TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE MiLLIONAIRES OF NEW YORK.
NOTHING strikes us so strongly in this Gold Crisis in New York as the enormous and unrestrained power of the new American Plutocracy. They seem to be rising to a posi- tion which, in the extent of the influence it confers, is without a parallel in the history of aristocracies, or is paralleled only by that of the few Roman families which united to hereditary station in the Republic the command of masses of treasure and armies of debtors. There are men as rich in England, and men perhaps as unscrupulous in Europe, but for men as unrestrained in the use of their power, as defiant of opinion, of the law, of their own reputation, of all that limits the application of extraordinary means, we must seek in the East or in the history of the old Pagan world. A Roman Senator would destroy a province to recover his interest on a loan, or raise a civil war to rid himself of his debts, and the American " Ring "-leaders seem willing to force on a national bank- ruptcy, or ruin an army of shareholders, as mere incidental strokes in some grand " operation," or rather game, for in many cases they seem actuated by the determination to win, at least as much as by any thirst for profit. What does Mr. Vanderbilt,—with, it is said, £15,000,000 sterling,—want with the few scores of thousands he makes when in some huge railway campaign he crushes a thousand families ? Yet he crushes them. In Europe a first-class millionaire of that sort would dread financial disturbance as he would dread an earth- quake. In America he makes one. The game, the excitement, the notoriety seem to be the temptations of these men even more than the profit, and the whole scene suggests that in America, as in Rome, satiety comes quick to the very rich ; that for the man of millions life has few interests ; that the hunger for excite- ment has reached the height where nothing will gratify it but battle, or orgy, or huge mad gambling, perhaps the most dangerous symptom which a community can exhibit. The " operation " which has recently convulsed New York and shaken American credit throughout the world was not in itself a very extraordinary one. American currency is paper, but all duties must be paid in gold, and a good many con- tracts must be fulfilled in one way or another by transfers of bullion. Gold, therefore, becomes an article of prime neces- sity to trade, and one specially liable to be monopolized. Most transactions of the kind are excessively dangerous, because, though the world must have the article, say, for example, quinine, or tallow, or quicksilver, in all of which monopolies have been attempted, still the world can wait, and appeal to science for aid ; but the gold was wanted immedi- ately, every day, and could not be superseded by anything else. Nobody could or would take anything out of bond till he knew what he would have to pay in duties, which he could not know till the price of gold had settled itself. A few rich men, therefore, thought that if they could get possession of all the available gold they could get their own price for it, and the gold in stock being everywhere a very limited quantity, they fancied themselves rich enough to do it. Given a few men sufficiently confident in one another, and sufficiently rich to begin the game, pledging their gold as they got it, and there is nothing very extraordinary or very far-seeing in such a plan, which was indeed very imperfectly organized, the Ring having either forgotten or been deceived by the largest bullion- holder in the country, the Treasury of the United States. The really extraordinary thing is that men of such wealth and such capacity should have been willing to run such a risk, and endanger the commercial safety of the Union in such a spirit of recklessness. Gamblers do very mad things sometimes, but in Europe vast wealth seems to sober men, and the City could no more think of the Rothschilds, or Barings, or any first-class bankers playing rouge-et-noir after that fashion than of their trying to shut the Bank of England for the sake of studying the physiognomical marks of despair on a splendid scale. The effort to do such a thing would cost any millionaire more cash in the consequent depreciation of his credit than he could hope to make by his operation. In America, we fear, had Messrs. Fisk, Gould, and the rest won the game, and stood out victors amid the surrounding ruin, their credit would have been increased. They very nearly did win. By steady purchases they forced gold np from 133 to 160, that is, they raised the price by some twenty-five per cent., and might, as they intended, have sent it up fifty ; but that the Treasury, after giving them time to exhaust themselves, poured gold from its vaults into the market. Their remaining strength did not suffice to
buy that, the bubble burst, and they stood with huge masses of contracts to receive gold at a price it did not fetch. Though
they won enormously .at first, still, with their object they must have held on to their contracts to a great extent, and the ultimate " differences " must have been frightful. Daring the fight resources had been accumulated by the Ring and their adversaries by enormous sales of securities, which were flung away at almost any price ; United States' bonds, for example,. being sold in large parcels 20 per cent. below market rate, and one great Railway falling sixty per cent. in 48 hours, and for- tunes changed hands in a few minutes. Of course, in such a. scene, the specialty of the American character, the strange and to us inexplicable something in their brains which makes them so. distinct from the English, the liability to mental hectic, came out in full force. Brokers went mad, fainted, fell ill, and died; the- Gold Room was like an asylum with the patients all loose and furious ; the clerks in the Gold Bank sat in permanent session ; the Bank was at last compelled to shut its doors merely to get, through its work, and desperate attempts were made by the• losers to lynch the chief author of their misfortunes, himself; it is reported, an enormous sufferer. All over the country business stopped, no man knowing at what price to sell; because he could not tell what import duty he might not have- to pay on taking his orders out of bond. The effect was, in fact, precisely as if Mr. Gladstone had announced in Parliament that he was about to increase all import duties indefinitely, without fixing either the time or the amount. The spasm was too short to create much ruin beyond speculating circles,. but had it lasted, as but for Mr. Boutwell's action it might have lasted, weeks, it is not too much to say that every dealer in the United States would have been more or less impover- ished, and trade contracted 90 per cent. Even as it was, every man who had contracted to deliver goods out of bond on any one of these three days was fined from 20 to 30 per cent. on the amount of duty, that is, probably, his whole profit. Mr. Fisk's finger was, in fact, on the throat of every man in every port of the Union.
