A man of cheerful, if somewhat rubicund, countenance is Dick Baker. His
outlook upon life is that of one who takes no thought for the morrow,
and can justify this light-hearted attitude of mind by the circumstance
that the world has always treated him well in every sense of the word
“treat”; for Dick acknowledges that he is “very fond of his
refreshment.” There are many people who welcome their acquaintances with
a smile; Dick goes one better, for he generally starts laughing when any
one speaks to him; his risible faculty is so delicately poised, that
“good morning” has been known to provoke a jovial roar. He may be said
to have solved the great problem set by some novelist-philosopher a
generation ago, “How to be Happy on Nothing a Year.”
Dick Baker was born sixty-six years ago. How he came to adopt the career
he has followed since he was twenty-one years of age, he can hardly
explain. He was always fond of horse and hound, and he never took kindly
to discipline; running with hounds therefore appealed to him as the
ideal occupation for an active and hardy young man who liked to be his
own master. Fondness for refreshment, notwithstanding, Dick has reached
a hale and happy old age. He can still “keep going” throughout the
longest day, and thanks to an outdoor life and a sound constitution,
suffers from neither cold nor rain. He dates his career as a runner from
about the year 1860, and probably knows more about the Essex,
Hertfordshire, and Puckeridge countries than any man living, having
spent forty-five seasons running with those packs.
[Illustration:
“DICK.”
_From a Painting by G. F. Thompson._]
]
He was for several years under Mr. Parry, when that gentleman was master
of the Puckeridge, and he tells many anecdotes of the various huntsmen
he has known, Dick Simpson, Hedges, Allen, and Will Wells among the
number. Dick’s early ambition was to be a hunt servant, but the Fates
denied him; he is, he now admits, safer on his own legs than in the
saddle. Upon a day it fell that Mr. Rowland Bevan gave Dick his horse to
lead home after a hard gallop. Dick thought it a pity not to try what he
could do as a horseman, and reflecting that, inasmuch as the horse had
had a long day, it would at least be quiet on this occasion, he mounted.
Before he got the horse home he had taken three heavy falls on the
macadam; but seemingly he was born a master of what some one has called
the “inexact science of falling,” for he boasts that he was none the
worse. He has confidence in his lucky star, and expresses it in a
fashion that has the merit of originality.
“Why, Dick, I thought you were dead,” said a member of the Puckeridge on
one occasion.
“No,” replied Dick, calmly; “God never kills good-looking people.”
How far Dick’s appearance justifies his opinion of his personal
attractions our readers are able to judge for themselves.
His master passion is anxiety to be identified with the hunt; to be
recognised as a member of the staff. To this end Dick, through the good
offices of an indulgent member who at the time held office as hon.
secretary, took advantage of the visit of a photographer to the
Puckeridge kennels to get his portrait taken with a couple of hounds; in
character, as it were. It is probable that this was the proudest moment
of his life. That he possesses some business capacity which might have
been profitably directed into other channels, is proved by the way he
turned this opportunity to account. He ordered a dozen copies of the
photograph at the aforesaid member’s expense, and retailed them to
members of the Hunt at two shillings apiece.
Dick acknowledges but one enemy in this world, and for that enemy he
cherishes hate, the deeper because he cannot be avenged of the outrage
it committed upon him. This enemy is the Great Eastern Railway Company,
which, with the heartlessness peculiar to railway companies, once “ran
him in” for travelling without a ticket. It was really not his fault, he
explains; he finished a long day with hounds many miles from home, and
thinking he had a shilling in his pocket jumped into the train intending
to pay at the other end. The fact that he was mistaken as to the
contents of his pocket does not, in his well-considered opinion, justify
the Company in haling him before the Bench, and getting him fined ten
and sixpence and costs. It was the most costly journey he ever made, and
he is unlikely to forget either it or the sequel.
Entertaining, as already mentioned, strong objections to anything like
discipline, a master of hounds being, in his judgment, the one mortal
being who is entitled to command his fellow-creatures, Dick has rarely
attempted permanent work: and when he has done so it has always proved
temporary after all; for what reason it seems unnecessary to enquire. In
summer he is usually to be found in attendance at cricket matches, and
in less exalted cricket spheres rather fancies himself as a bowler. He
possesses quite a remarkable instinct for discovering occasions, show,
celebration, athletic meeting, or what not, which will yield an odd
shilling; and will put in much more and harder work to earn the odd
shilling than he could ever be persuaded to do to earn the certain
half-crown. He has a family; and it is in no spirit of reflection upon a
hard-working spouse that he responds to enquiries with the
cheerful—always cheerful—assurance that “the cubs are all right.”
