CHAPTER II.

WALL STREET AS A CIVILIZER.

CLERICAL OBLIQUITY OF JUDGMENT ABOUT WALL STREET AFFAIRS.—THE SLANDEROUS

ELOQUENCE OF TALMAGE.—WALL STREET A GREAT DISTRIBUTOR, AS EXHIBITED

IN THE CLEARING HOUSE TRANSACTIONS.—POPULAR DELUSIONS IN REGARD TO

SPECULATION.—WHAT OUR REVOLUTIONARY SIRES ADVISED ABOUT IMPROVING

THE INDUSTRIAL ARTS, SHOWING THE STRIKING CONTRAST BETWEEN THEIR

VIEWS AND THE WAY LORD SALISBURY WANTED TO FIX THINGS FOR THIS

COUNTRY.

The dense ignorance displayed by men outside of Wall Street, in regard

to the business of that great mart, is almost incredible. Even the most

intelligent men I meet in other professions and walks of life have the

most utterly crude and undefined notions about the methods of doing

business at the Stock Exchange. Many good and pious clergymen are under

the impression that Wall Street is a name for the sum total of all kinds

of infamy, and solemnly exhort their devoted flocks not to touch the

unclean thing.

Clerical obliquity of judgment is not quite so bad, nor popular

ignorance so dense in this respect, as it has been, but there is a large

field for improvement yet. The business activity of the country, and the

spirit of intercourse being so rapidly infused throughout all ranks of

the community, have demonstrated that this antipathy to Wall Street has

been simply an unworthy prejudice, in spite of the high moral authority

from which it has emanated.

I don’t wish to throw any aspersion on the noble purposes of the clergy.

The end they have been seeking has been good, but it has not always

justified the means employed. These good men have unwittingly

misrepresented Wall Street, to the great detriment of the business

interests of the country.

There is no excuse, however, for a man in this enlightened age, who

professes to be a Shepherd in Israel and a spiritual leader of the

people, to remain ignorant of an important fact, or to continue to see

that fact through a false medium, when he has the opportunity of coming

into Wall Street and seeing for himself. He has no right to set himself

up as a censor, a public detractor, and a public libeller upon a set of

men and merchants who are the bone and sinew of the commercial and

industrial interests and prosperity of the country. It is not only a

personal wrong but a public injury.

The Rev. T. De Witt Talmage has perhaps done more than any other

clergyman to make our speculators, investors and business men ridiculous

in the eyes of the rest of the community and in the estimation of John

Bull, in whose dominion his so-called sermons are extensively read.

Talmage has employed his flashing wit and mountebank eloquence to bring

financial disgrace on the business methods of the whole country by the

manner in which he has ignorantly vilified Wall Street.

He can go to the Cremorne Garden, Billy McGlory’s, Harry Hill’s and

other places of dubious reputation, and make himself acquainted with the

real condition of things there.

How far he has penetrated into the green rooms and behind the scenes in

these places it is not my business to know, but why should he not treat

Wall Street as fairly, where everything is open to inspection, as he

does these dens of vice, where midnight scenes of villainous revelry and

reckless dissipation reign supreme? Why does he misrepresent Wall Street

without knowing anything about it? He can come here and go wherever he

wishes without a bodyguard of detectives or fear of molestation. Why is

he so particular about doing justice to the brothel and the gaming den,

while he airs his ludicrous eloquence to the highest pitch to falsify

the respectable business methods of Wall Street?

I recollect the time that men in the higher walks of life, and among the

higher classes (if I may use the expression, in opposition to the

opinion of the New York _Sun_, whose editor maintains that we have no

classes in this country) would have been ashamed to be seen in Wall

Street. Now, men in the same sphere are proud of the distinction, both

socially and financially. In fact Wall Street has become a necessity as

a healthy stimulant to the rest of the business of the country.

Everything looks to this centre as an index of its prosperity. It moves

the money that controls the affairs of the world.

Take the Clearing House, for example, with its 50 billions of

transactions annually. All but a fraction of this wonderful wealth,

compared with which the stupendous pile of Crœsus was a mere pittance,

passes through Wall Street, continually adding to its mighty power. This

great power, in comparison with which the influence of monarchies is

weak, is not, like the riches of these, concentrated chiefly on itself.

It is imparted to all the industries and productive forces of the

country. Wall Street is a great distributor. It is also universal in its

benevolent effects, practically unlimited by either creed or geography.

