Fifty years in Wall Street
ROTHSCHILDS’ HOUSE IN FRANKFORT.—CONSUL GENERAL TO AUSTRIA AND
MINISTER TO THE HAGUE.—A GREAT FINANCIER AND A CONNOISSEUR IN ART.
August Belmont has achieved the highest credit of any banker in the
United States. His bills are always in demand and command a little more
than those of any one else. He came to New York comparatively poor, but
is now worth millions. As a representative of the Rothschilds in this
country he has for many years held a high position in the financial
world. He has managed the business of that historic house with prudence
and exceptional acuteness and sagacity. Contrast his success in this
country with the experience of Americans abroad. George Peabody, and J.
S. Morgan, the successor of that philanthropist, may seem to be
exceptions to the rule, but they did not win such social and business
success as has been achieved by Mr. Belmont in this country, and the
fact remains that no American could have been so successful abroad as he
has been in the United States. Europe does not afford the opportunities
that so often arise here. This is the country of great and frequent
opportunities; there is a large and inviting field for enterprise and
business skill, although, of course, all cannot win such a position in
the financial world as that occupied by Mr. Belmont, who is reckoned
among the wealthiest as well as the most honored of America’s adopted
citizens.
He was born in the Rhenish Palatinate sixty-eight years ago. His father
was a man in well-to-do circumstances, who sent him, when he was
thirteen years old, to become an apprenticed clerk to the Rothschilds in
their Frankfort house. According to the German custom, he received no
pay; he was compensated by the opportunity of learning the banking
business. He made rapid progress. Before he was twenty-one he was
selected to accompany one of the Rothschilds to Italy and France as his
secretary. In 1837 the famous house, recognizing the promising field in
this country for profitable investments, sent young Belmont to New York
as their agent, a position which he held till 1858, when he became their
American correspondent and general representative, and this responsible
post he has held ever since. In 1844 he was appointed Consul-General for
Austria, and held the position for five years, when he relinquished it
because of his personal friendship for Louis Kossuth and his sympathy
with Hungary in the quarrel with Austria. In 1849 Mr. Belmont married
the niece of Commodore Perry, the hero of Lake Erie, a beautiful and
accomplished lady, who did much to strengthen his social position. In
1853 he was appointed Minister to the Hague by President Pierce, and
served four years. He has always been a staunch Democrat, and was for
several years chairman of the Democratic National Committee. He has
generally refused to accept public office, but his eldest son, Perry,
has served several terms in Congress.
Mr. Belmont is under the medium height, rather stout, with iron-gray
side whiskers, round German features and keen dark eyes, and among the
strong characteristics of the man is his marked chivalric courtesy and
knightly courage. As a financier he has few equals and no superior, and
to his politic and conservative management, as well as his foresight and
intimate knowledge of affairs, is due the American prestige and success
of the Rothschilds. Mr. Belmont’s house on Fifth Avenue, with its
splendid art treasures, is worth a large fortune in itself. He is a
connoisseur in works of art, and has one of the finest private
collections of pictures in the world. For many years he has also had a
princely residence at Newport and a stock farm at Babylon, Long Island.
Though not, strictly speaking, a club man, he was one of the founders of
the Manhattan Club. His successful career is an illustration of the fact
that this country affords a fine opportunity for the intelligence,
thrift and industry not only of native Americans but of the Republic’s
adopted citizens.
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CHAPTER LV.
THE SOCIALIST OBJECTIONS TO THE PRESENT ORDER OF
SOCIETY EXAMINED.
INCREASE OF POPULATION AND THE GROWING PRESSURE UPON THE MEANS OF
SUBSISTENCE.—EDUCATION AND MORAL IMPROVEMENT THE TRUE REMEDY FOR
EXISTING OR THREATENED EVILS.—ERRORS OF COMMUNISM AND SOCIALISM.—HOW
SOCIALISTIC LEADERS AND PHILOSOPHERS RECOGNIZE THE TRUTH.—GROWTH OF
POPULATION DOES NOT MEAN POVERTY.
Mr. Mill says: “It is impossible to deny that the considerations brought
to notice in the preceding chapter make out a frightful case either
against the existing order of society or against the position of man
himself in this world.” How much of the evils should be referred to the
one, and how much to the other, is the principal theoretic question
which has to be resolved. But the strongest case is susceptible of
exaggeration; and it will be evident to many readers, even from the
passages I have quoted, that such exaggeration is not wanting in the
representations of the ablest and most candid Socialists. Though much of
their allegations is unanswerable, not a little is the result of errors
in political economy; by which, let me say once for all, I do not mean
the rejection of any practical rules of policy which have been laid down
by political economists—I mean ignorance of economic facts, and of the
causes by which the economic phenomena of society as it is are actually
determined.