Sport in the City.
THE OLD YEAR AND THE NEW.
There are times when the tented field is as still as death, times when
even the hub of the universe is as dull as any Little Pedlington in the
Kingdom. We usually make up for it, however, by a great bustle of
company meetings in the concluding month of the year, and these
functions have been characterised during the past few weeks by a quite
unwonted show of animation. The shareholder, as a rule, is a very
patient and long-suffering kind of animal. He pockets his grievances,
passes the resolutions submitted for his acceptance, and goes away
thankful, in most cases, for very small mercies indeed. When he does
break out, however, he is apt to be a very ugly customer, and the lot of
the proverbial policeman is quite a happy one in comparison with that of
the luckless wight whom duty compels to face the music in his capacity
as a director. I do not know whether it is the contagion of heated
political assemblies that is spreading its virus in the City, or whether
we have come under some malign planetary influence; but certain it is
that there is a nasty spirit abroad, and the shareholder goes to his
meeting prepossessed with the idea that it is enough to be a director to
be either a fool or a knave. For several years in succession it was the
fate of the Westralian companies to furnish occasion for these angry
gatherings. They, however, are at length vouchsafed a well-earned rest,
and the miserable wretches who pull the labouring oar in South African
ventures are being given their turn.
That, perhaps, is not altogether surprising. Eldorado has become, in the
popular imagination, a veritable Nazareth, out of which no good can
come, and since shareholders cannot get out to Johannesburg to vent
their wrath upon the heads on which it might with some propriety
descend, they are with one accord taking it out of the English companies
operating in South Africa which lie within their reach. This is not in
consonance with strict justice, no doubt; but it will serve its purpose
all the same, for it can hardly fail to convey a hint to quarters in
which hints are greatly needed that the time has come for setting their
houses in order, lest a worse thing befal. It is probably the case, as I
have seen it stated, that the noise is made in inverse proportion to the
stake. The big shareholder is intelligent enough to know something of
the difficulties which follow upon the heels of a war and broad-minded
enough to make allowances. The man with ten shares or twenty, who gets
no dividend, and sees the market go steadily or unsteadily against him,
loses all patience, and is fired with an ardent longing to break
somebody’s head. What the small man voices, however, the big man feels,
and the moral which these merry meetings should convey to Johannesburg
is that shareholders have not put their money into South African
ventures as an erratic form of recreation, but with the reasonable
expectation of getting in their own lifetime a reasonable return. It is
too much the fashion out there to regard the shareholder as a negligible
quantity. Everybody seems to be bitten with the idea that the thing to
aim at is bigness of aggregate return, bigness of mills, bigness of
expenditure, bigness of everything except of the dividend declared.
Megalomania of this description spells ruin to the proprietorial
interest, and it is not compensated for by all the booby-talk about
prolonging the lives of the mines. It is easy to understand the
advantage of this prolongation to directors and managers and secretaries
and engineers, and all the other hangers-on of the industry; but where
the shareholder benefits from a division of his dividend by two and
doubling the terms of years in which it is paid, is more than the
average arithmetician can understand. The wrong turn was given to
everything by Lord Milner, who saw with his mind’s eye a population of
several millions on the Rand, and laid his lines accordingly. Lord
Selborne, who is apparently a man of sense and moderation, is doing his
best to curb and correct the extravagant ideas that had their genesis in
the time of his predecessor, and there is much reliable information to
warrant the belief that 1906 will be attended with very different
results from 1905. It need be, for only another such year as the last is
required, and South Africa will be for ever and a day undone so far as
the British public is concerned.
The change of Government made no more difference in the markets than if
it had been a change of footmen. The event had, in City parlance, been
already discounted. To men who had imagined to themselves the vain thing
that their exit would shake the financial spheres, as some of them
doubtless did, it must have been gall and wormwood to see quotations
actually rise on the day when their resignation became an accomplished
fact. This could only be due to a sense of general relief, and to the
feeling that the Liberal bark would prove far worse than its bite, so
far as the interests dear to the City are concerned. It certainly was
not owing to the new team being conspicuously strong either in business
or finance. It is an anomaly, to say the least, that the transformation
should result in a barrister being enthroned as the Chancellor of the
Exchequer and a solicitor installed as the President of the Board of
Trade; but Mr. Asquith has shown himself quite at home with figures and
fiscal questions during the past two years, and Mr. Lloyd-George has the
reputation in the House of knowing a thing or two besides the wickedness
of Mr. Chamberlain and the clauses of the Education Act.
