Many religious journals throughout the country have poured eulogies
upon the pious head of our Postmaster General because of his raid
against all letters bearing the least uncanny relation to that
abhorred criminal body, the Louisiana Lottery. In one sense this
action is not ill-advised; the national laws against gambling are
distinct, and even if they were unjust their existence would be no
excuse for their infringement. The highly moral action of Mr.
Wanamaker, however, happening as it does at a time when his own
relations with the hazards and plots of Wall Street have grown the
talk of our entire country, teem with a suggestion that should be
patent to thousands. If gnats are strained at and camels are
swallowed, there is certainly a pardonable satire in congratulating
those who devour the latter on their noteworthy powers of digestion.
As an immoral institution the Louisiana Lottery, evil as it is, cannot
be compared with Monte Carlo, which arrays itself in facile splendors
of enticement and smiles in mirrors and gildings on the rash gamesters
whom it ruins. But the Louisiana Lottery, which of late it has become
the fashion to revile, devises its chief gains in a much less faulty
manner. For such disbursements as one dollar, two dollars, five
dollars, a good deal of golden expectancy and anticipation can be
enjoyed, and there is no confirmed proof whatever that the citizens
who are rash enough to expend these massive amounts have ever been
swindled at the monthly New Orleans drawings. Indeed, they have
ample proof, if they care to sift it, that somebody in Maine, or
Indiana, or California, has received a small fortune for part of a
ticket purchased at the same cheap terms as their own. Naturally,
unless they were complete fools, they knew previous to their
investment that the chances against them were extremely large, and
that their prospect of winning anything very handsome was about equal
to that of their being struck by lightning or having an unknown
relative leave them a fat legacy. Could it once be proved that the
Louisiana Lottery is really dishonest in its dealings--really more
dishonest than the bright-lit bar-room that shiningly says to one,
"Come and get drunk in me if you choose, but if you don't choose drink
only as much as you want in me, and if you don't choose to enter me at
all, avoid me forever and a day"--then the iniquity of the whole
organization could not be scorned in terms too harsh. But at present
all indictments against this particular species of gambling would seem
to be just as airy as those against the alluring tavern. The
"prohibition extremists" are like lawyers who can never make their
case, yet are incessantly fuming against their own failure. These
extremists forget that their shadowy moral client is plaintiff in a
kind of curious divorce-suit, where the defendant is human nature and
the co-respondent human will. It is most probable that men will
continue to get drunk just so long as education remains for them an
incident force of inferior potency. As to their liking and upholding
certain milder games of chance (after the style of the Greeks, let us
say, at their very highest period of culture), that is perhaps not an
educational question at all, but one of simple diversion. There are
kinds of gambling, however, with which no believer in racial progress
will admit that the loftier forms of civilization can possibly deal,
and foremost among these must be counted the reckless license, the
odious libertinage of venture which now shames a republic never tired
of vaunting its virtues to the transatlantic monarchies from which it
sprang.
He who would note and study, in all their terror, melancholy, and
pathos, the selfishness and avarice of his fellow-men, might search
the whole known globe and never find a field for his observations at
once more fruitful and more discouraging than that of Wall Street. To
realize in its full glare of vicious vulgarity the influence of this
environment, let us take the case of some refined young man just after
he has quitted school and entered the office of a thrifty
broker--perhaps a warm friend of his father, who hugs the keenly
American doctrine that a youth should be put in the way of piling
dollars together as quickly as possible after he leaves the
educational leash. By degrees this young man will discover that the
only difference between Wall Street and a huge, crowd-engirt
gaming-table is one between simplicity and complexity. He will see
that the play of the former is far more difficult to learn and that it
requires a number of _croupiers_ instead of one. He will see that
these _croupiers_ are in most cases men whose names posterity will
hand down, if it hands them down at all, as those of stony egotists,
and sometimes of gigantic thieves. He will gradually gain insight into
certain of their methods, as when, only a few years back, one or two
of them seized an entire railroad under cover of what was the merest
parody of purchase and opposed both to law and to public policy,
afterward defending their outrage in the courts through the brazen aid
of venal judges and bringing to Albany (headquarters of their
attempted theft) a great carload of New York ruffians, each with a
proxy in his soiled and desperate hand--an instrument almost as
illegal as the pistol which those hands had doubtless too often
fingered if not fired amid the squalor of their owners' native
slums.[1]
[1] It is a fact that the late James Fisk, Jr., was
appointed by Judge Barnard, of New York, receiver of a
railway (the Albany and Susquehanna) which lay a hundred
miles outside of that magistrate's judicial district.
The neophyte in speculators' creeds and customs may amuse himself,
however, with reminiscences like the preceding only in a sense of that
proud historic retrospect which concerns past radiant records of "the
street." He may, if so minded, con other pages of its noble archives,
and dazzle his young brain with admiration for the shining exploits of
"Black Friday," an occasion when greed held one of its most sickening
revels, and a clique of merciless financiers gathered together so many
millions of gold coin that its price bred fright among the holders of
depreciating stocks. Agony, ruin, the demolition of firesides,
resulted from this infamous "corner" wrought by a league of miserly
zealots. But our young student of Wall Street annals will soon
harden his nerves against any silly commiseration. As well soil the
glory of Lexington or Bunker Hill by brooding over the pangs of those
who were its victims. All great victories necessitate bloodshed. It is
not every man who can wrest vast wealth from the turmoils of a "Black
Friday." ... And so, after turning the pages of a revolting chronicle,
all of which teem with calamity to the many and plethoric gain to the
bullying and insolent few, he surveys that active boil and ferment of
the present, seeking to discern there some course of trick and scheme
by which he too may fatten his purse, even though he blunts conscience
into a callous nullity. Between old days and new he finds but slight
difference. Rises and panics prevail now as then. The "margin,"
beloved of the wily broker, first lures and then robs the trustful
buyer. "Pools," open and secret, grasping and malicious, may wreak at
any hour disasters on the unwary. "Points" are given by one operator
to another with the same mendacious glibness as of yore. The market is
now dull with the torpor of a sleeping cobra, now aflame, like that
reptile, with treacherous and poisonous life. In its repose as in its
excitement our novice begins to know it, fear it, and heartily love it
besides. The chances are nine out of ten that he loves it too much and
fears it too little. Its hideous vulgarity has ceased to shock him.
Its "bulls," with their often audacious purchases of stock for which
they do not pay but out of whose random fluctuations in value they
expect to reap thousands from the "bears," who sell in a like blind,
betting-ring fashion; its devices of "spreads," and of "straddles,"
which are combinations of "puts" and "calls" whereby the purchaser
limits his loss and at the same time suits the chances of his winning
to those of vacillant prices themselves; its unblushing compromises on
the part of debtors with creditors, fifty cents on the dollar being
frequently paid by bankrupts to the extent of one, two, or three
hundred thousand dollars, in order that they may resume their highly
legitimate undertakings and perhaps grow rich again in company with
their fellow-gamblers; all these, and many more features of Wall
Street life, equally vivid and equally soiled by sordid materialism,
have at length wrapped the mind of this young observer in their
drastic and sinister spells. When he "starts out for himself," as he
is presently quite sure to do, his ultimate success is enormously
doubtful. His reign as a leading personality in Wall Street means to
have been a Childe Roland who, indeed, to the Dark Tower did actually
come. The horn that such a victor lifts to his mouth has been wrought,
as one might say, from the bones of some comrade slain in the same
arduous pilgrimage, and the peal of triumph which his lips evoke from
it might be called a blending of countless wretched cries from the
lips of other perished strugglers in the same daring design. Great
success with him, if he achieves it, will be--what? An almost Titanic
power to torture and affright at will hundreds, thousands of his
fellow-men. He will have before him the example of a man who locked up
$12,500,000 in one of his riotous assaults against honest
stock-exchange dealing--money notoriously not his own. He may desire
to imitate that course of behavior which had Samuel Bowles abducted
and unlawfully imprisoned because he published in his paper the truth
about Wall Street trickery and villany, or which sandbagged Dorman B.
Eaton in the streets of New York for having fought with legal weapons
of honest denunciation that malodorous craft of a compact between
incarnate kleptomania in finance and the unspeakable "boss" burglar of
Tammany Ring.
But needless are further details of those abominations on which our
rising young aspirant may turn an envious eye. He cannot but acquaint
himself with the whole horrid list of chicanery, since its items are
rungs of the ladder on which he himself may hereafter seek to mount.
If he aims to be a great Wall Street spider he must perforce fully
acquaint himself with what material will go toward the spinning of
that baleful tissue, his proprietary web. It must be woven, this web,
out of perjuries and robberies. Its fibres must mean the heart-strings
torn from many a deluded stockholder's breast, and the morning dew
that glitters on it must be the tears of widows and orphans. The laws
of a great republic are the foliage (alas, of a tree not too sturdy!)
on which its devilish meshes are wrought! There is no exaggeration in
stating that the financial history of the past three decades in
America has been one of peerless turpitude. Rome under the dying
glories of the empire scarcely parallels its knavish gluttonies of
illegal seizure. And Wall Street has been the boiling point of all
this infectious train of outrages against a patient people--one that
presumes to rate itself really democratic, and to sneer at countries
over seas in which to-day a Credit Mobilier, a Pacific Railroad
atrocity, a Manhattan Railroad brigandage, would make Trafalgar Square
or the Place de la Concorde howl with savage tumult.
But let us return to our would-be Wall Street magnate. Suppose he has
not the "grit" or the "go" (or whatever it would be termed in that
classic purlieu so noted for elegance of every-day rhetoric) either to
crown himself with the tarnished crown of a monetary "king" or even to
hold a gilt-edged but scandal-reeking portfolio at the footstool of
some such reigning tyrant. In this case he may join the great
rank-and-file of those whose pockets have become irremediably voided
and who seldom refer to Wall Street unless with muttered curses while
dragging out maimed careers in various far less feverish pursuits; or
he may, on the other hand, drift into that humble crowd of petty
brokers ("curb-stone" or domiciled) whose incomes vary from fifteen
hundred to as many thousands a year, and who pass hours each day in
envy, whether secret or open, of the dignitaries towering above them.
As one of these inferior persons his existence will continue, no
doubt, until he changes it for the tomb: and meanwhile what sort of an
existence has it been? All the finer human aims have appealed to him
as pearls appeal to swine. He has, perhaps, possessed faculties which
might have allowed him to shine ably and yet honorably in the state or
national congress, whose votes his friends and rivals, to ensure the
passage of their unscrupulous railroad-bills, have bought so often and
with such bloodless depravity. But these faculties have been miserably
misused. He may have loved some woman, and married her, and begotten
children by her; domestic affection may have warmed his being, just as
it does that of many a day-laborer. But in the arid air of Wall Street
all his intellectual and ethical possibilities will have wilted and
died. Lust for greater riches and a mordant, ever-smouldering
disappointment at not having attained them, will replace the healthier
impulses of adolescence. Books will have no savor for him; men of high
attainments, unless their coffers brim with lucre, affect him no more
than the company of the most unlettered oaf. He becomes, in other
words, the typical Wall Street man, and he becomes this with a
stolid indifference to all known motors of mental betterment.
