THE TIMES AND THE CUSTOMS.
It will be four years in September since the crash of Jay Cooke announced that hard times had come. During the débacle continuing from that day to this, the exposed rascalities of swindling corporations have shown how full the world still is of sheep eager to be fleeced, of geese to be plucked. Government officers prey on the people; the people, on each other; the giant plunderer is the stock company, to whose vast gobblings the pilfering of a Tweed or Winslow is a mere sugar-plum. The individual swindler feels himself a rogue, whereas the chartered thief holds a high head, builds him a palace from the spoils of his victims, and curses their impudence when they complain. They are legion, these mismanaged or fraudulent mining companies, land improvement companies, artificial light companies, normal food companies (for introducing camel-hump steaks to the American breakfast-table), and, above all, railroad companies, savings funds, and life insurance companies.
Satirists lash the sham enterprises—"Universal Association for Squaring the Circle," "American and Asiatic Consolidated Perpetual Motion Society," and what not; nowadays the main mischief is done not by these transparent humbugs, but by the genuine companies, that fairly invite trust and then betray it. Salted mines, watered stocks, lying prospectuses, bribed experts, bought legislatures, packed meetings, borrowed dividends, thimble-rig reports—we all know the tricks of "substantial" enterprises. It is not the seedy adventurers, the Jeremy Diddlers and Montague Tiggs of our day, that entrap the thrifty and ruin the intelligent, but the high-toned trust and commercial companies, seeming to be solid. These have wheels within wheels, rings within the ring, whereby many shareholders can be tricked by few; for, as the shellfish has foes that bore through his tough house and suck out the unfortunate tenant within, so crédit mobiliers, fast freight lines, super-salaried officers, contractors for supplies, construction agents, and the like, suck out the value of a stock company, and leave the shareholders the shells. Let not a posterity of laudatores temporis acti sigh over ours as the Golden Age of commercial honesty. It is only the Greenback Age. It is not even the Silver Age, unless, haply, the German Silver—that is to say, the Plated or Pinchbeck Age. We might perhaps style it the Brazen Age, in view of the all-pervading brass of corporation claqueurs and drummers; or we might very well call it the Shoddy or the Peter Funk Jewelry Age.
Still, our ancestry were worse beset with quack corporations. Mackay mentions over eighty speculative companies that rose with the South Sea bubble and were all crushed in a bunch by the privy council: one, a company for getting silver out of lead; another, for developing perpetual motion; a third, for insuring householders against losses by servants—capital, $15,000,000; a fourth, "a company for carrying on an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is"—capital, $2,500,000 in 5,000 shares of $500 each, on $10 deposit per share, which deposit nearly a thousand persons actually paid on the first half day the books were opened, so that before night the rascally manager was off with $10,000 booty. Besides the matured projects, many companies existing only on paper were able to sell "privileges to subscribe," when formed, at $200 or $300 each; for in that day of manias people in Great Britain paid premiums for the first chance to put their money into companies for freshening salt water, extracting oil from sunflowers, buying forfeited estates, capturing pirates, insuring children's fortunes, fattening hogs, fishing for wrecks, and importing jackasses from Spain—which last was surely bringing coals to Newcastle. As for such really solid enterprises as the South Sea bubble, their shares rose to a thousand per cent, above par.
Perhaps another South Sea bubble could not easily be blown; the Darien canal will hardly excite a fever of speculation like William Paterson's Darien project of one hundred and eighty years ago, for which prayers were offered in the Edinburgh churches; we are not likely to see a Mississippi scheme of the sort which caused cooks to struggle with courtiers for places in the Rue de Quinquempoix to buy John Law's shares, while office rents in that stock-jobbing thoroughfare rose from five hundred to sixty thousand livres a year. But our late American experience shows how swift men are to trust their hard-earned gains to corporate enterprises simply on the reputation of the managers. Insurance frauds and railroad wreckings thrive on the trustfulness of professional men and the narrow scope of tradesmen. The latter find sufficient occupation in the little gains of each day, and often are puzzled how to employ the surplus. To spend it would be unthrifty; to roll it in a napkin, bad stewardship; they are apt to be caught by the popular stock companies or by some scheme of speculation. These glittering prizes also attract sapient "men of business" who have been entrusted with investing the funds of widows and children. From such sources flow the rills that make the mighty rivers of stock enterprises, so that, having gathered up the spare cash of the shopkeepers and the annuitants, their bursting makes wide havoc.
Goodman Thompson's simple skill and joy are to gain five cents here, ten there, a dollar yonder; three customers have bought at nine o'clock to-day, at eleven the sales number fifteen, at noon no fewer than two dozen; whereas at midday yesterday they were only twenty-three. Brooding over these statistics, worthy Thompson fills up the day, the year, the lifetime in modest local glory, until the name of John Thompson, grocer, is taken from his door and put upon his coffin-plate, and John Thompson's son continues the trade in his stead. Absorbed, I say, in such details, some men seem strangely careless what the gross of their gains is, or how secured—their pleasure is "doing business" rather than growing rich, and equal fortunes by bequest would hardly give them the same comfort; others, and the majority, are not so careless, but are as surprisingly stupid, incautious, and gullible in investing their daily gains as they are sharp and shrewd in getting them. That is why they put their trust in treacherous princes of finance and railroad kings; that is why sharpers of good moral character in savings and insurance companies make many victims. It is wonderful how many tradesmen, subtle and sagacious in their callings, thrive in the hard task of driving bargains, only to lose their earnings to palpable knaves, or else by making hap-hazard investments. Their faculty of accumulation seems like that of the bee or the ant, good only to a given point, and within the use of given methods; it seems to fail when sober judgment on speculative fevers is called for.
But the hard times have temporarily taught first, caution; next, economy. Caution unluckily has run to suspicion, while economy has issued in a dearth of employment: thus the correctives applied to hard times have perpetuated them. People are buying not only less, but sometimes at second hand, so that every trade suffers—unless it be that of the coffin-makers; I never knew anybody who wanted a second-hand coffin. The economy that America usually needs is perhaps less that of refraining from buying than that of turning things to account. The man who needlessly cuts down his expenses is hardly so praiseworthy as the one who only makes every thread yield its best uses.
A national fault of ours is that of not getting the full use of things. European cities, for example, earn millions a year by selling their street dirt. American cities pay millions to get rid of it. In Europe it dresses sterile soil; in America it is dumped into channels to obstruct navigation. One can almost admire the humble Paris chiffoniers, as being a guild employed in redeeming to a hundred services what has been thrown away as useless—they rescue vast fortunes yearly. On the Pennsylvania oil lands twenty men put up a derrick, sink a test well, and fail. Sixteen out of the twenty reorganize, sink a new well within fifty rods of the other, build a new derrick, and never touch the old one, leaving it to rot. The expense of this kind of machinery is great; and yet out of the abandoned derricks in the oil regions you could almost build a timber track from Corry to New York. It is, I say, almost a national trait to accumulate what will be left to rust unused—although it is doubtless not American ladies alone that fill their wardrobes with garments never worn out. When a European friend of mine came to travel in this country, one of his first surprises was the hundreds of miles of expensive fences he saw enclosing very ordinary fields; next he noted the unused ground along the tracks of railroads. "That land would all be covered with vegetables in our country," he said. At his hotels he thought there was more wasted in labor, food, and superfluities than would have sufficed to reduce the cost of living by a third; indeed, I fancy he believed that despite our cry of "hard times" and "enforced economy," the sheer current waste of America would pay the national debt in a year.