MR. JACOB BROKER.
Mr. Broker was a man of great shrewdness and penetration. His education, to be sure, had been somewhat neglected, having been superintended in his youth by a strolling professor of the “black art,” whom to follow, he ran away from home at the age of fourteen. But his genius was of that universal kind which all men desire and but few possess—and hence the facility with which he adapted himself to his new employment. His initiation into the black art now stood him instead of capital, and made it easy for him to convince the honest Dutchmen of his power to turn “metals of drossiest ore to purest gold.” To him, therefore, they all went, whether to buy or to sell shares in the Wall-street Stock Company. And as he had often learned by the sad vicissitudes of life, the necessity of turning an honest penny for himself, he reasoned as all philosophers would do in the same circumstances, “that if he took not the tide of fortune at its flood, he might again suffer under the same unhappy conviction.” In other words, he thought, and acted accordingly, that if he did not embrace the opportunity to improve his fortune when it offered, it might never present itself again. He shrewdly guessed that he might greatly aid the rise in the value of the shares by appearing to be entirely disinterested—while at the same time he contrived, generally, to be the real purchaser when people employed him to sell, and the seller when they employed him to buy: by which means, as the stock gradually rose in the market,—the commission being considerable, the profit more—and as he bought and sold the whole number of shares several times over, he was enabled to abstract from the pockets of the honest Dutchmen and placing it in his own, in solid cash, nearly the whole amount of the nominal rise in value on all the shares.
HONESTY AND DISINTERESTEDNESS.
He was of course a man of substance, made so by his wits, and at the expense of the burghers of New-York.
That he was a strictly honest man, is quite certain; for his old master of the “black art” is known to have said, that when he paid him a secret visit, and suggested the propriety of manufacturing a few certificates of shares, to meet the urgency of demand, Jacob replied, that “if detected it would spoil the profits of his trade, and therefore, in honor, he could not consent to the proposal.”
He honestly paid his debts, also, for the same reason, and as a man of public spirit, lent his means to assist in building the “old jail,” to confine all those rogues in, who could not pay theirs.
PRINCIPLES OF TRADE.
To be sure, he acted on the principle that there is no friendship in trade, and that a bargain is a bargain, however made, and must be fulfilled. What if his customers did pay him a commission? he sold only his services, not his wits; and them he had a right to use for his own benefit. He had long since learned, in his profession of the “black art,” that the measure of success depended on the closeness of his secret, and if people did not know his arts, he thought it but right that they should pay for being amused by them; and following this mode of reasoning, in the scale of progression upward to the higher sciences, he judged rightly, “that if people were ignorant they must pay for instruction.”
MORAL REFLECTIONS.
Skilfulness in trade was, in his opinion, justly placed at the head of moral science, of which he had now become a professor; and why should he be expected to impart what he knew without a “quid pro quo?” Not he; but rather following the plain dictates of wisdom, he would learn all he could, and impart nothing.