Part 4 (1/2)
”I have that a.s.set,” said Simple, wondering how the aristocratic stranger had known him.
”I thought so. I knew at a glance. The fact is, I have just been speaking with Mr. C. Quick.” (This was a lie. Mr. C. Quick was one of the money magnates of Ashcroft, but had not hired out his name as an endors.e.m.e.nt)--”and he recommended you to me as one of the leading men of the town.” (This was a ruse, but it hit the bull's eye, and at the final count was one of the most telling shots.)
”I am pleased to meet you,” said Simple. ”And so am I,” said the shark.
”As a matter of fact, I only approach the better part of any community,”
he continued, pulling in on the line. ”To tell you the truth, Mr. C.
Quick said you were the only man in the town who had both foundation and substantial structure from your roots up,” and he laughed a broad sort of ”horse-laugh,” and slapped Simon on the shoulder.
”You see, with a proposition such as I have there is little use going to any but men of the greatest intelligence--those are the ones who understand the magnitude and the security and the ultimate paying certainties of the proposition which I have to offer you. You may consider yourself fortunate. It is not everyone who has the opportunity to get in on the ground floor, as it were, on a sure thing money-acc.u.mulating business. By the way, where is your office?”
Simon led the shark to his private dug-out on Brink Street, and showed him into one of his cane-bottomed thrones, while he himself sat on the yet unlaundered bed.
”Of course you understand all about joint stock companies, trust fund companies, munic.i.p.al bonds and debentures,” said the magnate, unrolling a bundle of unintelligible papyrus showing a.s.sets which did not exist, and spreading them out on the bed in front of his victim. The whole system had been premeditated and had been systematically worked out.
”Now,” said the shark, pointing at long and encouraging figures, ”those are a.s.sets and these are our liabilities; and besides we have a million dollar Government endors.e.m.e.nt. Now, the fact of the matter is this. You have a few dollars. I have a few dollars; Tom, d.i.c.k and Harry have a few dollars, and so have Jessie and Josie. Now, those little private funds which we all cherish and fondle, and hug to our bosoms, and jingle in our pockets, are of no use to us. They are dead. Of course they are earning three per cent, at the B.N.A. or the Northern Crown--what bank do you deposit with?--of course, it does not matter; there is no compet.i.tion among them; they pay you three per cent. and charge you ten per cent. Now, we are very much different. We give you all your money will make--if it is ten, twenty, thirty, fifty, or one hundred per cent.
See?
”Now, the fact of the matter is this: as I said before, those small individual fortunes are of no use to us individually; they have no earning power; they will not buy anything. But, put them all together--ah! the result is magical. You see, it is the aggregate that counts. Now with this theory in view, our company gets to work and canva.s.ses the country and it gathers together thousands of little, useless, insignificant, unproductive funds like yours and mine and joins them together into one vast, giant aggregate which we call a trust fund.
I see it is appealing to you. It could not be otherwise. Now, with this aggregate, you, and I, and everyone can own vast estates, buy forty-year debentures, lend money on approved security, buy real estate, the unearned increment of which will net in some cases two or three hundred per cent. interest, besides an increased valuation on the original sum invested.”
Perhaps every living man in the Dominion of Canada and the United States who betrays the least pretensions to having any money in his possession has heard a harangue of this kind many times in his life, and it is just as certain that the first time he heard it he was stung. Now, Simon was no exception to the rule, which proves that we are not all swordfish.
He felt himself being hypnotized, magnetized, charmed. He pictured himself as personal owner of lots, houses, acres--a joint owner of vast tracts of land along the G.T.P. or C.N.R.; and the shark showed him a facsimile of the certificates that would be issued to him when his shares were paid up in full. They were very neat and legal-like, and a man should be proud to own one of them.
”You see,” said the magnate, as he realized that he had the victim falling into his trap, ”we do not require to sell any more shares; we are doing well enough now, and some say we should leave well enough alone. But, a corporation of the nature of ours cannot rest on its oars; we must reach out for greater and better things, and to accomplish this we must have more capital. The fact is, a proposition has just been put to us, the nature of which I am not just now at liberty to divulge, but it is a sure winner. But it takes capital, as I said before, and we are compelled to sell some more stock. And, after all, it will be you and I who will benefit, and a hundred or more favored ones who have small savings which are netting them nothing at present, and the princ.i.p.al of which is rusting in the bank at three per cent.
”Now, to come down to business. Will you join us? Now, I am not going to press you. There are hundreds too willing; but remember, you will regret it if you lose this chance of a lifetime. Opportunity is knocking at your door; seize it by the fore-lock.
”The proposition I have to put before you is this: We are selling shares at one hundred dollars each, but if you have not the cash now, we will allow you six, twelve and eighteen months on the balance with a payment of five hundred dollars down if you buy twenty shares. The reason we are able to make such liberal offers is that we receive the same terms in buying up debentures.”
