Smoking, as usual, and wasting your time after luncheon, instead of hurrying to your offices and coining time into money like old Sam Dodson, who can give the cash value of every five minutes,” and Welsby sat down beside three other young Liverpool merchants in the club—all men who had one eye on business and the other on the good of the city. “Something's happened since I saw you fellows last on 'Change. Guess.” “Cotton up three points? A corn corner at Chicago? A big bear in lard? Anything to do with fruit?”
“Nothing whatever to do with such prosaic subjects, and I am ashamed to notice your mercenary tempers; this is a public affair, and is to be a profound secret for exactly seventy minutes, after which it will appear in the fourth edition of the Evening Trumpet.
“It's a pity that the early news could not be used for an operation in cotton, but I'll take it along to the 'Flags,' and tell it under pledge of silence to half a dozen brokers. If you are really interested in the matter, this will give it a wider and more certain circulation than any Trumpet could.”
“We're all ears, Welsby.”
“Well, to begin at the beginning, you know how our people in Liverpool are crowded together in courts and rookeries without room or air. It's hard on the men and women, but it's hardest on the children, who have no place to play in but the gutter.
“So a man wrote a letter to the papers about a month ago, pleading for a fund to put down small playgrounds in the crowded districts, where the little folk could come of an evening, and the mothers could sit, and the men might smoke a pipe...
“I remember the letter,” broke in Cotton; “it was signed 'Philanthropist,' and was generally supposed to have been composed in a moment of inspiration by some proprietor of insanitary property; it was an elegant letter, and affected me very much—to tears, in fact,”
“It was signed 'Charles Welsby,' and you never read a word of it, because it had no reference to polo nor the Macfarlane Institute for Working Lads, the only subjects to which you give any attention. Four people read it, however, and wrote to me at once. One man denounced the scheme as another instance of the patronage of the rich. He added that it was a sop, and that the toilers would soon find open places for themselves.”
“He would mean your garden, Welsby,” suggested Lard. “The Socialist has two main principles of action: first, to give nothing to any good cause himself; and second, to appropriate his neighbour's property on the first opportunity. And your other correspondents?”
“I had a letter from the inventor of a nonintoxicating beer, offering £5 on condition that we advertised his beverage, which he discovered by supernatural guidance and sold for philanthropic ends.”