Entertaining, as already mentioned, strong objections to anything like discipline, a master of hounds being, in his judgment, the one mortal being who is entitled to command his fellow-creatures, Dick has rarely attempted permanent work: and when he has done so it has always proved temporary after all; for what reason it seems unnecessary to enquire. In summer he is usually to be found in attendance at cricket matches, and in less exalted cricket spheres rather fancies himself as a bowler. He possesses quite a remarkable instinct for discovering occasions, show, celebration, athletic meeting, or what not, which will yield an odd shilling; and will put in much more and harder work to earn the odd shilling than he could ever be persuaded to do to earn the certain half-crown. He has a family; and it is in no spirit of reflection upon a hard-working spouse that he responds to enquiries with the cheerful—always cheerful—assurance that “the cubs are all right.”
Sport in the City.
THE OLD YEAR AND THE NEW.
There are times when the tented field is as still as death, times when even the hub of the universe is as dull as any Little Pedlington in the Kingdom. We usually make up for it, however, by a great bustle of company meetings in the concluding month of the year, and these functions have been characterised during the past few weeks by a quite unwonted show of animation. The shareholder, as a rule, is a very patient and long-suffering kind of animal. He pockets his grievances, passes the resolutions submitted for his acceptance, and goes away thankful, in most cases, for very small mercies indeed. When he does break out, however, he is apt to be a very ugly customer, and the lot of the proverbial policeman is quite a happy one in comparison with that of the luckless wight whom duty compels to face the music in his capacity as a director. I do not know whether it is the contagion of heated political assemblies that is spreading its virus in the City, or whether we have come under some malign planetary influence; but certain it is that there is a nasty spirit abroad, and the shareholder goes to his meeting prepossessed with the idea that it is enough to be a director to be either a fool or a knave. For several years in succession it was the fate of the Westralian companies to furnish occasion for these angry gatherings. They, however, are at length vouchsafed a well-earned rest, and the miserable wretches who pull the labouring oar in South African ventures are being given their turn.
That, perhaps, is not altogether surprising. Eldorado has become, in the popular imagination, a veritable Nazareth, out of which no good can come, and since shareholders cannot get out to Johannesburg to vent their wrath upon the heads on which it might with some propriety descend, they are with one accord taking it out of the English companies operating in South Africa which lie within their reach. This is not in consonance with strict justice, no doubt; but it will serve its purpose all the same, for it can hardly fail to convey a hint to quarters in which hints are greatly needed that the time has come for setting their houses in order, lest a worse thing befal. It is probably the case, as I have seen it stated, that the noise is made in inverse proportion to the stake. The big shareholder is intelligent enough to know something of the difficulties which follow upon the heels of a war and broad-minded enough to make allowances. The man with ten shares or twenty, who gets no dividend, and sees the market go steadily or unsteadily against him, loses all patience, and is fired with an ardent longing to break somebody’s head. What the small man voices, however, the big man feels, and the moral which these merry meetings should convey to Johannesburg is that shareholders have not put their money into South African ventures as an erratic form of recreation, but with the reasonable expectation of getting in their own lifetime a reasonable return. It is too much the fashion out there to regard the shareholder as a negligible quantity. Everybody seems to be bitten with the idea that the thing to aim at is bigness of aggregate return, bigness of mills, bigness of expenditure, bigness of everything except of the dividend declared. Megalomania of this description spells ruin to the proprietorial interest, and it is not compensated for by all the booby-talk about prolonging the lives of the mines. It is easy to understand the advantage of this prolongation to directors and managers and secretaries and engineers, and all the other hangers-on of the industry; but where the shareholder benefits from a division of his dividend by two and doubling the terms of years in which it is paid, is more than the average arithmetician can understand. The wrong turn was given to everything by Lord Milner, who saw with his mind’s eye a population of several millions on the Rand, and laid his lines accordingly. Lord Selborne, who is apparently a man of sense and moderation, is doing his best to curb and correct the extravagant ideas that had their genesis in the time of his predecessor, and there is much reliable information to warrant the belief that 1906 will be attended with very different results from 1905. It need be, for only another such year as the last is required, and South Africa will be for ever and a day undone so far as the British public is concerned.
The change of Government made no more difference in the markets than if it had been a change of footmen. The event had, in City parlance, been already discounted. To men who had imagined to themselves the vain thing that their exit would shake the financial spheres, as some of them doubtless did, it must have been gall and wormwood to see quotations actually rise on the day when their resignation became an accomplished fact. This could only be due to a sense of general relief, and to the feeling that the Liberal bark would prove far worse than its bite, so far as the interests dear to the City are concerned. It certainly was not owing to the new team being conspicuously strong either in business or finance. It is an anomaly, to say the least, that the transformation should result in a barrister being enthroned as the Chancellor of the Exchequer and a solicitor installed as the President of the Board of Trade; but Mr. Asquith has shown himself quite at home with figures and fiscal questions during the past two years, and Mr. Lloyd-George has the reputation in the House of knowing a thing or two besides the wickedness of Mr. Chamberlain and the clauses of the Education Act.