Simon was completely victimized. His tormentor might just as well have addressed him in Latin, for he knew so little about debentures, joint stock funds and the intricacies of high finance that he could not follow the promoter and was completely dazzled with the obscurity and eloquence of the language. And then the magnate spoke so rapidly that only lightning could keep up with him. The result was that Simon fell into the trap and was pinched. He not only gave away all his rainy day money, but he burdened himself with a debt, which, to a working man, was a mountain, and more than he could carry. He sold his house to meet the next two payments, and just as the third payment came due the company went into liquidation, and it consumed all their available a.s.sets to discover that there was nothing left for the shareholders. And Simple Simon began life over again.
Of the High Cla.s.s Eskimo
Away up in the great northland, even further north than the northern boundary of British Columbia, there lives a race of people who form, and have formed, no part of the great human civilization of the world which has been, and is going on in the more moderately climatic regions of the earth. For centuries they have lived apart, and have taken no notice of the big world which has been, and is living itself to death far from them down in the indolent south, where the sun could s.h.i.+ne every day in the year--where it did s.h.i.+ne every day that it was not cloudy, and where there was no long, dreary, dark midnight of at least four months'
duration; where the sun did not dip beneath the horizon at about the beginning of October, and disappear, not to be seen again until the end of March; where, in some parts, there was no snow, while in others only for a few weeks during the year. No snow! no ice! Can you imagine such a condition? And up there it is almost the Eskimo's only commodity. He eats it, drinks it, lives in it, sleeps on it, and his castle is built of it. And he endures it year after year, from his babyhood to his gray days, and there appears no hope for him. Bare ground is a curiosity to the Eskimo; and there are no spring freshets. Their bridges across their streams are formed of ice; the very salt sea is covered with it; and they venture out on those great floors of ice in search of the polar bear and the right whale which form almost their only food, and supply them with their only source of clothing, heat and light. In the midst of his narrow and cramped circ.u.mstances the Eskimo can laugh at times as heartily as any other human, and he has grown extremely low in stature to accommodate himself to the small opening which gives access to his igloo (house). The average man or woman does not exceed much over four feet. No other explanation seems to have been offered by science for the extreme dwarfishness in stature of this curious race of people.
Like the polar bear--almost their only a.s.sociate in those northern and frozen wilds--the idea never occurred to this people to migrate south where the earth is bare and warm, and is clothed in a green mantle; where the sun s.h.i.+nes every day; where the land is flowing with milk and honey; where peaches and water melons grow, and where it is not necessary to go through a hole in the ice to take a bath. No, this strange people, whose food is ice, whose bed is ice, whose home is ice, and whose grave is ice, are part and parcel of the snowy north; and they live on, apparently happy and contented with their hard life and uncongenial environment. Where the white man begins to be uncomfortable, the Eskimo begins to be at home. Where the white man leaves off the Eskimo begins, and his haunts penetrate away into the far north--into the land of perpetual ice and snow. Where we go only to explore he builds his permanent abode.
But this is not a history of the geographical distribution of men; it is to be the story of an Eskimo who went astray according to the moral ideals of his immediate tribesmen.
Once upon a time there lived in this northland of which we have been speaking a young native who had mysteriously arrived at the conclusion that the life of an Eskimo was a very narrow and fruitless existence indeed, and that the conditions under which they lived were totally inadequate to supply the demands of a twentieth century human being. In the midst of the other members of the family he a.s.sumed an att.i.tude of weariness and contempt for his a.s.sociates and environs. ”One may as well a.s.sociate with a polar bear,” he soliloquized. ”Man was made to accomplish things; the Eskimo is no further advanced in the scale of living, organic beings, to all intent and purpose, than the polar bear, or the walrus. He is born, lives, eats, sleeps, hunts, kills, dies, and is buried in the cold frozen earth, if he does not fall through a hole in the ice into the bottomless sea. To the south of us is a great healthy world where men live; where they have discovered all that the world has to give, and where they enjoy those things to the utmost; where they read and write and take records of their doings. Me for the south!” he shouted, and he made up his mind to migrate at the first opportunity and be in the swim with men. ”I must learn to read and write and think, even if I have to forget my own language,” he declared.
Now, it came to pa.s.s that as he was soliloquizing as above one morning, a girl appeared before him. She was so m.u.f.fled up in furs that only an Eskimo could distinguish whether the bundle was male or female. She sat down beside him and placed her short, stubby, m.u.f.fled arm as far around his neck as it would go, and in this att.i.tude she coaxed, and begged, and prayed, and argued with him, thinking that she might resurrect him to himself again. But when she found that his mania was for the south, she wept as only woman can weep the whole world over, even in the far north where the tears are in danger of freezing to her cheeks. But he, in his brutish, advanced-thought sort of way, pushed her from him.
”If you love me you will help me to go,” he said. ”If you love me you will stay,” she responded.
He rose and moved towards his igloo; she followed. He crawled like a bear through the thirty feet or more of narrow tunnel which led into the hut proper. She did likewise. In the igloo he threw himself down on the ice floor among the squalor and quant.i.ties of bear meat in various stages of decomposition. The smell from the whale-oil lamp almost choked him. The girl sat down and continued to cling to him.