“I said to the man when he had explained what the thing was, ‘I will give you thirty days in the penitentiary,’ and you ought to see him get out. It would have done you good to see Mr. Gould laugh over our dropping down behind that counter at the sight of that portable churn.”
Mr. Morosini illustrated Mr. Gould’s peculiar tactics in operations in some particular stock in the Exchange with another anecdote. Said he:
“At one time Mr. Gould was short on Pacific Mail, and he bought and sold, bought and sold, bought and sold until the commissions paid brokers amounted to about $36,000. Then the account was finally made up and showed to the credit of Mr. Gould on the entire transaction the sum of fourteen cents. A rumor was in circulation that Mr. Gould had made a great deal of money in the stock. One afternoon, just about that time, I was at Mr. Gould’s house when William H. Vanderbilt called to see him about some matter of business. He congratulated Mr. Gould on having made so much money on the stock. Mr. Gould turned to me and said, ‘Morosini, how much have we made on that deal in Pacific Mail?’
“I answered, ‘$140,000.’
“‘What,’ he exclaimed, and looked at me in a queer way. After Mr. Vanderbilt had gone Mr. Gould said, ‘When I asked you what we had made on that Pacific Mail transaction why did you say we had made $140,000?’ I answered, ‘Did we want to disgrace ourselves by saying fourteen cents? Why not let them know that we can make money as well as they can?’ Mr. Gould was very much amused.”
Those men who of late have been most intimately associated in business with Mr. Gould, and those directly connected with the business enterprises of which he was the commanding power, invariably speak of him in the highest terms. The directors of the Manhattan Elevated Railway, the Western Union Telegraph Company, the Missouri Pacific System, and other great corporations in which Mr. Gould’s holdings of stock were the controlling interests, have been lavish in the compliments and admiration which they express.
Newspapers throughout the country, in their editorials, seem to have made every effort to be kind, even while expressing, most of them, detestation for Mr. Gould’s methods. In the public press, however, he has had few compliments except for his shrewdness and his family life, while criticisms have been very severe on all of the prominent features of his career.
A great number of clergymen, too, have taken occasion to preach sermons on the death of Mr. Gould, some of them very bitter in their denunciation of him. A few have been charitable enough to object entirely to the fact that he made little application of his wealth toward benevolences, and have said little about his methods of acquiring it.
It is true, however, that the weight of the consensus of opinion has been that Jay Gould’s life was that of a wrecker of fortunes and of honor, that the good that he is done falls far short of balancing the account, and that his loss will be felt less by the world at large than would that of any other man of equal prominence.