Until the elections are over and done with, it is not probable that we
shall witness anything very theatrical in Throgmorton Street; but the
knowing ones are counting upon a marked improvement of gilt-edged
securities when things have settled down. Just as Nature abhors a
vacuum, so does the Stock Exchange abhor stagnation, and the one
question on everybody’s lips is what to go for in the New Year. Yankees,
too dangerous; Home Rails, not to be touched with a barge-pole; Foreign
Rails, quite high enough already; Foreigners, not another eighth to be
squeezed out of them; Breweries, wait a bit; Copper stocks, a gamble for
lunatics. Such is the rough-and-ready pronouncement of three out of four
of the old hands one meets. What all are agreed upon is that gilt-edged
descriptions must advance and that Kaffirs cannot, the one owing to the
plethora of money they see looming in the near distance, the other to
the alleged but scarcely demonstrated fact that the public have spewed
out their mining stocks and will not have them back at any price. I
always like to note these confident predictions. They are so often made
and so seldom borne out by the event. How easy it would be to make
fortunes if they were! Except for the puff palpable—the price of which
is as well known as that of a postage stamp—the financial press is
shrewd enough for the most part to refrain from prognostications after
the manner of the vaticinators in the sporting journals; but how much it
would add to the gaiety of nations if they made selections for the rise
and fall after the fashion of their compeers in Fleet Street! The only
thing that may always be predicted with certainty of markets is that
what will happen will be the unforeseen, and this is intelligible
enough. The calculable influences are few in comparison with the
incalculable—something occurs to upset the best-laid schemes of mice and
men—and you will meet a dozen men who have made their little pile out of
the short view for one who has staked his fortune without regret upon
the long one.
I will not emulate, therefore, the fame of Zadkiel. I shall not prophesy
because I do not know; but it scarcely needs a prophet to perceive that
much in the coming year, if not everything, turns upon the course of
events in the Empire of the Czar. It is easy to see how pregnant with
possibilities is the situation if one takes into account that big
dominating factor, and rules out all the rest as of minor account or of
no account at all; and it is equally easy to perceive that we are at the
mercy of a chapter of accidents. None will undertake to say what the
outcome will be, least of all a Russian himself who knows his people and
the subtle influences by which they are or may be moved. I have had the
advantage during the past few weeks of coming into contact with several
recent arrivals from that unhappy country, and the accounts they give
are so confused and so contradictory as to leave one in a more
impenetrable fog than if one had never taken any pains to learn the
truth at all. On some things, however, they are all agreed. Russian news
in the newspapers, so they say, must be taken with a liberal quantum of
salt. The Jews, not without reason, hate Russia, or rather the
established order in Russia; they control, directly or indirectly, the
bulk of the leading journals of all countries, and the news agencies as
well; their mission is to set down things in malice, to paint everything
in the blackest colours, to ruin Russian credit abroad, and to bring
down upon the Russian people the execration of the civilised world. The
fires of revolution are alight, it is true, but the conflagration is not
so widespread nor so all-consuming as the enemies of Russia would have
the world believe, and a free and purified Russia will emerge. What will
happen then is the problem; and all my Russian friends are at one in
saying that any representative Government that may be established will
set before itself two objects of policy—a better understanding with
England, based upon a solemn renunciation of any designs against India,
and development of the resources of the Empire by the aid of foreign
capital.
So far as the former of these objects is concerned, it goes almost
without saying that any English Government in power would go more than
half-way to meet amicable and sincere advances; and as to the
latter—with another _entente cordiale_ once established—the chances are
that British capital will flow into Russia as it has flowed in turn into
America, North and South, into Africa, into Australasia, into India, and
into every quarter of the globe in which capital can be freely and
safely employed. It is premature, perhaps, to say that Russian ventures
will be the outstanding feature of 1906; but the event is on the cards,
and the pioneer enterprises are already on the stocks. The world has not
been standing still while the nations have been at war and the heathen
have been raging furiously. During the past year or two, no end of
little expeditions have been poking their noses into the recesses of the
Ural region and the vast areas of the Siberian provinces, sending back
reports of riches, mineral and agricultural, beyond the dreams of
avarice. It is difficult to believe that resources of this description
still exist in their virgin state so near comparatively to the Western
capitals; but the evidence, coming as it does from so many capable and
unimpeachable sources, is quite irresistible, and the inference appears
to be inevitable that the exploitation of Russia is the next big task to
which the world of finance and industry will direct its attention. The
exploitation of China may wait, or be relegated to our friends and
allies, the Japanese.
