follows: “With respect to your cheque on Brown’s Bank, received yesterday, I regret to hear this day of the suspension of the bank. Under these circumstances your cheque will not be cleared, so that we shall have to debit your account with it.” This is pleasant. I have another cheque sent by the same post as the other. I begin to fear on that account. Happily, no more letters of that kind come in, and I take another turn in the open air. Every one looks grave. There are little knots of men standing like conspirators in every street. They are trying to comfort one another. “Oh, it will be all right,” I hear them exclaim; but they look as if they did not believe what they said, and felt it was all wrong. Now and then one steals away towards the bank, but the door is still shut, and he comes back gloomier-looking than ever. I am growing sad myself. I have not seen a smile or heard a pleasant word to-day, except from my neighbour, who chuckles over the fact that his account is overdrawn. He laughs on the other side of his mouth, however, when he realises the fact that he has cheques he has not sent in. Another day comes, and I know my fate. Some banks have agreed to come to the rescue. They will pay all bank-notes in full, and will make advances not exceeding 15s. in the pound in respect of credit accounts as may be necessary. Happily, our little town is safe.
Another day or two of this strain on our credit must have thrown us all into a general smash. This is good as far as it goes, but I fail to see why the holder of one of Brown’s banknotes is to have his money in full, while I am to accept a reduction of five shillings in the pound or more. However, I have no alternative. I would not mind the reduction if my friends the creditors would accept a similar reduction in their little accounts. Alas! it is no use making such a proposal to them; I must grin and bear it. One consolation is that my wife—bless her!—is away holiday-making and does not need to ask me for cash. On the third day we begin to fear that we may not get ten shillings in the pound, and the post brings me back another cheque with a modest request for cash by return. All over the country there is weeping and wailing. One would bear it better a month hence. Christmas is coming! Already the bells are preparing to ring it in. I must put on the conventional smile. Christmas cards are coming in, wishing me a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! and, oh dear! I must say, Thank you! Alas! alas! troubles are like babies—the more you nurse them, the bigger they grow.
And now it is time for me to make my bow and retire. Having said that my bank was smashed up, I cannot expect any one to be subsequently interested in my proceedings. We live in a commercial country and a commercial
age, and the men whom the society journals reverence are the men who have made large fortunes, either by their own industry and forethought and self-denial, or by the devil’s aid. And I am inclined to think that he has a good deal to do with the matter. If ever we are to have plain living and high thinking, we shall have to give up this wonderful worship of worldly wealth and show. Douglas Jerrold makes one of his heroes exclaim, “Every man has within him a bit of a swindler.” When Madame Roland died on the scaffold, whither she had been led by the so-called champions of liberty and equality and the rights of man, she exclaimed, as every school-boy knows, or ought to know, “Oh, Liberty, what crimes are done in thy name!” So say I, Oh, wealth, which means peace and happiness, and health and joy (Sydney Smith used to say that he felt happier for every extra guinea he had in his pocket, and most of us can testify the same), what crimes are done in thy name; not alone in the starvation of the poor, in the underpaying of the wage-earning class who help to make it, but in the way in which sharks and company promoters seek to defraud the few who have saved money of all their store. You recollect Douglas Jerrold makes the hero already referred to say, “You recollect Glass, the retired merchant? What an excellent man was Glass! A pattern man to make a whole generation by.
What could surpass him in what is called honesty, rectitude, moral propriety, and other gibberish? Well, Glass grows a beard. He becomes one of a community, and immediately the latent feeling (swindling) asserts itself.” And the worst of it is that Glass as a company director and promoter is worshipped as a great man, especially if he secures a gratuitous advertisement by liberality in religious and philanthropic circles, and exercises a lavish liberality in the way of balls and dinners. Society crawls at his feet as they used to do when poor Hudson, the ex-draper of York, reigned a few years in splendour as the Railway King. Glass goes everywhere, gets into Parliament. Rather dishonest, a sham and a fraud as he is, we make him an idol, and then scorn far-away savages who make idols of sticks and stones.
W. Speaight & Sons, Printers, Fetter Lane, London.