Until the elections are over and done with, it is not probable that we shall witness anything very theatrical in Throgmorton Street; but the knowing ones are counting upon a marked improvement of gilt-edged securities when things have settled down. Just as Nature abhors a vacuum, so does the Stock Exchange abhor stagnation, and the one question on everybody’s lips is what to go for in the New Year. Yankees, too dangerous; Home Rails, not to be touched with a barge-pole; Foreign Rails, quite high enough already; Foreigners, not another eighth to be squeezed out of them; Breweries, wait a bit; Copper stocks, a gamble for lunatics. Such is the rough-and-ready pronouncement of three out of four of the old hands one meets. What all are agreed upon is that gilt-edged descriptions must advance and that Kaffirs cannot, the one owing to the plethora of money they see looming in the near distance, the other to the alleged but scarcely demonstrated fact that the public have spewed out their mining stocks and will not have them back at any price. I always like to note these confident predictions. They are so often made and so seldom borne out by the event. How easy it would be to make fortunes if they were! Except for the puff palpable—the price of which is as well known as that of a postage stamp—the financial press is shrewd enough for the most part to refrain from prognostications after the manner of the vaticinators in the sporting journals; but how much it would add to the gaiety of nations if they made selections for the rise and fall after the fashion of their compeers in Fleet Street! The only thing that may always be predicted with certainty of markets is that what will happen will be the unforeseen, and this is intelligible enough. The calculable influences are few in comparison with the incalculable—something occurs to upset the best-laid schemes of mice and men—and you will meet a dozen men who have made their little pile out of the short view for one who has staked his fortune without regret upon the long one.
I will not emulate, therefore, the fame of Zadkiel. I shall not prophesy because I do not know; but it scarcely needs a prophet to perceive that much in the coming year, if not everything, turns upon the course of events in the Empire of the Czar. It is easy to see how pregnant with possibilities is the situation if one takes into account that big dominating factor, and rules out all the rest as of minor account or of no account at all; and it is equally easy to perceive that we are at the mercy of a chapter of accidents. None will undertake to say what the outcome will be, least of all a Russian himself who knows his people and the subtle influences by which they are or may be moved. I have had the advantage during the past few weeks of coming into contact with several recent arrivals from that unhappy country, and the accounts they give are so confused and so contradictory as to leave one in a more impenetrable fog than if one had never taken any pains to learn the truth at all. On some things, however, they are all agreed. Russian news in the newspapers, so they say, must be taken with a liberal quantum of salt. The Jews, not without reason, hate Russia, or rather the established order in Russia; they control, directly or indirectly, the bulk of the leading journals of all countries, and the news agencies as well; their mission is to set down things in malice, to paint everything in the blackest colours, to ruin Russian credit abroad, and to bring down upon the Russian people the execration of the civilised world. The fires of revolution are alight, it is true, but the conflagration is not so widespread nor so all-consuming as the enemies of Russia would have the world believe, and a free and purified Russia will emerge. What will happen then is the problem; and all my Russian friends are at one in saying that any representative Government that may be established will set before itself two objects of policy—a better understanding with England, based upon a solemn renunciation of any designs against India, and development of the resources of the Empire by the aid of foreign capital.
So far as the former of these objects is concerned, it goes almost without saying that any English Government in power would go more than half-way to meet amicable and sincere advances; and as to the latter—with another entente cordiale once established—the chances are that British capital will flow into Russia as it has flowed in turn into America, North and South, into Africa, into Australasia, into India, and into every quarter of the globe in which capital can be freely and safely employed. It is premature, perhaps, to say that Russian ventures will be the outstanding feature of 1906; but the event is on the cards, and the pioneer enterprises are already on the stocks. The world has not been standing still while the nations have been at war and the heathen have been raging furiously. During the past year or two, no end of little expeditions have been poking their noses into the recesses of the Ural region and the vast areas of the Siberian provinces, sending back reports of riches, mineral and agricultural, beyond the dreams of avarice. It is difficult to believe that resources of this description still exist in their virgin state so near comparatively to the Western capitals; but the evidence, coming as it does from so many capable and unimpeachable sources, is quite irresistible, and the inference appears to be inevitable that the exploitation of Russia is the next big task to which the world of finance and industry will direct its attention. The exploitation of China may wait, or be relegated to our friends and allies, the Japanese.
It must not be presumed from our readiness to settle the affairs of the nations that we have lapsed into indifference in the City as regards various little matters of domestic concern with respect to which agitation has been simmering for some time past. The relations of the House and the public are being canvassed more freely now than I have ever known, from within as well as from without. There is a consensus of opinion that things are not quite what they ought to be, as indeed they never have been and never will be even in this best of all possible worlds; but the insiders are afraid of pulling bricks about lest they should bring the entire edifice about their ears, while the outsiders are wanting in the organisation to give the old walls such a shove as would be felt by those within. It will not be long, however, before events compel the general overhaul which is recognised as a prime essential to the revival of business on such a scale as will enable the Stock Exchange man to live without sapping the very vitals of his clients. The complaints of the latter go to the very foundations of business as it is carried on to-day. Why should one pay brokerage when he buys? In every other business, it is the seller alone who pays. The answer is that the buyer must pay, or the broker, who deals with a jobber, would get no benefit from the transaction; to which comes the rejoinder that the jobber is the fifth wheel on the coach, and should not be privileged if he wishes to dispose of his wares. The force of the argument for dispensing with the middleman is perceived by all who are not hide-bound by tradition, use and custom, while practical recognition is being given to it in much of the business that is being transacted outside.