“Boss” Tweed on Tainted Money, with Some Nonsense Definitions of Fads
and Finance.
The Asbestos Society of Sinners was in session. The subject of debate
was, “Resolved that gold may be yellow, but it is not tainted.”
“‘An Englishman’s hell is want of money,’” mused Carlyle, repeating
what he had said while a denizen of earth.
“It’s too bad he gets Hades in both the upper and lower worlds,”
observed “Boss” Tweed, who as the reincarnated Dives handled the gavel.
“Unfortunately, that condition is not confined to any one country.
Wendell Phillips once said that if an American saw a silver dollar on
the other side of Hell he would jump for it.”
“Is that why you came here?” asked he whose only claim to fame was that
an ass had spoken to him.
“Baalam’s itchy palm spoiled him for a prophet,” observed Tweed,
addressing the chairman, and ignoring that individual. “No, gentlemen,
it wasn’t one dollar that brought me here. It was $10,000,000 or
$100,000,000; I forget which.”
“A cypher more or less makes no difference,” put in Carlyle, cynically.
He evidently thought this a side-splitting English joke, for he laughed
at his own wit.
“That depends whether there is a point back of it,” asserted Dr.
Johnson.
“Truly these be tainted times, if we can place any dependence in the
New York correspondence of the Cimmerian Chatterbox,” volunteered
Tweed. “Poor Diagones has had to give up his quest for an honest man:
not being in the trust, he cannot buy any oil for his lantern. But even
a searchlight wouldn’t help him in these days. An honest man never gets
within the rays of the calcium; he is too busy picking the pockets of
the people.”
“Oil and money will come uppermost at last in the caldron of watered
stocks underneath which are the fires of Hell, for both are Standard.”
“I don’t see how tainted money can be made from refined oil.” It was
Solomon the wise who spoke.
“Tainted money, like crude oil, may be refined,” asserted Tweed. “Yet
even crude oil is not to be despised, for it accrues interest and some
of the taint can be carbolized by sending bad rum to the heathen.
It matters not what denomination tainted money is in, although the
Baptists ought to be able to wash some of the taint away. In to-day’s
issue of the Stygian Siftings, I read that a certain sect who won’t
trust any other denomination to read their Bible for them, say that
the pilfered pelf of frenzied financiers is all right if it be used
for good purposes. It isn’t even necessary to keep the dirty dough in
a separate flour barrel from the certified wheat; they are willing to
convert tares and all into breakfast food. It resolves itself into a
case of homeopathic treatment—the use of tainted money to remove a
greater taint.”
“Bribery, which in evening dress is called graft, has become such
a popular pastime that the refusal of a man to touch money offered
him leads one to the conclusion that it is not tainted but merely
counterfeit,” said Shylock, as he tried to hide some degraded ducats in
his blouse. “They wouldn’t let me shed one drop of blood, yet to-day
the American capitalist gets his pound of flesh by bleeding the people.”
“It’s a wonder Atlas wasn’t exposed for holding up the earth,” mused
Anon. “Since the days of the gods, many a man has had his shoulder put
out of joint trying to do the same stunt, but the weight of the world
is still cause for worry.”
“So deep-rooted in the universe is graft,” asserted Tweed, “that the
chairman of an investigating committee, in making his report, went to
the Jersey shore and looking out to sea, wrote: ‘I can see no graft.’
Even then he forgot the ship-building trust and also overlooked the
unimportant fact that his very words were grafted from Lord Nelson.”
“Who was the first grafter?”
“Adam would have been had he been tempted with a plum instead of with
an apple.”
“Graft,” explained Noah, surnamed Webster, “is a botanical term for
‘splitting straws’ in the garden politic. Its principal fruits are
plums, leafing out in ‘long green.’ A grafter is a captain of industry
who has been found out.”
“All men bow to the despotism of the dollar,” said a well-known
anarchist with an unforgivable name. “It is no longer the divine right
of kingship, but the divine right of dollarship, to rule the earth.
The rulers of old had their armies and forced obedience; the rulers of
to-day have their money bags and buy it.”
“The dollar,” declared Alexander Hamilton, “is the corner-stone of our
egotistic civilization, and the dollar is terribly hard. Its hardness
may make it better as a corner-stone but does not especially fit it for
use as a pillow for tired humanity.”
“Growing socialistic, eh? My dear Alexander, you have been exclusive
owner of six feet of land long enough to be cured of that fanciful fad.”
“Fads,” interposed Worcester, noting that Webster was ready with a
definition and anxious to forestall him, “is a diversion of the wealthy
and the only game on which Parker Brothers have no copyright. It is
played similar to ‘Pit’ and ‘Bluff,’ although it is not confined to
Wall Street.”
“Fancies,” declaimed Johnson, “is a vivid imagination diluted with
printers’ ink for the purpose of converting the skeleton in the family
flat into $1,500 cash. Usually the man who has ancestors doesn’t court
investigation.”
“Investigation,” defined Roget, “is a popular kind of bookkeeping begun
after the race is lost and the money is spent; a locking of the safe
deposit doors after the deposits are safe in the cashier’s pocket. As
the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children, Adam, being
fatherless, is the only man in Hades whom the Stygian Insurance Company
would guarantee immune from the epidemic of investigation which has
been transplanted from the upper to the lower world. But even Adam
suffered exposure before he plucked the ‘long green’ from the fig tree.”
“In England insurance is called assurance, but the name better applies
to American directors, whom it assures a life of luxury. The policy
holder believes insurance is a legacy, but his widow discovers it is a
law suit. Life insurance is a bogie at which everybody not in a glass
coffin throws a stone. It is old, tried and true: too old to notice you
after you’re dead; true—to its officers; and tried—in the courts. It
makes sick loans which have the effect of paralyzing the tongues of its
officials or sending them to Europe in search of health.”
