“I was a working-man and worked hard. I put by a little out of what I made. Of nights I studied. I learned all ends of the ship-building business in a way. But I needed money to get free. It never occurred to me to claim somebody else’s money as mine. I thought the rich would help me to get rich if I helped them to get richer. My idea of getting capital was to go get it. I was a long time finding where there was any.
“By and by I heard of an old wreck on the coast––a steamer had run aground and the hull was abandoned after they took out what machinery they could salvage. The hull stood up in the storms and the sand began to bury it. It would have been ‘dead capital’ then for sure.
“The timbers were sound, though, and I found I could buy it cheap. I put in all I had saved in all my life, eight thousand dollars, for the hull. I got a man to risk something with me.
“We took the hull off the ground, refitted it, stepped in six masts, and made a big schooner of her.
“She cost us sixty thousand dollars all told. Before she was ready to sail we sold her for a hundred and twenty thousand. The buyers made big money out of her. The schooner is carrying food now and giving employment to sailors.
“Who got robbed on that transaction? Where did ‘dead labor suck the life out of living labor,’ as Karl Marx says? You could do the same. You could if you would. There’s plenty of old hulls lying around on the sands of the world.”
Iddings had nothing in him to respond to the poetry of this.
“That’s all very fine,” he growled, “but where would I get my start? I got no eight thousand or anybody to lend me ten dollars.”
“The banks will lend to men who will make money make money. It’s not the guarantee they want so much as inspiration. Pierpont Morgan said he lent on character, not on collateral.”