"Faites votre jeu, Messieurs! Le jeu est fait"? Not at all! This was in Montreal not at Monte Carlo. Strictly "business," and thoroughly respectable. True, many men lost, but some won. And what would you have? How could it be otherwise? There are but a certain number of gold pieces in the world; and, if, after an "operation," my bag contains more, it is certain that my neighbour's must hold less. Currency, bullion, stocks, shares, grain, cotton, what are any of them but the tokens to win and lose money upon? But the thing is done "upon 'Change," and 'Change, like church, is a good word, and everything belonging to it is respectable. If it were round a green-cloth table now, how different it would be! though the outcome might be the same. Respectability cannot tolerate the green cloth. And yet, to an all-seeing eye, there may be less amiss when a man's money falls upon the black and the red. At least the play at Monte Carlo is "on the square;" there are no misquotations or false telegrams, bogus prospectuses, lying reports, collusive understandings, and traps for the unwary, such as have been heard of at times in the places of better repute.
Ralph Herkimer made a great deal of money; Considine made some; and by-and-by, as American finance returned to a normal position, other fields of enterprise were needed as the possibilities of gambling in gold and greenbacks grew less; and then Considine's American connections became a valuable introduction for Ralph to several "good things." There were estates whose owners, stripped of all their other property, and still encumbered by their debts, could not wring a subsistence from the devastated acres, and were willing to part with them for a trifle; but no one would buy--no one at hand, that is, who had opportunity to know about the war-ravaged fields and the intractable labourers. But at a distance, in a land of peace, where a good title and a veracious statement of the acreage and the yielding capacity were the data--where, in fact, a pencil and a piece of paper were the means for judging the promise of the venture--how different it all was. Here was a country where snows and frosts were scarcely known, or, so it was said, where the cattle could range without shelter all through the year, where the gardens were planted with figs and pomegranates, and pigs fattened in the orchards on peaches too plentiful to repay the gathering. There were minerals too, every variety of riches, gold, coal, copper, hidden in the ground, and only awaiting the capital and skill to dig them up; and forests of pine, now vastly enhanced in value by the Chicago fire, waiting to be cut down and converted into lumber if only foreign enterprise would undertake the task. What could be better calculated to stir the imagination of people accustomed to contend for three long months of the year with the fiercest severities of winter, and to wring fixed and moderate profits by patient industry from a soil which still was five or ten times the price of these fields of endless summer? The fevers, malaria, bad water, and general backwardness did not show on the map, and a dense silence kept them from the knowledge of investors.
Ralph and his friend being well-to-do, their statements and recommendations were implicitly accepted; and, indeed, the statements in themselves were not untruthful; it was in the counter-balancing facts, which were left unstated, that those who afterwards considered themselves their dupes, found the limitation and disillusion of their hopes, which teach men in the end that Fortune is as likely to find them out while labouring at home, as to be found by them without exertion and experience, in distant places. But that was the buyers' concern--knowledge which came to them later and by degrees, Ralph and his friend had completed their share of the transaction and pocketed their commission when the sale was made; what followed had for them no interest.
They made many such sales, pocketing large commissions--the larger, indeed, the worse the property they disposed of--vast tracts in some cases, containing untold wealth in minerals and forests, where the buyers sunk fortunes in endeavouring to bring the riches within reach; and at length, having exhausted their resources, had to subside into the ranks of the ruined people around them, and wait patiently for a generation, till the march of time should bring within reach of their children the sums they had placed out of reach for themselves. There were smaller farms, too, where sturdy yeomen with their blooming children went to make rich more quickly; but somehow few appeared to thrive in those distant migrations. Their livestock was apt to die; too little rain, or too much, would destroy their crops, and their own health would fail; and in a year or two they would find their way back to Canada, with an enlarged experience but a shrunken purse; while of the children, some would be left behind in the foreign churchyard, and the rest, yellow and gaunt, bore small resemblance to the bright-eyed youngsters they had been before.
In a few years the trade in southern homesteads died out, Canadian enterprise laid down her telescope and interested herself with things nearer home. Science, ransacking her own soil, had come on hid treasure of many kinds, gold, copper, iron, phosphates, and plumbago, and showed where, instead of sending her savings abroad, she might sink them at home--her own savings and those of many a sanguine stranger. On every side Ralph saw opportunities of money-making, and he was ready to use them; but now his operations, he found, must be on another footing than before. Hitherto he had been a financier; now, his neighbours recognized him as a capitalist. The change of standing was gratifying, but it had its dangers and its drawbacks.
Finance has been described as the art of transferring money from one pocket to another--in a Stock Exchange sense, be it understood, not an Old Bailey one--and the financiers are the artists who perform the feat. Money is a volatile and also an adhesive substance--matter in a state of unstable equilibrium, which must not be disturbed or changes will ensue--wherefore, in the process of transferring, some of it is certain to be spilled, and that the artist may pick up if he can; it is his perquisite. A good deal too is apt to stick to the artist's fingers--perquisites again--and hence the profit of handling other people's money. If it were one's own already, whence would come the profit? A man can scarcely gain by paying perquisites to himself; though, to be sure, he may obviate the necessity of paying them to any one else. But there cannot be a doubt that the financier escapes much embarrassment when he is not a capitalist. See, for example, with what calm unflinching pluck a "general manager" can carry on war with a rival railway! The next half-yearly dividend may be sacrificed in the contest, but he does not falter, he goes bravely on. He is not a shareholder; it makes no matter to him. To seek a parallel in the political world capitalists and financiers stand to one another as kings to their ministers. When things go well the minister does the work, the king has the profit and glory; but when they miscarry, though the minister did the mischief, it is the king who loses his crown; the minister merely withdraws into privacy, and lives comfortably in retirement on the emoluments of former office. Yet who, if he could, would not be a king, to be trembled before and worshipped? and after all, the successful revolutions are not numerous.
Ralph recognized the new danger in his path, and regretted a little, at times, when he found he must let a profitable opportunity go by, merely because it was one which only an impecunious promoter durst undertake; but he had his compensations. Like the man who becomes a king, he got well grovelled to, and he liked it. He could influence, too, if the after responsibilities of "promoting" were too onerous to be undertaken. The use by other men of his name, unauthorizedly, as a heavy holder of their stocks, was worth money; and, as long as he "unloaded" in time, perfectly safe. He did not now flutter about 'Change, scattering reports and picking up news; he sat in his office, and was waited on by those who sought his countenance in their schemes and wished to learn its price.
Only one disappointment as yet had befallen him. He wished to become president of a leading bank, and he knew so many of the directors that he made sure of gaining his point. Unfortunately the directors knew him as well, and deemed it advisable to choose some one else; but then of course it was the general body of shareholders who must bear the blame. The ballot leaves so many things in doubt, and covers up so much about which there can be no doubt at all. His friends, the directors, called on him immediately the election was over--the traitors being probably the first to hurry in--and expressed the most cordial regret and condolence; and Ralph was too wise not to accept the profuse explanations with gracious condescension. Their hastening to explain was a tribute, at any rate, to his weight, and showed that they feared him; and as one after another he smiled them out, he promised himself to let them feel yet that their fears had not been groundless. He was not, therefore, in his most debonair mood, when, on being informed by a new clerk that a rough-looking man had been waiting some time, he permitted him to be introduced.
"Paul?"
"----day, sir."