The sketch here given is a true one, and may serve to show how it is that many men who dabble in amateur finance disappear from their usual haunts and come to irretrievable grief. Englishmen, no matter to what class they belong, must, as a rule, have something to do. Unlike any other people, except their American cousins, they are sooner tired and weary of idleness than of any amount of physical or mental labour. And this is particularly the case with Anglo-Indians, who, after, perhaps, a quarter of a century of hard work in the East, come home to enjoy their hard-earned pensions. For a short time—for a few months—they are content to do nothing; but after they have renewed old friendships, and revisited the scenes of their early life, and settled down to what must be a comparatively monotonous life, they find there is something wanting, and that employment or occupation is almost necessary to their very existence. The ways in which this want may be supplied are various. To some, politics and literature fill up, or help to fill up, the gap; racing and betting, hunting, shooting, and other sports are followed by their respective votaries amongst those who have more leisure than they know what to do with. But ‘going into the City’ has the double fascination that it combines pleasure with occupation and imaginary profit. Unfortunately, the unpleasant awakening too often follows the pleasant dream.
Another curious fact regarding Joint-stock Company speculation is that what may be called the fashion, which changes, so to speak, as often as that of a lady’s bonnet, and which does not admit of more than one kind of enterprise being popular at the same time. Thus, during all last year and a great portion of 1884, little found favour with the share-taking public save Companies for the extension of the electric light. This fancy seems to be for the present at least played out, and for the year, gold mines appear to be popular.
As matters now stand, the man who steals a few shillings is summarily dealt with, and rarely escapes the punishment due to his crime. But the Company promoter or Financial Agent who deliberately plans to ruin hundreds, and who, so soon as the harvest of one bogus Company is reaped, hastens to sow the seed of another, is allowed to go on with impunity, obtaining by falsehood and misrepresentation infinitely more than many others can by the legitimate use of capital; and defrauding their victims of what in many cases has cost a lifetime of long and patient toil.
One thing seems very certain; and the more any impartial person looks into the subject, the more convinced he must be that some supervision ought to be exercised with reference to all Joint-stock Company prospectuses which are published, and which increase in number every day. It is very true that fools are, like the poor, always with us; but this ought not to deter the authorities from taking care of those who cannot take care of themselves. We have already admitted that there are Companies and Companies—that there are some undertakings offered to the public which are perfectly honest and legitimate; whilst others are got up for the express purpose of swindling the many, and of putting money into the pockets of the few. If, then, supervision were enforced, and no Company allowed to be advertised until it had undergone investigation by competent persons, would it not be all the better for such concerns as are certified to be sound? If it were possible to obtain a reliable return of those who have been beggared by these swindles during the last ten or fifteen years, there would soon be a public outcry in favour of this supervision of proposed Companies; and a very great evil, the greatest financial evil of the present day, would be quickly and surely remedied.
That the whole system must ere long undergo revision, and that it must be sooner or later put under proper control, is what no one who has had opportunity of witnessing the working behind the curtains can doubt. Promoters and Financial Agents have had a good time of it for the last twenty years, and it will be only fair if they are now obliged to retire on their laurels; and their calling, so far as dishonesty be concerned, become a thing of the past. Finance without funds has had its day, and for the general public, that day has been allowed to continue too long. The anomaly of protecting people from the wiles of the gaming-tables, and yet leaving them to be the victims of plausible schemers, who entice them to a very much more dangerous (because a more hidden) ruin, is too palpably wrong for any honest person to defend; and it behoves the authorities to put a stop to what has become one of the greatest social evils of the day.
IN ALL SHADES.
CHAPTER XXII.
Three or four months rolled rapidly away, and the Hawthorns began to feel themselves settling down quietly to their new, strange, and anomalous position in the island of Trinidad. In spite of her father’s prohibition, Nora often came around to visit them; and though Mr Dupuy fought hard against her continuing ‘that undesirable acquaintance,’ he soon found that Nora, too, had a will of her own, and that she was not to be restrained from anything on which she had once set her mind, by such very simple and easy means as mere prohibition. ‘The girl’s a Dupuy to the backbone,’ her cousin Tom said to her father more than once, in evident admiration. ‘Though she does take up with a lot of coloured trash—which, of course, is very unladylike—when once she sets her heart upon a thing sir, she does it too, and no mistake about it either.’
Dr Whitaker was another not infrequent visitor at the Hawthorns’ bungalow. He had picked up, as he desired, a gratuitous practice among the poorer negroes; and though it often sorely tried his patience and enthusiasm, he found in it at least some relief and respite from the perpetual annoyance and degradation of his uncongenial home-life with his father and Miss Euphemia. His botany, too, gave him another anodyne—something to do to take his mind off the endless incongruity of his settled position. He had decided within himself, almost from the very first day of landing, to undertake a Flora of Trinidad—a new work on all the flower-plants in the rich vegetation of that most luxuriant among tropical islands; and in every minute of leisure time that he could spare from the thankless care of his poor negro patients, he was hard at work among the tangled woods and jungle undergrowth, or else in his own little study at home, in his father’s house, collecting, arranging, and comparing the materials for this his great work on the exquisite flowers of his native country. The faithful violin afforded him his third great resource and alleviation. Though Miss Euphemia and her lively friends were scarcely of a sort to appreciate the young doctor’s touching and delicate execution, he practised by himself for an hour or two in his own rooms every evening; and as he did so, he felt that the strings seemed ever to re-echo with one sweet and oft-recurring name—the name of Nora. To be sure, he was a brown man, but even brown men are more or less human. How could he ever dream of falling in love with one of Miss Euphemia’s like-minded companions?
He met Nora from time to time in the Hawthorns’ drawing-room; there was no other place under the circumstances of Trinidad where he was at all likely ever to meet her. Nora was more frankly kind to him now than formerly; she felt that to be cool or indifferent towards him before Edward and Marian might seem remotely like an indirect slight upon their own position. One afternoon he met her there accidentally, and she asked him, with polite interest, how his work on the flowers of Trinidad was getting on.