The Human Boy and the War

by Eden Phillpotts

There is a great deal of difference between being expelled and "invited to find another sphere for your activities." In fact, as my father said, if Dr. Dunston had expelled me, he would certainly have made a row about it, and very likely have written to the newspapers.

But old Dunston was a jolly sight too wily for that. He wrote to my father when the event happened, and said that circumstances had come to his ears which made him think, etc., etc., that I had better leave Merivale.

I am Mitchell, and my father is a financier, and I may say that this profession embraces a great many branches.

Sometimes, after dinner in holidays, he has allowed me to stop and smoke a cigarette while he talked to friends, and so I have got a gradual inkling of what it means to be a financier; and, in a way, this inkling was my downfall. Not that I felt it a downfall really to be hoofed out of Merivale; for it was rather a potty sort of show, and I should have gone to a far more swagger place if my father had been flusher just at the time when I had to go somewhere, owing to a trifling bother at another school.

But I went to Merivale, and just because I tried to take advantage of what my father had said about finance and apply it to school life, the difficulties arose.

I gathered off and on from my father, when he was in a talkative frame of mind, that one of the great arts of a financier is to do deals between other people.

For instance, you have something to sell, and my father knows it. And he routs about and leaves no stone unturned, as they say, until he finds somebody who wants to buy just what you want to sell. Then, having found you a customer, my father arranges all the details of the business, and everybody is satisfied, and my father, for all his time and trouble, gets richly rewarded.

Then, again, another fine branch of the financier's art is the floating of public companies. To float a company requires great skill and nerve.

The first thing is to find a place a long way off, far beyond the reach of intending shareholders, in fact. Then you discover this far-off country is extraordinarily rich in minerals, or india-rubber, or manure, or some other useful material which everybody wants. You send out a mineral or manure expert to the far-off country, and he is delighted to find these things in enormous quantities, and sees at a glance that, if properly managed, they will produce dividends of very likely a hundred per cent. for the first year, and much more afterwards.

Then my father, or whoever it might be, is glad, and he goes about to other skilful men who understand companies, and they collect together and make a board. The more famous financiers there are upon this board the better the public likes it; and so the company is floated, and the public is invited to put in money.