And when Lawson is aroused you see a fighter with all his wits about him and of utter fearlessness. He would have made a first-class soldier, with his quickness and dash and the pluck that was born in him, and has not to be summoned by thinking and resolving.
THE BOSTON VIEW OF LAWSON
The Boston view of Lawson is illuminating. They are afraid of him on State Street. He thinks so rapidly and does things with such instant decision that he bewilders the conventional plodders. They admit that he is brilliant, that he has a genius for gathering in the dollars, but he shocks the financial Mrs. Grundy. They tell you that he is "irregular," "sensational," "bizarre," and the rest of it—all of which means simply that he is a man of original mind, who follows his own methods, succeeds with them, and doesn't care a snap of his fingers about being out of the fashion.
He has a hundred ideas and impulses where the "safe and steady-going" business man has one—and as the safe and steady-going State-Streeter doesn't understand the ninety-nine Lawson ideas and impulses which do not come to him, he charges them up to "eccentricity" and "charlatanism."
Boston says Lawson is vain. He certainly does hold a good opinion of himself, and he has a right to. A boy who goes into a bank at twelve as he did and before he is seventeen cleans up $60,000 is hardly to be rebuked for considering that he is better fitted for the financial game than most. He knows life, he knows men. He has made and lost fortunes and is not afraid of being "broke."
That experience has been his repeatedly, but always he rose again. His brains, energy, and daring would cause him to rise anywhere. Had he been given birth in a South American republic, the dictatorship would have been his inevitably.
Lawson was born a money-maker, but he is a great deal more than that. He is a many-sided man, interested ardently in lots of things to which the ordinary money-maker is oblivious. He is very, very human. He has a soul.
Although he is raining blows on important men, who are not accustomed to being treated with disrespect—although he is charging them with crimes, and hopes, I should say, to drive them out of the country or into the penitentiary, he speaks of some of them with the greatest kindness, thoroughly understanding their good personal qualities.
THE WONDERFUL ROGERS
He denounces H. H. Rogers, for example, as a robber, a criminal, and he said to me: