When Napoleon was about to crown himself--so I have somewhere read--they
submitted to him the royal genealogy they had faked up for him. He crumpled
the parchment and flung it in the face of the chief herald, or whoever it
was. “My line,” said he, “dates from Montenotte.” And so I say, my line
dates from the campaign that completed and established my fame--from “Wild
Week.”
I shall not pause to recite the details of the obscurity from which I
emerged. It would be an interesting, a romantic story; but it is a familiar
story, also, in this land which Lincoln so finely and so fully described
when he said: “The republic is opportunity.”
One fact only: _I did not take the name Blacklock_.
I was born Blacklock, and christened Matthew; and my hair's being very
black and growing so that a lock of it often falls down the middle of my
forehead is a coincidence. The malicious and insinuating story that I used
to go under another name arose, no doubt, from my having been a bootblack
in my early days, and having let my customers shorten my name into Matt
Black. But, as soon as I graduated from manual labor, I resumed my rightful
name and have borne it--I think I may say without vanity--in honor to
honor.
Some one has written: “It was a great day for fools when modesty was made
a virtue.” I heartily subscribe to that. Life means action; action means
self-assertion; self-assertion rouses all the small, colorless people to
the only sort of action of which they are capable--to sneering at the doer
as egotistical, vain, conceited, bumptious and the like. So be it! I have
an individuality, aggressive, restless and, like all such individualities,
necessarily in the lime-light; I have from the beginning lost no
opportunity to impress that individuality upon my time. Let those who have
nothing to advertise, and those less courageous and less successful than
I at advertisement, jeer and spit. I ignore them. I make no apologies for
egotism. I think, when my readers have finished, they will demand none.
They will see that I had work to do, and that I did it in the only way an
intelligent man ever tries to do his work--his own way, the way natural to
him!
Wild Week! Its cyclones, rising fury on fury to that historic climax of
chaos, sing their mad song in my ears again as I write. But I shall by no
means confine my narrative to business and finance. Take a cross-section
of life anywhere, and you have a tangled interweaving of the action and
reaction of men upon men, of women upon women, of men and women upon one
another. And this shall be a cross-section out of the very heart of our
life to-day, with its big and bold energies and passions--the swiftest and
intensest life ever lived by the human race.
To begin: