“Then if no money is wanted, how do you start?”
“On credit, my lad, and the more you owe to the right people the safer you are. Who will help you when you are hard pushed? Your friend? Not a bit of it. Your creditors! Who will push your business, bring you customers, put you in the way of a good deal? Your creditors. No man ever failed for debt. It was for not owing enough! Why, half Sydney firms would be wound up to-morrow but for their wise foresight in owing too much. The creditors dare not face the loss, so they keep them going. As for the squatters in the country, from what I hear there is not one in a score could pay ten shillings in the pound, and they are as jolly as sand-boys and as happy as kings. Does the price of wool trouble them? Not much!”
“And is it wise to pay nobody?”
“No, that is a fool’s game! A small creditor is a small enemy, while a big creditor is a big friend. It’s the same with appropriating. Never take a few paltry pounds, you may get seven years. It is just as simple to start a rotten company and scoop thousands—just as easy and no risk; only fools can’t see it. And who gets in quod? The little fishes or the big ones? Why, the little fishes all the time? Why, the law is a net made so delicate that all the big sharks can break through; the only question is, will you be a man eaten or a man-eater?
“It’s all the foolishness and humbug we are taught while we are boys that spoils life for most men. They start out at a game they don’t understand, with the certainty they do. Mind you, I’m not saying things are not pretty well as they are, for if there were no mugs where would our turn come in?”
Huey felt at first a certain revolt and repugnance to the doctrines of Soft Sam, but little by little the feeling wore off. The calm certainty of the speaker, the evidence he had of the success of his plans, all told with force. How could he argue against success; he, who so far felt himself a failure? A thought came into his mind how One was in old time taken to a pinnacle of the Temple, and the kingdoms of the world shown to him—“All these will I give you if you will bow down and worship me.”
But he put the recollection aside as not suited to the affairs of practical life.
Alec, on his side, received all these new maxims like new milk.
To him they were as the keys of Heaven—self-evident propositions that he wondered had never struck him before.
“Well, what had we better start?”