It must not be presumed from our readiness to settle the affairs of the
nations that we have lapsed into indifference in the City as regards
various little matters of domestic concern with respect to which
agitation has been simmering for some time past. The relations of the
House and the public are being canvassed more freely now than I have
ever known, from within as well as from without. There is a consensus of
opinion that things are not quite what they ought to be, as indeed they
never have been and never will be even in this best of all possible
worlds; but the insiders are afraid of pulling bricks about lest they
should bring the entire edifice about their ears, while the outsiders
are wanting in the organisation to give the old walls such a shove as
would be felt by those within. It will not be long, however, before
events compel the general overhaul which is recognised as a prime
essential to the revival of business on such a scale as will enable the
Stock Exchange man to live without sapping the very vitals of his
clients. The complaints of the latter go to the very foundations of
business as it is carried on to-day. Why should one pay brokerage when
he buys? In every other business, it is the seller alone who pays. The
answer is that the buyer must pay, or the broker, who deals with a
jobber, would get no benefit from the transaction; to which comes the
rejoinder that the jobber is the fifth wheel on the coach, and should
not be privileged if he wishes to dispose of his wares. The force of the
argument for dispensing with the middleman is perceived by all who are
not hide-bound by tradition, use and custom, while practical recognition
is being given to it in much of the business that is being transacted
outside.
Then it is perceived that no sort of logical justification exists for
the enormous difference made in brokerage between one class of goods and
another, and between one client and another. For example, bonds are
bought and sold on a commission of 1/16 per cent., mining shares on
varying scales which work out at an average of ¾ per cent., which is
enough to kill the finest business in the world. This excessive charge
is not defended; but it is explained. When mining shares were first
introduced, the public were very shy of them—and the House, too, for
that matter—and promoting firms were ready to pay liberal commissions in
order to get them placed, an operation often attended with difficulty
and risk. Thus there came to be established a standard of expectation,
the public paying whatever charge the broker chose to exact, and the
mining market became the happy hunting-ground of new recruits by the
thousand, who perceived in it the opportunity of quickly getting rich.
Short cuts of this kind, however, generally prove the long way round in
the end. Brokers as a class cannot thrive by bleeding their clients
white by excessive commissions and contangoes. Either they make losses,
which wipe out their gains, and more, or they kill the goose that lays
the golden eggs. They cannot acquit themselves altogether of some share
in the collapse by which speculation of this character has been
overtaken. Commonsense and competition point with unerring finger the
direction of amendment and reform, and I expect to see established at no
distant date an almost universal charge of ¼ per cent. upon the money,
whether shares are bought or sold, or ½ per cent. if commission be
charged on sales alone. Pending this concession, it is not probable that
speculation will revive upon any considerable scale in the market which
has been in the past the most attractive of all markets, and may be
again if things are well and wisely handled. The loss of it would not be
compensated for by rubber trash and cab companies, over which there will
be some burning of fingers before long. “Trash,” did I say? Well, of
course, that is much too sweeping a generalisation. As a fact, the great
majority of the rubber concerns are moderately capitalised, and the
demand for their product is going up with such leaps and bounds that
they can only be regarded as sound and stable concerns. That, however,
is where the trouble comes in. On the back of every successful form of
enterprise kindred ventures are too often floated without much regard to
the question whether they contain the elements of success or not. Like
the razors that were made to sell, and not to shave, these undertakings
are launched for the sake of the promotion, and for no other reason
apparent to the wit of man. Promotion in the miscellaneous market has
seldom much behind it. The shares once placed, those who are in may
whistle for the day they will get out. There is but one fitting
inscription for that section, regarded as a whole—“Abandon hope all ye
who enter here.” Mining descriptions, with all their drawbacks and all
their dangers, have as a rule at least the inestimable advantage of a
“shop.” Mining promotions, I am given to understand, are likely to be
almost nominal in the coming year; but there are miscellaneous things
enough to stagger humanity awaiting a favourable moment to be launched.