Borrowers roam the island of Manhattan from morning to midnight, invading every place and penetrating every corner. They can no more be shut out than the Atlantic Ocean; they are all-pervading, persistent, and resistless. They will climb to the apex of Grace Church, or walk to High Bridge in a driving storm, for the sake of a trivial loan, when they could not be hired to do honest work for ten dollars an hour. They never know dejection; if they did, they would be philanthropic enough to make a case for the coroner. They rob the credulous and cajole the weak with a zest and cheerfulness which can only spring from a serene consciousness of doing evil. While the good suffer and the deserving starve, they enjoy themselves and grow round with plenty.
Professional borrowers have a knowledge of human nature equal to Shakspeare or Cervantes; and in physiognomy they laugh Lavater to scorn. They often ask loans without getting accommodation; but this does not prove their insight at fault,—only their love for experiment. The demands they make upon the unwilling are tentative efforts to be treasured up as warning in the future. They would never go to the wrong man were not the right one absent. They cannot always have things as they want, and so they take them as they must. The merest novice makes no approaches to the Astors, or Stewarts, or Vanderbilts; their reputation has gone before them, and he can discover at a glance that not a single dollar can be torn from their financial souls. Such an absolute incapacity for procuring money gleams from every lineament of the rich, that the rudest savage would recognize it on instinct.
If borrowers preyed upon the prosperous, they would do little harm; but, unfortunately, they find their victims among those who have not locked up their hearts and thrown away the key. The man who lends is primarily a good fellow; and that he should be driven into scepticism and cynicism by deliberate swindles, is deplorable indeed. Such shattering of faith is a sin against the race; and if a professional borrower did not aspire to total depravity, he would hesitate before committing it. But he stops at nothing, except it be the vision of a debt discharged, or the ghost of an unredeemed due-bill.
THE FEAR THEY INSPIRE.
Hundreds of our citizens, strange as it may appear, are in perpetual dread of borrowers. They are aware that their countenances and their hearts are against them, and that, resolve as they will, they are in danger of being wheedled. They are angry with themselves whenever they succumb to the blandishments they have suffered so much by; and still, when assailed by a direct petition for a loan, they yield without protest.
Plausible swindlers seem to keep in memory every over-amiable man who will open his purse for the telling of a piteous tale or specious story. They are ever on the trail of such a member of the tender-hearted tribe, and they inevitably run him down. Go where he may, they invariably find him out, and, with wheedling tongue, lick up his substance.
HORACE GREELEY AS A VICTIM.
The kind and gentle Horace Greeley was, until the last day of his life, the victim of impecunious cheats. He was opposed, on principle, to giving them a penny; and yet, in practice, he was a perpetual purveyor to their imaginary needs. For many years, I doubt if any energetic applicant for a loan ever left the presence of the great journalist without carrying his point. During the last twenty-five years of his life, Mr. Greeley must have lent to entirely irresponsible persons, without the slightest expectation of getting anything back, not far from fifty thousand dollars. Every week he would berate himself for his encouragement of such “confounded loafers,” as he styled them, and express his determination to reform his loose and lavish habit. But with the new week would be resumed the open-handed generosity, from the impossibility of saying “no” even to the most transparent impostor.
While entering the Tribune office, the editor would often notice a borrower lying in wait, and tell him beforehand there was no use of asking for money; that he could not get another penny under any circumstances. The cozener, however, knowing his man, would follow him into the sanctum, and in less than a minute Mr. Greeley would be seen opening his pocket-book, and be heard to say, “Now, take that, and don’t come here any more; for I’m going to turn over a new leaf.”
Of course the new leaf was never turned over, unless in a backward direction. The journalist’s reputation as a succorer of suckers was so firmly established that he drew them from every quarter, and could not shake them off.