I have endeavored to correct the utterly erroneous impression that prevails outside Wall Street, in regard to the nature of speculation, showing that it is virtually a great productive force in our political and social economy, and that without it railroad enterprise and other branches of industrial development which have so largely increased the wealth of the nation, would have made but slow progress.
To preserve and inculcate these ideas by putting them in what I hope may be a permanent form, is another object of publishing this volume. I know you can sympathize with me in this effort to set public opinion right, as many of you have long been making strenuous endeavors after success in the same direction.
To put the whole matter, then, into one short and comprehensive clause, my cardinal object in this book is to give the general public a clearer insight of the reputed mystery and true inwardness of Wall Street affairs.
In my relation of certain reminiscences of Wall Street, and in discussing the checkered career of certain brokers, operators and politicians, I have endeavored to be guided by a historic aphorism of Lord Macaulay:
“No past event has any intrinsic importance,” says the great essayist, litterateur, historian and statesman. “The knowledge of it is valuable,” he adds, “only as it leads us to form just calculations with respect to the future.”
In the samples of my experience which I have given in this book I have aimed, to some extent, at this rendition of the noble purposes of history and biography in their philosophic and scientific application of teaching by example. If I have fallen far short of this high ideal of the British Essayist, as I humbly feel that I have, I must throw myself on the kind indulgence of the readers, and ask them to take the will for the deed. For the presentation of the facts themselves I crave no indulgence. They are gems worthy of preservation in the light of the above definition. I only submit that the setting might be much better.
My chapters on politics may be considered foreign to the main issue, but as many of the events therein described were intimately connected with my business career, I think they are not much of a digression.
Henry Clews.