MR. JAY GOULD'S DEFENCE OF HIMSELF.
ACONTRIBUTOR to the St. James's Gazette reported on Monday the essence of some conversations which he held with the late Mr. Jay Gould on the deck of an Atlantic liner. Circumstances mentioned threw the two men into a position of momentary sympathy, and the millionaire replied to questions, perhaps a little over-searching, with a want of reticence greatly at variance with his usual habit. The reporter doubts, indeed, whether Mr. Gould might not have been "fooling " his interlocutor ; but though we should not inter- pret his meaning as the contributor does, we believe, on internal evidence, and our own recollection of the earlier history of Mr. Gould's speculations, that the narrator has remembered the conversation pretty accurately. Mr. Jay Gould, it must be premised, held an exceptional position among American millionaires. Most of them, like most Princes, are a little vain. They occupy special pedestals in the great gallery ; they receive an immense amount of adulation of a certain sort ; and they are conscious of being objects of permanent national interest, usually of an admiring kind. The admira- tion may often be unwilling ; but still the average American does speak of Mr. Astor, or Mr. Vanderbilt, or Mr. Rockefeller, with a feeling which, if not exactly admiration, is a working substitute for it. He thinks of him and his wealth as products "possible only in my great country, Sir." Mr. Jay Gould, how- ever, was distinct among contemporary millionaires. He was hated with a cordiality which was not at first sight explicable, for of all the millionaires, he was the least ostentatious, and though he must have employed indirectly tens of thousands of the horny-handed, he never, that we know of, was the object of any Trade Union hostility. He was nevertheless detested. We cannot recall, since we first noticed him as the ally of that vulgar Sardanapalus, " Jem Fiske," a kindly mention in any American newspaper or society of Mr. Jay Gould ; while we could dig up, if it were worth the trouble, a hundred tele- grams in which the words were made bitter by the covert hatred or contempt of the bulletin-maker towards the Napoleon of the Stock Exchange. The truth is, that he was regarded, justly or unjustly, as the successful brigand of the finance world, a conclottiere who accumulated enormous wealth—some fifteen millions sterling, invested at 7 per cent., all made in one generation—by raiding, marauding, and wrecking through- out the Stock Exchange kingdom. He certainly made a very great sum by getting possession of all available gold currency in New York, and selling it to wealthy men who must pay anything for it, or go into bankruptcy for broken contracts. That was, at all events, an unamiable way of making money, even if he did not, as is alleged, in making it, cheat Fiske. the original deviser of the scheme—we are bound to say we cannot find this touch of Satan in the contemporary accounts of that marvellous rig "—and men have said habitually worse things of him than that. The American City editors will have it that he made his later millions by wrecking, or, in more accurate American, by "freezing out" innocent holders of railway and telegraph property. He would decide that he wanted a line, would attack it with rumours, menaces of opposition, and sales at extravagantly low prices ; then buy a "controlling interest" at bottom prices, working through a hundred brokers ; and then appear as dictator of the line, which he thenceforward managed to a profit or a loss, or both in succession, as best suited his own interests. His share_ holders, for whom in English estimation he was trustee, were never, it is asserted, regarded at all. He himself gave the con- tributor to the St. James's Gazette an account of his system, which is worth extracting :—" Everything in this world moves between two limits, like a pendulum. The true secret of success is to watch the pendulum till you get the usual limits of the swing. If you want to make money by buying and selling stock, you should study a certain stock till you have gauged its limits. If you find that this particular stock wavers between 140 and 170, wait till it falls to 140, and then buy all you can lay bands on, always being content to sell out long before it goes up to 170. When it reaches 170, sell all you can find purchasers for, and close your account long before it sinks to 140. In two words, buy at the bottom and sell at the top, cut your losses, be content with small profits, and never be induced to play with stock standing at fair prices.' This is the golden rule. There is but one exception. It is this : never follow the market,—that is to say, be led by the fools. As soon as there is a panic, buy. The reaction always follows. I am telling you nothing new, probably; but I am telling you how I made my fortune, and how those who do not do it lose theirs. One stock is as good as another, only you must not start till you have bad it under observation for three years." That is probably quite true, with the necessary addendum that Mr. Jay Gould, unless he was greatly belied, was accustomed, when necessary, to give the pendulum a sharp kick ; and it was this kicking that created the bitter hostility felt towards him as a financier. Nobody ever called him dishonest, for he never quite broke through legal rules ; but thousands who had lost by him called him inhuman, and accused him, in numerous cases, of using his enormous power and his unerring perception of weak points in Company management, not for his own advan- tage, but to crash personal foes and rivals, an action as much forbidden by the ordinary ethics of business, as it is forbidden to a General in a great war to order sharpshooters to lay in wait for the General opposed to him. We think it possible that in this respect Mr. Jay Gould was maligned, and that men who were crashed under his financial car thought them- selves singled out when they had been utterly forgotten ; but that men in great numbers—unhappy and innocent share- holders in possession of properties sound till the Gould party desired them—believed the great " operator " to be malignant as well as bold, must be substantially true.