The American Press is already asking anxiously where the remedy for this state of affairs can be found, and it has reason for its anxiety. There is not the slightest security that the experiment may not be repeated by men much stronger than Messrs. Fisk and Gould, and Government cannot be always descending in a shower of gold to the relief of mankind. Even, if gold were not the subject, men so rich and imbued with such a thirst for gaining might still work irretrievable mischief. There is nothing whatever to prevent three or four speculators like Mr. Vanderbilt from mastering all the railways in the country, or reducing their shares to nominal values, or holding all the iron, or even making an attack on flour, or doing any other act which men possessed of immense resources, and standing in sympathy apart from the community, fighting like the Barons of old for their own hands, without reference to the welfare of any not directly connected with themselves, may be able to conceive. Congress has no power over them, the State Legislatures can scarcely touch them—being precluded from annulling the obligation of any contract—the judiciary is in their pay, and even if they stepped beyond the law, which they need not do, juries could not be found to convict them. They cannot be deprived of their wealth without a social convulsion, they cannot be lynched, for they could raise regiments of armed bravoes, and apparently they cannot be induced to forego this use of wealth. Amidst such colossal gambling every other excitement seems insipid, and life without excitement is to them a dreary waste. What are they to do ? In England a man with ten millions would enter politics, or build up a great landed estate, or " found a family," or engage in that miserable but exciting social strife which absorbs so many brains ; but in America all these careers are closed, wealth being, after a certain point, nearly useless to secure a career. It is often asserted that the readiness with which " society " in Europe adopts the very rich is discreditable to the great, that it is, in fact, a violation of the first law of good societies that refinement, not wealth, is the sine guct non of admission, but it must not be forgotten that society in the act of adoption imposes certain restraints which the history of New York shows to be of value. It is not well that great skill in getting together millions should be rewarded with a peerage, political influence, high position in society, and the general deference of all around ; but it is much better that it.should be so rewarded than that its possessor should be placed, as in New York, practically outside restraint, invested with power to ruin, or enrich, or demoralize whole communities. A millionaire there seems able to place himself altogether outside the laws, to live among a race which still boasts its Puritanism like a Sultan, among a law- abiding people to wage private war, among a community singularly kindly to pour out ruin at will upon the unoffend- ing. No aristocrat in modern days has had anything like the power of the American plutocrat, and no aristocrat in any clays has been more completely beyond restraint. The remedy, we hope, must come, but we confess we cannot see whence. The law of equal division at death clearly does not prevent agglomerations of property which are all the more dangerous, because the property, being personal, can be so vapidly turned to use. A Marquis of Westminster can do much, but a threat from him to upset the City would only provoke a smile. A Mr. Vanderbilt in England, if he chose to work mere mischief, might reduce us all to a state of barter, and work more ruin than an invading army ; and if we may judge from all we hear of New York, would be just as likely to do it as not in order to feel his power, to make
strokes," and generally to enjoy the excitement of a superb form of gambling. Fortunately, in England a man of that kind would in no short time provoke the community, and the community through Parliament is absolute ; but in America we see nothing to prevent the development of the millionaire into a virtual monarch, the state of whose digestion would be important to millions, who could no more be controlled than .a Shah could be controlled, and who, if he could not send his adversaries the bowstring, could send them an equally fatal decree of confiscation. We fail to see what a man with fifty millions could not do in New York, or why a successful chief in the "Ring," any man with a million, a head for finance, and alo scruples, should not make fifty millions. We expect yet to see Mr. Urquhart's strange dream fulfilled, and a single anillionaire gain possession of a State, make what laws he pleases, and live in a free Republic as much a sovereign as if he were an Asiatic King. Vanderbilt—who, we should say, -.behaved well in this affair—could buy New Jersey.
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