THE SKETCHER. WALL'S STREET LAST TRAGEDY.

Otago Witness, Issue 2809, 15 January 1908, Page 78

THE SKETCHER.

WALL'S STREET LAST TRAGEDY.

By T. P.

New York, like London, has its many quarters and its many lives. Unlike London, it has not almost illimitable space at its disposal. It cannot end indefinitely, eating up L-he country around, as our metropolis does. An island, on every side f*nfronted by vast sheets of "water, either of sea or of one of those gigantic rivers which in Americai are almost like the sea, it is a narrow strip of land, with its limited space growing hourly in value. The result is tha.t there is a concentration of population within tits borders which sometimes makes you think of it rather as one of those teeming cities of the East tlian as of a city built by European races. It is not necessary now to get all the way down to Wall street in order to do any kind of .business, and especially it is not necessary to do so in order to speculate in stocks and shares. In the Waldorf Astoria, for instance — that gigantic hotel which astounds every European who comes to New York — you find a Stock Exchange on a small scale. There is a board there on which you can find the last market quotations,' and there, is an obliging and quick broker ready to execute your cony mission®, and without ever leaving your hotel, or at a few yards from your own door "up town " you can in a day become a millionaire or a pauper.

— Frenzied Extravagance. —

But, after all, it is all associated with Wall street — that terrible - street which plays so vast, and often so- sinister, a part in the lives of New YorEers, and, indeed, Americans generally. The desire to gamble is pretty strong and pretty widespread in England, but it is as a slight chill is to a raging malarial fever compared with the love of gambling in New York. Sometimes I have thought, when I look back on the. articles I wrote in fhls very journal immediate^ after my return last year from America, as if — by some access of second sight — I had foreseen and prophesied what has recently taken place in New York. The dominating impression left upon my mind by this last visit to the American metropolis wa^ the inordinate price of • every thing, and the sense of almost frenzied extravagance that I felt in the atmosphere around me. There was no possibility — at least, 60 is seemed to me — of anybody managing to keep up with that feverish, rapid, intoxicating tide of life whicli runs with such fierce strength in New York, unless one has vast wealth. The dinner you took in a restaurant cost you double or treble what it costs in London. If you stood a drink to a few friends it amounted almost to the cost of a dinnet" in London, and the waiter turned up his nose when you offered two shillings instead of four for a tip. — The Heaping Up of Riches. —

In the magnificent dress of tb© women — in the dazzling splendours of the houses — in the magnificent carriages or motor cars — in everything around and about you in New York, you get firs sense ol vast expenditure, of correspondingly vast earnings — of being in the core of a great Imperial nation which gathers spoils from all parts and heaps up gigantic wealth at every hour. And this impression was immediately followed by the feeling that the struggle for wealth in such a city and in 6uch a nation must be almost like the strife between tigers in a pit, where either you were torn to death or rose to the surface on the dead bodies of those you had to kill that you might live. It is a necessary consequence of such conditions that the chance which the Stock Exchange always gives to get rich, rapidly, without any exertion, without any waiting, should exercise a fascination that is irresistible to anybody who has the money to speculate. And thus it is that Wall street plays a far more important part in the life of New York than does the Stock Exchange in the life of London. What sort of a, street is this which fills this momentous role?" In Western America they have what they call a canyon. A canyon is a great narrow fissure between towering mountain sides. Sometimes — especially in the State of Colorado — you pass between such mountain sides in* a canyon where you have almost the impression of living for the moment underground 1 , so deep is the shadow in which you pass owing to the narrowness of the canyon and the Height of the surrounding mountains. Now, Wall street is in the city wwhat a canyon is on a Western railway. Think of Wall street as something very narrow, somewhat gloomy except on brilliantly sunny days, and as having its aides rising to steep overhanging mountains in the shape of sky-scrapers. This will give you an approach at least to a true conception of what the famous street is like. Do not imagine it long, do not imagine it broad, do not imagine it spacious. It is none of these things. It is just a short, narrow' ravine with towering buildings, many of them of that white marble which is one of the glories and the wonders of American towns. The Stock Exchange is in one of those imposing buildings. Unlike our Stock Exchange in London, the public has a gallery from which it can look down upon the tiger pit underneath. It is a strange, a moving, a painful, and in some respects an almost disheartening sight. Amid these groups of men, aervous, hurried, shouting, so that there is even at a distance a Toar as of the rumblings of the earthquake or the crash of the sea, you see the struggle for wealth in its^most acute, fierce, and I had almost said disgusting and affrighting, form. It shows you how little we liave advanced after all in civilisation when this is the way in which men conduct their warfare foi food in the modern world. It looks so much like a return to the days when the savage, roaming the forest in a naked ««4 painted body, crushed with equal

gusto and equal lack of remorse the animal that supplied his food or the other man who fought with him for the carcase. And everything is done to accentuate and heighten- the ferocity and the deadlines® of the struggle. I have often thought of the narrowness of the frontiers in the kingdom of speculation in London. Within the space of 14 or of 19 days you may be made rich or poor, for, as my readers know, that is the length of time which elapses between one account day and another. Fourteen days — nineteen days — it is n. short interval after all in a lifetime in which to put your fortune to the test. But yet, if you consider, a thousand things are possible in a fortnight or in 19 days. A great war may be declared, a satisfactory peace made, there may be a panic or a boom ; in oJher words, you may have a good run for your money. And even if you are hard hit, there are opportunities within 14 or 19 days of making such arrangements as will help you over your trouble. Constantly stockbrokers and jobbers come to each other's "rescue on the Stock Exchange, and help each other to get over all the troubles that may arise in the dread interval between the two account days.

— A Modern Inferno. —

; But to all the other factors that create the \ pandemonium of Wall street, there is added the almost infernal rule which compels every dealer and every speculator , to meet liis account every day. The New York gamble? 16 given from 3 o'clock oi one day till 10 o'clock of the uext day to settle his account". An interval not of 14 days nor of 19 days, but of fe^er hours, is the small gap of time which divides the gambler in Wall street from fortune or from' ruin. Just dwell for a moment on that one factor ; try to understand it, to realise it, and then you will begin to know what Wall street is and means. It is no wonder that in moments of excitement and panic Wall street should suddenly assume the aspect of pandemonium or of a lunatic asylum, &nA that men, playing a great game in which their lives, the lives of theit children and wives, are the terrible states, should hustle and struggle and jostle and roar until the i shouts sound like screams, and the thunder of- the dreadful tiger pit should me to some such panoramas of pain as Dante saw when he descended to the Inferno.

— The Embodiment of High Finance. —

This is the world in which the 1 man known to all New York as Charley Barney moved and had his being. He was a complete type of the dominating financier —that modem, terrible, and omnipotent potentate -who has arisen in America, and who can rule men's lives and fortunes with a power more resistless and more desolating than Genghis Khan with his hordes, thaai AtttEa with his horsemen. Barney embodied, fcyfpifted, and > epitomised High Finance as it exists in America. He was in everything. He was a director on the boards of 20 to 30 companies. That, of course, might m«an little enough in London. There are men who are on just as many boards with us, and yet have little or no induence over the general financial life of London. But not so with Charley Barney and New York. There was scarcely one of the companies which did not control some, large space of New York life. Some of them, for instance, were companies that dealt in town lots, end in Ne«r York 4qot& lots have risen in price in the space of a night with such gigantic proportions, as well as i-apidity, as to remind, one rather of the miracles -of the "Arabian Nights." It ie one of the result® of this tremendous aggregation of power in the hands of a single man life& Ofoarles Barney that the small speculator—the little nwn — is squeezed o"ut till there is *m> life left in him. One of these big financiers, who died a few years ago, got -possession of a vast quantity of the shares of one of the railways of New York. la a short time he had run the •shares up to 200 dollars apiece. When he diedl it was found' that he had scarcely a single share in the enterprise left. He had unloaded on the public ; there was a big fall, of course, in the price of the shares, and in that fall thousands were ruined. But ho had got out, and aaen like him looked down on the little men who were left to struggle and to die in the waters while they were smiling, prosperous and respected, on dry land. This it High Finance.

—Where Money Flows Like Water. —

Mem like Bariney, who get rich beyond the dreams of avarice in a few months, or even weeks — who command^ in thia way the markets, and at their own sweet will can create a great boom or a hideous panic, are the leaders of that wild race of extravagance which impressed me painfully in. Newi York. Our most spendthrift multi-millionaires would appear little better than chicken-hearted niggards in comparison with these New York plutocrats. Mr Barney had 1 a palatial "mansion, and a palatial mansion in New York literally means a palace. There whs not a, bedroom in his house probably which had not attached to it a bettutif ul bathroom in white marble or other opulent material. His wife this very ytear -gave va entertainment where mediaeval costumes were worn which probably cost thousands of pounds. Mr Barney kept \ big steam yacht — of all amusements the most luxurious and the most expensive. He was a member of 15 clubs. And he and his wife occupied the most conspicuous box in the Metropolitan Q,peru House— which is called the Diamond Crescent—the portion of the Opera House which is occupied by the wives of the multi-millionaires, and where is xlways a blaze of precious stones. A man of such a type as Mr Barney cannot stop. He '« bound by the very necessities, of his position to speculate, and to speculate gigantically. So long as markets are booming this is all right ; but let credit be impaired, the collapse comes. Wkn ifred Heinze, wbose story I told

