No just estimate of Mr. Gould can be formed without taking into consideration the fact that he lived in a time and country in which corruption in politics and business was widespread. The great mass of the people were honest, but municipal government was the most corrupt ever known. Bribery walked the streets of the national and state capitals, and “jobs” were behind nearly every public undertaking. It was a period, on the one hand, of glorious achievement and extraordinary development, and, on the other hand, of venality, deceit and dishonesty. The besetting temptation of the times was the desire to get rich—enormously rich—suddenly. Mr. Gould may be said to have been little if any worse than most of his contemporaries in business. His triumphs were, for the most part, over men who would have ruined him if he had not ruined them.
In regard to himself, he once said when told that he was the most unpopular man in the United States:
“I never notice what is said about me. I am credited with things I have never done and abused for them. It would be idle to attempt to contradict newspaper talk and street rumors. As to enemies, any man in my position is likely to have them. With me the bitterest enemies have always proved to be men to whom I had rendered services. As a general thing, I do my best to be on good terms with everybody I come in contact with. I am not of a quarrelsome disposition. But, on the other hand, I have the disadvantage of not being sociable. Wall street men are fond of company and sport. A man makes $100,000 there and immediately buys a yacht, begins to drive fast horses, and becomes a sport generally. My tastes lie in a different direction. When business hours are over I go home and spend the remainder of the day with my wife, my children, and the books of my library. Every man has natural inclinations of his own. Mine are domestic. They are not calculated to make me particularly popular in Wall street, and I cannot help that.”
The day after his death, his friends had only one word to say as to the qualities in the dead man which commanded a tribute from them—his ability, his foresight, his wonderful patience in the working out of his aims, his fidelity to friends, his good faith with his business associates and his generosity to subordinate workers. Mr. Morosini, speaking of his dead friend and former employer, with whom he had been associated for a longer period, and perhaps more continuously and in some respects more intimately, than any other man in New York, said:
“Mr. Gould was one of the most lovable men I ever knew. It was a pleasure to serve him. He was very appreciative, and never imposed a needless task upon any one. In the office he always took things easily and coolly. There was never any hurry or confusion. In his family he was the best of husbands, and I never knew a man who loved his children with such intensity as he did. He seemed to worship them all. He was a very companionable man, and there was a great deal of humor in his disposition. While he was not given to telling stories or cracking jokes himself, he enjoyed hearing others do so and would laugh as heartily as the rest. He was very abstemious in his habits, but was exceptionally fond of coffee. Now and then he would sip a little wine, but he rarely took more than a spoonful at any time. My opinion is that his system gave way under the great strain resulting from the consciousness of his immense wealth. It was a tremendous care, and he was always weighed down with the anxiety and excitement of protecting his properties.
“Mr. Gould was the most generous of men, and he made a great many other men rich by his own generosity. I could give you hundreds of instances where in return for some slight service to him he has started men in the way of making fortunes. There is one which just comes to mind while I am talking which is a good illustration. Once there was a man out West who did some little work for Mr. Gould in a railroad matter there. The man was of the ordinary type of a Westerner on the frontier. Mr. Gould said to me: ‘I ought to do something for him; what would you suggest?’ I replied, ‘Buy him a thousand shares of stock for a rise.’ He said, ‘All right,’ and ordered the purchase of 1,000 shares of Denver and Rio Grande. The stock was then about 29. We carried it along until it reached a very high point and looked like going off, and then we sold it. The profit was $65,000 and I paid that money, all of it, sixty-five bills of $1,000 each, to that man myself. Mr. Gould had ordered that transaction for that particular purpose. He took none of the profit himself, but directed that the man should have it all.
“There were many instances,” continued Mr. Morosini, “of just that sort, and many in which he greatly helped men there in Wall street from going down—men whom he was under no obligation to help, but he assisted them under an impulse of generosity.”
In regard to Mr. Gould’s business methods, Mr. Morosini said: “Of course, he was very reserved. He never let the left hand know what the right hand did. His motto was never to say ‘cat’ until you had him in the bag. For instance, he asked me one day to call in about $8,000,000—which we had loaned out. I followed his instructions; the money was collected; he said nothing to anybody about why he had called it in. I kept the money for nearly a month, when one day he told me that I might loan it out again, as he had no more use for it; that he had intended it for use in buying the Reading road, but the deal had fallen through and therefore it might as well be drawing interest. That was the first I knew of what he had in contemplation when he called the money in. Then again, when he bought the Missouri Pacific, his negotiations with Commodore Garrison were carried on for three months, and it was only when he asked me to draw checks and told me to whom they should be drawn that the whole thing came out.”
Continuing, Mr. Morosini said: “Mr. Gould could enjoy immensely anything funny or ludicrous. We used to have a small window in the office through which I would talk to some of the unimportant callers, and through which Mr. Gould would also talk to people whom it was not necessary to bring into the inner room. One day a man came to the window and said, ‘I want to see Mr. Gould.’ I told him he could not see Mr. Gould unless he told me what he wanted. He replied, ‘I have an invention here, and there’s millions to be made out of it.’ Mr. Gould was in the next room, and he said, ‘Morosini, what is it the man wants?’ and I told him, whereupon he got up and came to the window to talk to the man.
“When Mr. Gould appeared, the man put his hand under his coat as if to pull something out. I saw it glisten, and thinking it was a blunderbuss, I dodged down under the counter, and Mr. Gould seeing me go down dropped down also. ‘Shoot high, you son of a gun,’ I yelled out. Then the man laughed and said there was nothing to fear, and began to explain the nature of his invention. We got up and looked at it, and what do you think it was? He had a sort of a brass cylinder, and he said it was a patent portable churn. It was to be filled with cream in the morning when a man was starting away from home, and slung by a strap over his shoulder under his coat. The motion of the body while walking would keep the cream stirring, and then besides there was a sort of piston with a handle on the top. Every now and then you were to give that a jerk, so that by the time the man reached home at night he could turn out on a plate for his wife a pound or two of fresh butter.