Well, at this point, the intellectual interest of the story comes in. Mr. Jay Gould, who looked so impassive, must have secretly felt acutely the hatred that he excited, and must have realised more or less the cruelty involved in his methods of doing business, or he never could have said to the St. James's contributor what he did say. His whole argument is a defence of himself as a man who was warring, not doing business, who was dealing with enemies alone, and who derived from their hatred a right to hit as hard as he could, and with all the weapons he could find. " I am absolutely the most detested man living, and I am not surprised." "There isn't a man or woman living who could do me a good turn to save his own life "—we quote exactly, but Mr. Gould clearly said, " who would do me a good turn "—" and why, therefore, should I do any man or woman a good turn ? " "I was born and bred so low down that I have always been on the rise at every point in my career; and accordingly, every man's hand that I have come in contact with has been against me." Again, to give the full force of what he said, we must extract verbatim :—" I cannot remember ever having had a good turn done to me. I am not surprised, for I have had to shove down every man I have ever met ; but equally, why should I help those who have been opposed to me ? I have made my own fortune, and in doing so I have had to ruin thousands. To be sorry for one fact, I should have to be sorry for the other. I can't say I am, for the simple reason that any man whom I beat is a bigger fool than I am, and I hate fools ; and, of course, fools hate me. It is lucky for me and lucky for them they are in the majority ; but why should I like men who hate me? I don't like being hated, naturally ; but I can't help it. If I were liked, I should know I was a fool, and that thought would break me right up. I was born to make money, and to be execrated accordingly. I can't help being hated, any more than I can help making money. Everybody has had the same chances that I have had. Exactly the same crises have occurred during all our lifetimes. Everybody's eyes have been rivetted on the same projects. They have thought one thing would happen, and they have acted on their opinion ; I have thought the other thing would happen, and I have acted on my opinion. I should have been mad to act against my convic- tions, and madder still to try and make the world act against theirs. Yon can't do people good turns,—they won't let you. I should not listen to them, they would not listen to me. Surely we are quits, and there should be no ill-feeling. But there is, and as they hate me for succeeding, I hate them for failing. At any rate, one is as rational as the other. If I lost, I dare say I should be unreasonable enough to hate them, and they would accordingly hate me sooner or later. They might try and help me ; but I would not take their advice, and ac- cordingly they would drop me as a fool, and we would all be standing in the same hating ratio one to another. Men I have never seen nor even heard of have gone about with murder in their hearts, and if they could have found me would have been fools enough to kill me,—just as if that would have benefited them ! It surely is as natural for me to hate them as for them to bate me. I have gone about for years with men paid to protect me. If I did not hate every man as cordially as every man hates me I should be unhappy, and yet I suppose I am the most miserable devil in the whole world. What a paradise it all is !" There can be no mistake about the meaning of those words. They are all self-excusatory. Mr. Gould, in a long career of stock-dealing, had become a perfect money-making machine ; he had no interest in anything outside money-getting, any more than Darwin had an interest in anything outside science ; but there was, nevertheless, a heart within his body which felt that his operations were cruel in their results, which made its possessor miserable, and which had to be kept down by an intellectual fiction which he all the while knew—for he was loved in his own house—to be a fiction. He could not repent so far as to give up his practices, and yet could not help repenting—in a sullen, moody, fighting way, it is true—but yet repenting. No wonder that such a man, after making fifteen millions, after facing with quiet brow the hatred of a continent, died comparatively young (fifty-six) of " nerves," that is, mental strain, as well as of consumption. We hardly remember a narrative more truly tragic, or one that more vividly described the feelings of what used to be called, in a language now disused, a " possessed " man. Mr. Gould, if the St. James's narrative is true, was possessed with the demon of money-making—not avarice, but the money-making form of ambition—who could not go out of the arena, could not help using his marvellous weapon of slaughter, yet had all the while to steel himself against relics of instinctive pity by asserting over and over again, " these are all my enemies."
Was there anything in the substance of his excuse? A little, perhaps, but not much. We suppose, from the accounts, that four or five individuals did, in succession, make desperate efforts to crush him—the national Government was once very nearly provoked into it, for that gold "corner " of his might have caused a national calamity—and did show themselves " enemies " in his sense, and it is probable, also, that he was a mark for bloodthirsty vengeance, both on the part of anarchists and ruined speculators ; but the sense of general personal hatred must have been begotten of his own consciousness. Speculators grow hard-hearted, we suppose, very often, as gamesters do—that is the best moral objection we know to gaming—but they do not universally hate individuals who suc- ceed. They rather hate themselves for failing, as chess-players do, than others for being successful. Had Mr. Gould played less hardly, had he oftener forgiven a debt, had he even stopped earlier, and thenceforward used his wealth well, he would have been no more detested than any other of the billionaires, among whom, after all, he was not the first. The world is not kindly, especially now, when competition is so fierce, and envy has acquired such new strength; but it is not bitter enough to justify each one in it in taking up the attitude of a man defending a besieged fortress. Even the unsuccessful err in that attitude, and, in the successful, it is not only thankless, but utterly absurd. Mr. Gould might have had friends enough if he had conducted business in the usual method ; and, moreover, he was clearly a man, like many others, who could live without them. His excuse is merely the effort of a man conscious of wrong-doing, and intending to persist in it, yet uneasy enough to devise an excuse which, if it could not still his conscience, could satisfy his mind. He was not " fooling " his interlocutor at all ; but, in an accidental mood, probably induced by seeing that his acquaintance bad also a bitter quarrel with fate, he indulged himself for once in thinking aloud.
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