a few weeks ago, came down, he dragged" down with him the whole vast fabric of frenzied speculation. Mr Barney found that lie no longer could summon millions from the vasty deep. The banks, the financiers, every institution found itself compelled to call in their loans and to squeeze thsir customers. And thus it happened that one day the affrighting and astounding spectacle was seen of Mr Barney, ohe omnipotent multi-millionaire — the president #of the Knickerbocker Trust, which heJ.fi up to then about the same position as the Bank of England with v« — scurrying excited, anxious, haggard, wild-eyed through Wall street and all the other passages and alleys and courts of that little but mighty city of finance <n the down-town end of New York, and" soon the awful whisper went round that the multi-millionaire and the greatest bank of New York were in trouble. It was like the announcement of on earthquake or the Day of Judgment to the men Tvho knew tih© inside life of Wa-ll street. It was the first cry of alarm, that, like some greait shriek of more than* human or earthly pain, heralded and preceded that gigantic and desolating financial cyclone which has rent and shivered the whole of the United States as mercilessly and as thoroughly as tlie lightning that' ■splits the oak to its xoots. There is one" figure that looms out of the universal devastation as calm and potent and! immutable. It is that of Pierpont Morgan, N who was one of the many big powers to whom ,Mr Barney appealed, and appealed' in vain, for assistance to meet the difficulties that all in a night came down upon him with a rapidity -as crushing as their magnitude.

—The Last Resort. —

There are men who could get over even so tragic -a downfall as this ; but they ere men who hare younger yeans, and steadier nerve, and less sensitive temperaments than this unfortunate man. (Prom ail I can gather from the papers, M* Barney* was a proud' man, who, having lield hia head Mgh, could not face the prospect of having to take a lower place. " There are plenty of people like that, and to them p in given conditions death always appearsthe welcome and- the preferable method of escape. It should be added that there wai^one other factor in his life which' added a deeper" gloom to" his existence. He was at- war >vith has wife, wn^f some' paper — with the disregard 1 for private life* which characterises some few New York' papers— had openly told the story, a^nd, added to the sottxtw and the" shame' of the unhappy difference. This may have helped to unnerve the unfortunate man, and to make him the less prepared for the terrible hour which might have been met, and even conquered, if he had been his once strong self. In addition, there were — a& there usually is in hours oi . misfortune — those treacherous desertions, those transformations and distortions of featoves an^ characters loved for years, and misunderstood for years, which is, of all misfortune's long train of tortures, the most! desolating to a man of such a temperament as Mr Barney. Thus it came to pass that when his hour of trial came he was crumpled up. All spirit, «11 energy, a'l hope left the man. He saw his misfortunes not as they really were, but 'a the giigantao distortion of the -sleepless night or the nightmare, and he relrasedt<> &c comforted or to struggle or .to see things in their naked actuality.," Brooding, 6ilent, broken-hearted— twisted and crushed out of all his old formr'a* a hones which the earthquake has riven and distorted—he called out to dfeatb. And one morning he was left <ak>ne, and he shot himself, but with such unsteady hand that- the ball foikd to kill at, once, and lie lingered in agony for several hours.

— Ironic Elements. —

Two little facts give to the tragedy that ironic element which is co seldom absent from these stories. The report of the- shots did not attract any attention. It was thought to be but dine slatnjning of a door, and the writhing wretch was.leFt alone for some time. Within a few feet were, ha knew, wife and children, but he coxild no more reach them than if he and they dwelt in separate 6t»rs divided by infinite, space. It makes one shudder as though one was reading of a being buried alwe and crying ip vain to the ones that loved nim to dig him out of the coffin prison. The second ironic fact is thalt while Mr Barney lay dying, a committee of investigation was examining his accounts. They found that he still had half a million sterling left out of his fortune. Half « millionsterling, and he killed himself a penniless pauper ! The committee was stall meeting when the news came of Mr Barney's death. It was a ghastly and strangely" inappropriate message to come into this gathering of auditors and accountants aad casWers, But Death is often an Intruder. — T. P.'g Weekly.