In the first place, it is unhappily true that the wages of ordinary
labor, in all the countries of Europe, are wretchedly insufficient to
supply the physical and moral necessities of the population in any
tolerable measure. But, when it is further alleged that even this
insufficient remuneration has a tendency to diminish; that there is, in
the words of M. Louis Blanc, _une basse continue des salaires_ (a
continual decline of wages); the assertion is in opposition to all
accurate information, and to many notorious facts. It has yet to be
proven that there is any country in the civilized world where the
ordinary wages of labor, estimated either in money or in articles of
consumption, are declining; while in many they are, on the whole, on the
increase—and an increase which is becoming, not slower, but more rapid.
There are, occasionally, branches of industry which are being gradually
superseded by something else, and in those, until production
accommodates itself to demand, wages are depressed; which is an evil,
but a temporary one, and would admit of great alleviation even in the
present system of social economy. A diminution thus produced of the
reward of labor in some particular employment is the effect and the
evidence of increased remuneration, or of a new source of remuneration,
in some other; the total and the average remuneration being
undiminished, or even increased. To make out an appearance of diminution
in the rate of wages in any leading branch of industry, it is always
found necessary to compare some month or year of special and temporary
depression at the present time, with the average rate, or even some
exceptionally high rate, at an earlier time. The vicissitudes are no
doubt a great evil, but they were as frequent and as severe in their
former periods of economical history as now. The greater scale of the
transactions, and the greater number of persons involved in each
fluctuation, may make the change appear greater, but though a large
population affords more sufferers, the evil does not weigh heavier on
each of them individually. There is much evidence of improvement, and
none that is at all trustworthy, of deterioration, in the mode of living
of the laboring population of the countries of Europe. When there is any
appearance to the contrary it is local or partial, and can always be
traced either to the pressure of some temporary calamity, or to some bad
law or unwise act of government which admits of being corrected, while
the permanent causes all operate in the direction of improvement.
M. Louis Blanc, therefore, while showing himself much more enlightened
than the old school of levellers and democrats—inasmuch as he recognizes
the connection between low wages and the over-rapid increase of
population—appears to have fallen into the same error which was at first
committed by Malthus and his followers, that of supposing that because
population has a greater power of increase than subsistence, its
pressure upon subsistence must be always growing more severe. The
difference is that the early Malthusians thought this an irrepressible
tendency, while M. Louis Blanc thinks that it can be repressed, but only
through a system of Communism. It is a great point gained for truth when
it is recognized that the tendency to over-population is a fact which
Communism, as well as the existing order of society, would have to deal
with. And it is encouraging that this necessity is admitted by the more
considerable chiefs of all existing schools of Socialism. Owen and
Fourier, as well as M. Louis Blanc, admitted it, and claimed for their
respective systems a pre-eminent power of dealing with this difficulty.
However this may be, experience shows that in the existing state of
society the pressure of population on subsistence, which is the
principal cause of low wages, though a great is not an increasing evil;
on the contrary, the progress of all that is called civilization has a
tendency to diminish it, partly by the more rapid increase of the means
of employing and maintaining labor, partly by the increased facilities
opened to labor for transporting itself to new countries and unoccupied
fields of employment, and partly by a general improvement in the
intelligence and prudence of the population. This progress, no doubt, is
slow; but it is much that such progress should take place at all, while
we are still only in the first stage of that public movement for the
education of the whole people which, when more advanced, must add
greatly to the force of the two causes of improvement specified above.
It is, of course, open to discussion what form of society has the
greatest power of dealing successfully with the pressure of population
on subsistence, and on this question there is much to be said for
Socialism; what was long thought to be its weakest point will, perhaps,
prove to be one of its strongest. But it has no just claim to be
considered as the sole means of preventing the general and growing
degradation of the mass of mankind through the peculiar tendency of
poverty to produce over-population. Society as at present constituted is
not descending into that abyss, but gradually, though slowly, rising out
of it, and this improvement is likely to be progressive if bad laws do
not interfere with it.
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CHAPTER LVI.
STOCK EXCHANGE CELEBRITIES.
HOW WALL STREET BANKERS’ NERVES ARE TRIED.—FINE HUMOR, JOCULAR
DISPOSITIONS, AND SCHOLARLY TASTE OF OPERATORS.—GEORGE GOULD AS A
FUTURE FINANCIAL POWER.—AMERICAN NOBILITY COMPARED WITH EUROPEAN
ARISTOCRACY.—HOW THE IRISH CAN ASSIST TO PURGE GREAT BRITAIN OF HER
BILIOUS INCUBUS OF NOBILITY.—THE NATURAL NOBILITY OF OUR OWN
COUNTRY, AND THEIR DESTINY.
Among the well-known members of the Stock Exchange not elsewhere
mentioned are James D. Smith, who is now in his second term as
President, and who is also President of the New York and Exchange clubs
and Commodore of the New York Yacht Club, a man of a genial nature and
everyone’s friend; Brayton Ives, twice President of the Stock Exchange,
the colonel of a cavalry regiment under General Sheridan in the civil