On my desk, amongst the letters of sympathy received immediately after my failure, was one from a prominent Wall Street man, whom I had known for many years and who for a time had been one of my neighbors at Knollwood. I wrote to him about the same as I had written Viedler.
The return mail brought his reply, written personally, expressing regret that he was "unable to assist me as he was a large borrower himself."
All stock brokers are large borrowers in their business, but here was an instance in which this universal custom was given as an excuse for not making a loan of five thousand dollars to a friend in trouble.
And who was this man? Here is what Thomas W. Lawson had to say of him in one of the chapters of "Frenzied Finance":
J*** M*** deserves more than a mere passing mention here, for he was at this time a distinguished Wall Street character and one of the ablest practitioners of finance in the Country. During the last fifteen years of his life, M*** was party to more confidential jobs and deals than all other contemporaneous financiers, and he handled them with great skill and high art. Big, jolly, generous, a royal eater and drinker, an associate of the rich, the friend of the poor, a many-times millionaire.
Another friend off the list—but there were many left. Now for the next one. "The third time a charm"—perhaps.
Again I turned to the letters on my desk. This time I took up one from a former mayor of New York. A man widely known, politically, socially, and as a philanthropist.
His kind letter when received had been a pleasant surprise to me. I had known him but a few years and could not claim a very close intimacy, though he had always been most cordial and our families were acquainted. As I re-read his letter it seemed to me as if it invited me to address him under just such circumstances as then existed.
Again, and for the third time, my messenger went forth seeking for the friend who would help a man when he is down.
The reply came promptly enough and brought me the information that my friend did not "desire to invest in any new business."