It is not in any sense an attractive type. The Wall Street men are
lilies that toil and spin ("tiger" lilies, one might term them, in
remembrance of the old gambler-slang about faro and roulette); but
their industries, however distinct, are what the political economists
would call those of non-productive consumers. They are active drones,
to speak with paradox, in the great hive of human energy. Like all
gamesters, all men who live by the turning of the dice-box, they have
a devil-may-care demeanor, now and then rather sharply peppered with
wit, though wit not always avoidant of the obscene. For the most part,
they are as ignorant of the large onward push of human thought as if
they were farmers in some remote county of Arkansas. And yet they
affect, at all times, an amusing omniscience. To "know it all" is a
phrase beloved as sarcasm by their nimble vernacular, and though this
(like "Come off!" and "Look here, what are you giving us?") is a form
of speech incessantly on their lips, one is prone sometimes to reflect
how amazing is the meagreness of real knowledge which their "knowing
it all" piteously represents. They are sometimes keen sportsmen, but a
good many scamps, dolts, and cads are that. Their acquaintance with
contemporary literature could be summed up by stating that if you
should ask an average number of their class whether he had read the
last novel of Mr. James, he might pull his moustache (the Wall Street
man usually has a moustache, and often a symmetric and well-tended
one) desiring to learn whether you had reference or no to _G. P. R._
James, of the "two horse-men" celebrity. Their ignorance, however, is
not equal to their self-sufficiency. Almost whenever the average Wall
Street man goes into good society he makes himself more pronounced
there by his assurance than his culture. Of the latter quality he has
so little that the best clubs of which he is a member tolerate rather
than accept him. In most cases he is deplorably curt of speech and
brusque of deportment. Suavity, repose, that kindliness which is the
very marrow and pith of high-breeding, shock you in his manners as
acutely by their absence as if they were rents in his waistcoat or
gapes in his boot-leather. The "bluff," impudence, and swagger of the
Stock Exchange cling to him in society like burrs to the hair of
horse or dog. He would be far more endurable, this socially rampant
and ubiquitous Wall Street man, if he revealed the least shred of
respect for those ideas and faiths on which his hard, cold course of
living has necessarily trampled rough-hooved. He is so bright and
intelligent, as a rule, that you wonder why he is so phenomenally
vulgar. But his brightness and intelligence are of the quality, nearly
always, that throws into hysteric giggles the "summer girl" on piazzas
of third-rate hotels. Ordinarily, too, he has not the faintest
conception of how deeply and darkly he bores people who would live
apart from him, from his bejewelled and supercilious wife (her pretty
head always goes an inch further backward when "Tom" or "Dick" has
"made a strike in stocks"), and from the French maid, with her frilled
cap, whom his children gabble to in their grammarless American-French,
but whose unctuous idioms are Sanscrit alike to madame and himself.
Conceive that you or I shall wish to talk with the ordinary Wall
Street man, on the piazza of his watering-place hotel, on the deck of
his record-breaking steamer. (When he goes to Europe, which he
incessantly does, he invariably takes a record-breaking steamer in
preference to all others.) What does he know? What can he tell us?
Politics? He reproduces, if he be a Republican, the last tirade of his
favorite newspaper in behalf of protection and Mr. Blaine. If he be a
Democrat he will spout the last editorial of his favorite newspaper in
favor of free trade and Mr. Cleveland. History? The Wall Street man
rarely knows in what year Columbus discovered America, and would be in
straits wild enough to horrify that talented arch-prig, Mr. Andrew
Lang, if you mentioned either Cortes or Pizarro. Fiction? He admired
Robinson Crusoe when a boy, and since then he has read a few
translated volumes of Dumas the elder. Poetry? He doesn't like it "for
a cent"; but he once did come across something (by Tennyson or
Longfellow--he forgets which) called "Beautiful Snow." That "fetched
him," and "laid over" any other verse he recollects.
Here, let us insist, is no aimless travesty of the average Wall Street
man, but a faithful etching of him, apart from those more sorry
lineaments which might be disclosed in a portrait painted, as it were,
with the oil of his own slippery speculations. If he resents the
honest drawing of his well-known features, why, so much the better.
His indignation may be fraught with wholesome reactions. Perhaps he
will have his defenders--interested ones, of course. We may pluck the
cactus-flower with hands cased in buckskin, and swear that it harbors
no sting below its roseate and silken cockade of bloom. Prejudice is
too often the saucepan on which we cook our criticisms; and when these
are done to a turn we cast the vessel into a dust-bin, trying with
mighty valor of volition to forget that it even exists as old iron.
