“But with the million there came another interest. Up to that time I had applied my methods to individual cases; but it struck me, after the strain of the amalgamation negotiations was over, that my generalisations were capable of a wider application. I took up the study of political affairs over here; and I found that my principles enabled me to gauge the psychology of masses even more easily than those of individuals. As a practical test, I stood for Parliament; and got elected without any difficulty. Of course one of the Parties was glad to have me—a millionaire isn’t likely to go a-begging at their door for long—but you may remember that I won that election by my own methods. The Party machines tried to copy them, of course, at a later date; but they failed hopelessly because they were merely repeating mechanically some operations which I had designed for a special case.
“I took very little interest in politics, though. I had no sympathy with the usual methods of the politicians; and at times I revolted against them effectually.”
He was evidently thinking of the two episodes which had gained him the nickname of the Wrecker.
“When I began, I think I told you that the element of risk enters largely into one’s pleasures; and I believe that holds good in politics. The work of a politician, and especially of a Cabinet Minister, is largely in the nature of a gamble. To most of them, politics is an empirical science; for they have little time to study the basis of it. I’ll do them the justice to say that I don’t think it is a mere matter of clinging to their salaries which keeps them in office; it’s mainly that they enjoy the feeling of swaying great events. With an Empire like ours, the stakes are tremendous; and there’s a certain sensation to be got out of gambling on that scale. Mind you, I doubt if they realise themselves that this is what they enjoy in the political game; but it is actually what does sway them to a great extent.
“Now so long as it’s a mere question of some parochial point, I don’t mind their enjoying their sensations. It matters very little in the long run whether one Bill or another passes Parliament; and if they fight over minor questions, I don’t care. But twice in my political career I saw that the Party game was threatening trouble on bigger lines. The Anglo-Peruvian agreement and the Malotu Islands question were affairs that cut down to the bed-rock of things; and I couldn’t stand aside and see them muddled in the usual way. I had to assert myself there, whether I liked it or not. And when I did intervene, my mental equipment made the result a certainty. I knew the country and the country’s average opinion in a way that none of them did; and I had only to strike at the vital point. They call me the Wrecker; and I suppose I did bring down two Governments on these questions; but it wasn’t so difficult for me.
“But, as I told you, I never had much interest in politics. I like real things; and the political game is more than half make-believe. I still have my seat in the House; but I think they are gladdest when I am not there.
“Well, I am afraid I’m making a long story of it; but I think you will see the drift of it now. Politics failed to give me what I wanted. I had no turn for the routine of it; and I had no wish to be involved in all the petty manœuvres upon which the nursing of a majority depends. Mind you, I could have done it better than any of them, with that peculiar bent of mine. They consult me whenever a crisis arises; and I can generally pull them through. After all, it’s a case of handling men, there as everywhere else.
“However, I wanted something better to amuse me than the squaring of some nonentity with a knighthood or the pacification of some indignant office-seeker who had been passed over. I wanted to feel myself pitted against men who really were experts in their own line. And that was how I came to take up finance in earnest.”
He paused again and lighted a fresh cigar. While he was doing so, I watched his face. In any other man, his autobiographic sketch would have seemed egotistical; and possibly I have raised that impression in my reproduction of it; for I can only give the sense of what he said. I cannot put on paper the tones of his voice—the faint tinge of contempt with which he spoke of his triumphs, as though they were child’s play. Nor can I do more than indicate here and there that peculiar sensation of duality which his talk took on more and more clearly as he proceeded. It was as though the Nordenholt whom I saw before me were telling his story whilst over behind him stood some greater personality, following the narrative and tracing out in it the clues which were to lead on to some events still in the distant future.
“Finance, Flint,” he continued. “That was the field where I came into my own at last. Money in itself is nothing, nothing whatever. But the making of money, the duel of brain against brain with not even the counters on the table, that’s the great game. The higher branches of finance are simply a combination of arithmetic and psychology. They’re divorced absolutely from any idea of material gain or loss. Railways, steamship lines, coal, oil, wheat, cotton or wool—do you imagine that one thinks of these concrete things while one plays the game? Not at all. They are the merest pawns. The whole affair is compressed into groups of figures and the glimpses of the other man’s brain which one gets here and there throughout the operations. And I played a straight game, Flint; no small investor was ever ruined through my manœuvres. I doubt if any other financier can say as much. I went into the thing as a game, a big, risky game for my own hand; and I refused to gamble in the savings of little men. I took my gains from the big men who opposed me, not from the swarm of innocents.”