“Knowledge is no longer power,” denied Webster; “wealth has taken its
place. Even both ends of Wall Street can be made to meet. At one end is
the aspiring finger of Trinity Church, pointing to the sky, and at its
foot is a cemetery. At the other end is the first station on the road
to Brooklyn and—another cemetery!”
“Gold itself is pure,” observed Portia, LL.D.; “it becomes defiled only
in passing through dirty fingers. Tainted money may be exchanged for
gold that isn’t greasy at the mint and no questions asked. The filth
from the bad man’s fingers doesn’t take away the value of the larcenous
long green, or of the sullied silver.”
“In my time,” said Tweed, “we didn’t ask whether money was tainted
before we took it. There’s time enough for an investigation after
the trust treasure is spent, and suspicious specie never becomes
penitential pesos until after money has ceased to talk. Riches are
promised to the righteous man—which we all are until the newspapers
find us out. Every millionaire secured his wealth honestly with two
exceptions, neither of which are noted in the newspapers.”
“You know it is said,” observed Cæsar, “that it is easier for a camel
to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the
kingdom of heaven.”
“If that includes Cleopatra’s needle, there is still hope for the rich
man,” put in Marc Antony.
“A note of protest won’t pay your debts, so what’s the use of all this
outcry about opprobrious opulence?” asked Tweed. “Who can scent from
afar the possibilities of graft quicker than the man who is counting
up his censurable coin? Among the crowd in full cry after a fleeing
burglar with his pockets full of soiled silver, none shouts ‘stop
thief’ more lustily than the pal who did not get his share of the
plunder. In the rustle of the competitor’s greenbacks which are tainted
with the tears of women and the blood of men, no capitalist hears the
cry of the widow and orphan more quickly than he who is seeking to
shear the fleece of an innocent and confiding lot of lambs swallowed in
the vortex of frenzied finance.”
“How about the tainted tricks of politics?” I asked. “I might have
been a politician myself if I hadn’t been converted and so became a
newspaper man instead.”
“Your position is now more hopeless than ever, for you not only know
all the tricks of the politician, but those of the newspaper man as
well,” retaliated Tweed.
“Money, the devil’s pass key, has securely locked more than one
skeleton safely away in the family closet,” I continued. “After all,
we can’t get along without the disreputable dough. If a rotting log
nurture a bank of violets, it would be folly to despise the flowers
because they sprang from a tainted source.”
“It would be well if the twentieth century had a Lycurgus,” commented
Plutarch. “For the purpose of sapping the foundation of avarice, he
called in all the nefarious nuggets and decreed that iron should be
used as current coin. If modern millionaires had to drive a yoke of
oxen to carry home each $88 in dividends, the iron would enter their
souls far more readily than into their pocketbooks.”
“The profits of plunder ought to be checked.”
“So they are. A check is drawn for each man who has his price, to
stop him from branding his neighbor a thief. Never analyze the gold
given as a gift. Does it matter which cow gave the skimmed milk if we
get the cream? If our pocketbook is made corpulent enough to choke
our scruples, shall we inquire if our benefactor has cobwebs on his
conscience? A man’s criminality ought not to be based on the size of
his bank account.”
“Greed and graft have always been blood money relations,” I said. “In
the dawn of history Adam owned the whole world except one little tree
and he wouldn’t be happy till he got that.”
“But I never became a millionaire,” muttered the first man,
disconsolately.
“You would have been a multi-billionaire if you had held onto all your
real estate. But perhaps, like Ann Drew Karnagee, you thought it a sin
to die rich after living in the tainted atmosphere of affluence.”
“Then there was Cæsar. He ran up a supper bill of twenty-five million
in four months. My authority? Never mind; it’s all down somewhere.”
“You are right,” agreed Plutarch. “The turning of tarnished tin into
trust treasure isn’t confined to any one decade. Even Prometheus was
guilty of petty larceny, for he stole fire from heaven and—”
“If you grasp the burning ploughshare of ill-gotten gains, do not
complain if it sears your palms and scorches your brain and petrifies
your heart.” Thus spoke Judas and departed.
“Mortals say that money cannot be carried beyond the grave,” explained
Tweed; “but there is spirit money as well as spirit men. Grafter Judas
hanged himself to get rid of thirty pieces of silver—foolish man! How
little fitted he would have been for life in New York; on the board
of aldermen, for instance, or as a district boss. We New Yorkers are
frequently afflicted with itching palms, but money never burns our
fingers as it does that of Judas in Hades. He throws it away, but it
always returns to his grasp. If I had been empowered with the same
necromancy on earth, I could have been president of the United States.
Possessing Judas’ faculty, I could have paid each man his price and yet
the money would always have returned!”
“In the scales of God,” declaimed Portia, “charity will outweigh gold,
unless Dives and Lazarus have changed places since the last tidings we
had of them.”
“For all that,” concluded Tweed, “the only objection I ever found to
tainted money was that ‘taint enough! A little thieving is a dangerous
thing; graft much or you’ll taste the penitentiary spring. Though
Justice is blind, she isn’t deaf, and he who can jingle the most gold
usually wins his case. The man who sent me to the island said, ‘I hope
to see you in hell some day,’ and I’ve wondered ever since which of us
he was doubtful about getting here.”
HOW THE CREATION CENTERED
ABOUT A PETTICOAT: A REVISED
VERSION OF THE FIRST CHAPTER
OF DARWIN AND THE
ASCENT OF MAN.