Never was more blatant humbug aired than that about our "brilliant"
Wall Street financiers. Their "brilliancy" is merely a repulsive
egotism in one of its worst forms,--that of cupidity. They are like
misers with longer, quicker, and more sinewy fingers than other
misers, in the gathering together of dollars. Their shrewdness may be
exceptional, but a quality which consists half in accurate guessing
and half in bullying defiance is hardly worthy of the name. As for
their "nerve" and "coolness," these are not endowments that in such
connection can be admired or praised. For surely the gambler who
cannot face bravely those very slings and arrows of variant if not
always outrageous fortune which form the chief indices of his dingy
profession, cuts a mean enough figure in the cult of it. "Jim" Fisk
had traits like these, but who now applauds them? As well admire the
courage of a house-breaker in scaling a garden-wall at midnight, or
his exquisite tact in selecting a bed-chamber well-stored with jewels
and money. The so-called "great men" of Wall Street are foes of
society--foes merciless and malign. Their "generalship," their
"Napoleonic" attributes are terms coined by people of their own
damaging class, people with low motives, with even brutish morals. It
is time that this age of ours, so rich in theoretic if impracticable
humanitarianisms, forebore to flatter the spirits which work against
it in its efforts toward higher and wiser achievement. The anarchists
hanged in Chicago were men of mistaken purpose and fatuous belief. But
at least they were conceivably sincere, however dangerous to peace and
order. These czars and tycoons of finance, on the other hand, are
scoffers at the integrity of the commonweal, and have for their Lares
and Penates hideous little gods carved by their own misanthropy from
the harsh granite of self-worship. Every new conspiracy to amass
millions through wrecking railroads, through pouring vast sums upon
the stock market, through causing as vast sums to disappear from
public use, stains them blacker with the proof of their horrible
inhumanity. Even death does not always end their monstrous rapine, for
when they pay what is called the debt of nature they too often fling,
in their wills, a posthumous sneer at that still larger debt owed to
their fellow-creatures, and make some eldest son their principal heir.
Charity may get a few niggardly thousands from them, and handsome
bequests usually go to their younger children; yet the bulk of the big
gambler's treasure passes intact to one who will most probably guard
with avid custody the alleged prestige of its possession.
But we should remember that on many occasions it is not even a game of
chance with these potentates of Wall Street. They play, as it were,
with marked cards, and can predict to a certainty, having such mighty
capital at their disposal, just how and when particular stocks will
rise or fall. Spreading abroad deceitful rumors through their little
subservient throngs of henchmen brokers, they create untold ravage and
despair. Fearful cruelty is shown by them then. The law cannot reach
it, though years of imprisonment would be far too good for it.
Families are plunged into penury by their subtly circulated frauds;
forgery and embezzlement in hundreds of individual cases result; banks
are betrayed and shattered; disgrace and suicide are sown broadcast
like seeds fecund in poison. One often marvels that assassination does
not spring up in certain desperate human hearts as a vengeance against
these appalling wrongs. Murder is ghastly enough, in whatever shape it
meets us, and from whatever cause. But if Lincoln and Garfield fell
the prey of mad fanatics, it seems all the stranger, as it is all the
more fortunate, that agonized and ill-governed human frenzy should
thus far happily have spared us new public shudders at new public
crimes.
Conjecture may indeed waste its liveliest ardors in seeking to
determine what place this nineteenth century of ours will hold among
the centuries which have preceded and are destined to follow it. But
there is good reason to believe, after all, that in one way it will be
held remarkable, perhaps even unique,--as an age of violent contrasts,
violent extremes. Here we are, seeking (however pathetically) to
grapple with problems whose solution would wear an almost millennial
tinge. There are men among us--and men of august intellects, too--who
urge upon society the adoption of codes and usages which would assume,
if practically treated, that the minds and characters of mortals are
little short of angelic. And coevally with these dreamers of grand
socialistic improvement, we are met by such evidence as that of Wall
Street, its air foul with the mephitic exhalations that rise from dead
and rotting principle. When the state is corrupt, and large bodies of
its citizens are not only corrupt but wholly scornful of every
fraternal and philanthropic purpose as well,--when communities like
this of Wall Street, cold-blooded, shameless, injurious, are bowed to
as powers, instead of being shunned as pests, then the ideals of such
men as Karl Marx and his disciples loom distant and indefinite on the
horizon of the future. Tritest of metaphors though it may be, all
civilization is a garden, and in this garden of our own western
tillage Wall Street towers to-day like a colossal weed, with roots
deep-plunging into a soil they desiccate and de-fertilize. When and
whose will be the extirpating hand?
Here dawns a question with which some modern Sphinx may defy some
coming OEdipus. Let us hope it will prove a question so adequately
answered that the evil goddess using it as a challenge--the
conventional deity of injustice, duplicity, and extortion--will
dramatize her compulsory response to it by casting herself headlong
into the sea!