The Human Boy and the War

by Eden Phillpotts

This the public is only too thankful to do, because, of course, the thing promises so well; and then the shares are quoted on the Stock Exchange, and the papers are suddenly full of the company some morning, and the board sits and has a champagne luncheon and arranges its salaries and so on.

Of course, the people who have found that happy, far-away land, flowing with minerals and manure and such like, are richly rewarded, as they deserve to be; and sometimes they take it in money and sometimes in shares, and sometimes in both.

And all may or may not go well; but the financier, whose business it is to do these things and float the company, takes care to come out of it all right in any case--otherwise it is no good being a financier.

There was once a very fine company floated by my father and several of his scientific friends, for extracting gold from salt water.

It was based on thoroughly sound principles; because science has proved that there is so much gold in every ton of salt water; and, of course, if it is there, it can be extracted by modern inventions. So my father and others of even greater renown were filled with the idea of promoting a company to do this.

It was a brilliant and successful company in a way, but did not last long for some reason.

They started at a place near Margate, I think, with pumps and tubes to draw in the water, and machinery and professional chemists to get the gold out of it, and a staff of twenty skilled men, who understood the complicated mechanism. And they easily got enough gold from somewhere to make the prospectus, and also enough to make a brooch for the manager's wife; and no doubt they would have got much more in course of time, but something failed--the water in the English Channel was a bit off, or some other natural cause--and my father said it would have been far better for everybody concerned if the works had been put up in the Isle of Skye, or perhaps in Norway, or in the West Indies, or the Fiji Islands, where conditions might have been better suited to success.

But gold was none the less made for my father and one or two others, "though not from the sea," as my father said thoughtfully when discussing the winding up of the affair.

There is another and even higher branch of the financier's art--the loftiest of all in fact. This consists in floating loans for hard-up monarchs, and it is absolutely the biggest thing the financier does. It wants great skill and delicacy.

You can also float loans for hard-up nations if you understand how to do it, but there are hundreds of financiers who never reach these dizzy heights of the profession, just as there are hundreds--you may say millions--of soldiers who never get above being colonels, and thousands of clergymen who fall short of becoming bishops.