It has taken greater advantage, for the general good, of scientific

discovery than all the scientific societies combined. Wherever the

electric wires have penetrated the Wall Street broker has followed. The

members of the Stock Exchange are, through the power of electricity, in

closer sympathy with the great heart of civilized humanity than all the

missionaries and philanthropic societies in the world. They are the

great cosmopolitans of the age. In practical sympathy they outshine the

most devoted efforts of the benevolent associations of half the

continent. They have the means to do it, and this comes chiefly from

being practical, and from their strong antipathy as a body to cant and

hypocrisy.

There are many popular delusions outside the ranks of the clergy

connected with the effort to form a correct estimate of Wall Street

affairs by the general public. It is a popular delusion that it is a

place where people who are in the “ring” take something for nothing. No

idea could be further wide of the mark in regard to Wall Street men as a

class, however true it may be of some individual instances, as in other

departments of business. Wall Street gives full value for everything it

receives, and the country at large is deeply its debtor. Some people may

think this a paradox, but there is nothing more easily demonstrated to

those who have observed the commercial and industrial progress of the

country and the age.

Wall Street has furnished the money that has set the wheels of industry

in motion over the vast continent, and in one century has brought us

abreast, in the industrial arts, of countries that had from one to two

thousand years the start of us. In this respect it has assisted nobly to

carry out the ideas of the fathers of the Constitution. Washington,

Jefferson, Madison, Franklin and Hamilton laid down the doctrine that it

would be a betrayal of the interests of posterity to limit the

productive energies of this country to raw material. With our present

experience we may think it strange that this question should ever have

been debated, but it was, even after the old tyranny had been obliged to

loosen its grasp on the struggling enterprise of the young Republic. Our

old revolutionary sires deserve credit for their foresight, but what

would have been the fate of their commercial philosophy if Wall Street

had not supplied the sinews of war to cope with the forces of nature, to

work our mines and build our railroads, and through these and other

means, to attract the teeming population from every clime to cultivate

our virgin soil and develop our wonderful industries and resources?

Apropos of the above observations, I may add that during the debate in

the British Parliament, on the recognition of the Confederacy, the great

manufacturing power in our industrial, financial and commercial progress

was clearly exhibited and thoroughly appreciated by British statesmen.

It was made one of the strongest arguments, too, by some of the

representatives of our jealous and envious cousins on the other side of

the “pond,” why Great Britain should recognize and aid the South in the

war. Lord Salisbury, then Lord Robert Cecil, at present the leader of

the Tory party in England, and the advocate of twenty years’ coercion

for Ireland, was one of the bitterest foes of the Union, chiefly on this

account. He was one of the Vice-Presidents of the “Southern Independent

Association,” for the promotion of the cause of the Rebellion, and for

supplying the Confederates with money and arms, and for the ultimate

object of founding an empire of slavery on this continent.

In his speech then, on the Southern blockade, the future Lord Salisbury

made the following touching allusion to our dangerous prosperity on this

side: “The plain matter of fact is, as every one who watches the current

of history must know, that the Northern States of America never can be

our sure friends, for this simple reason—not merely because the

newspapers write at each other, or that there are prejudices on both

sides, but because we are rivals—rivals politically, rivals

commercially. We aspire to the same position. We both aspire to the

government of the seas. We are both manufacturing people, and in every

port as well as at every court we are rivals to each other. With respect

to the Southern States the case is entirely reversed. The population are

an agricultural people. They furnish the raw material of our industry,

and they consume the products which we manufacture from it. With them,

therefore, every interest must lead us to cultivate friendly relations,

and we have seen that when the war began they at once recurred to

England as their natural ally.”

Thus we see how anxious Great Britain was to take the place which the

North has reserved for itself, and so proudly maintained in commerce and

industry.

The great coming man, Salisbury, wanted to reduce us all to the position

of hewers of wood, drawers of water and planters and pickers of cotton,

for the special accommodation of Great Britain, as the mighty centre of

the world’s manufacturing industries. This would have given a set-back

to our civilization, causing us to make a retrogressive move to the dark

ages. Since then we have afforded this noble lord and his nation ample

proof that we are very far advanced in the manufacturing arts ourselves,

and that in many things we are far ahead of England, and they are no

doubt greatly surprised that the arrangement by which England was to

have all the profit and America all the hard work, has not been carried

out.

In this wonderful development of the industrial arts, Wall Street money,

enterprise and speculation have played by far the most conspicuous and

progressive part, thus enabling us, in little more than two decades, to

outstrip the old nations that were so anxious to enslave us, in spite of

the fact that they had centuries upon centuries the start of us. It must

be galling to some of these people that we are now the most available

candidates for the commercial and industrial supremacy of the world, and

we have attained this position, in a great measure, through the

instrumentality of Wall Street as a civilizer.

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