“Indeed I am not: our land is filled with milk-fed sophistries and the men who propagate them. The ordinary mind is incapable of matching the processes of the wit of our stock exchanges. Let us examine the processes of one of our millionaires. He buys a water-power for a trifle: organizes it into a stock company, and sells stock to the widow and orphan at an advance of anywhere from a hundred to a thousand per cent. profit. He makes his money not because he holds the stock, but because he sells it—because the public buys it.”
“That sounds reasonable,” grimly asserted Uncle.
“But the interesting study is that of the public. The promoter makes a grant of say, $50,000 to a charity. The foolish woman in the country, doctor, or lawyer, reasons that one who would give so much to the public must be really very godly and would not cheat a poor body, so he or she puts money into any old proposition such philanthropists advance. This, I fancy, is token of the shallowness of the ordinary mind in financial matters, and such shallowness explains why some men easily accumulate wealth, the result of labour.”
I believe Mr. Bang can see no good in anybody or anything, his is—in spite of his personal kindness, like the gift of the furs—a narrow nature. Mumsie, I am sure, was not convinced, no more was I; probably she remained silent out of weariness.
“Jack, you certainly would not increase your popularity by publishing such statements,” said Uncle.
“I know that well. Timkins tried it with the result that throughout the financial districts every man’s voice was against him. When you cannot refute a man’s statement, the next thing to do is drown it with calumny. The inference the public draws is that a liar cannot speak the truth, or a dishonest man honest, or a fool occasionally wise. So the thing to do is to persuade the public that one’s enemy is a liar, a rascal or a fool.”
“But, what has become of Timkins?”
“He fell into bad ways; he misjudged the limitations of The Tarbrush, the sheet to which he contributed, and wrote up the President of a rascally mining promotion. The President of the Mining Company was also President of a social club to which the editor and proprietor were ambitious members. In the process of re-establishing themselves the two jelly-fish wrote a letter of apology to the injured president, promising to receive no more communications from the offender. That illustrates the processes of a certain type of financial newspaper, for, after all, the writer was not responsible, as the article had passed a sub-editor.”
“And Timkins?”
“Timkins will go to London. As a budding author he can establish himself there. All Canadian writers, as soon as they begin to gain a footing in the literary world here, go to England. Canada is a land whose people do not seem to trust their own.”