their policy, which is short-sighted and stupid and base. The moral difference between me and them is that, while I merely assert and maintain my right to live, they deny the right of any but themselves to live. I say I criticize them; but that does not mean that I sympathize with the public at large in its complainings against them. The public, its stupidity and cupidity, creates the conditions that breed and foster these men. A rotten cheese reviling the maggots it has bred!
In those very hours when I was obeying the imperative law of self-preservation, was clutching at every log that floated by me regardless of whether it was my property or not so long as it would help me keep my head above water—what was going on all round me? In every office of the down town district—merchant, banker, broker, lawyer, man of commerce or finance—was not every busy brain plotting, not self-preservation but pillage and sack—plotting to increase the cost of living for the masses of men by slipping a little tax here and a little tax there on to everything by which men live? All along the line between the farm or mine or shop and the market, at every one of the toll-gates for the collection of just charges, these big financiers, backed up by the big lawyers and the rascally public officials, had an agent in charge to collect on each passing article more than was honestly due. A thousand subtle ways of levying, all combining to pour in upon the few the torrents of unjust wealth. I laugh when I read of laboring men striking for higher wages. Poor, ignorant fools—they almost deserve their fate. They had better be concerning themselves with a huge, universal strike at the polls for lower prices. What will it avail to get higher wages, as long as the masters control and recoup on the prices of all the things for which those wages must be spent?
I lived in Wall Street, in its atmosphere of the practical morality of “finance.” On every side swindling operations, great and small; operations regarded as right through long-established custom; dishonest or doubtful operations on the way to becoming established by custom as “respectable.” No man's title to anything conceded unless he had the brains to defend it. There was a time when it would have been regarded as wildly preposterous and viciously immoral to deny property rights in human beings. There may come a time—who knows?—when “high finance's” denial of a moral right to property of any kind may cease to be regarded as wicked; may become a generally accepted canon, as our Socialist friends predict. However, I attempt no excuses for myself; I need them no more than a judge in the Dark Ages needed to apologize for ordering a witch to the stake. I could no more have done differently than a fish could breathe on land or a man under water. I did as all the others did—and I had the justification of necessity. Right of might being the prevailing code, when men set upon me with pistols, I met them with pistols, not with the discarded and antiquated weapons of sermon and prayer and the law.