CHAPTER XIV.

BUSINESS.

The world is full of hopeful analogies, and handsome, dubious eggs, called possibilities.

-George Eliot.

BUSINESS lines and methods were not definitely determined. You might buy butter in a hardware store and drygoods at a liquor shop.

When Purser Forbes, of the steamer California, set out to purchase stores, he ransacked the place, picking up here and there what he could find, paying usually a dollar a pound for provisions; whereupon, becoming somewhat disheartened, he dropped into a restaurant, where, for a mutton chop, with poor bread, and still poorer coffee, and no butter, he was made to pay $3 50. Thereupon he thought it must be a great country, and so went on with his purchases.

Business was conducted on high-pressure principles. On Long Wharf there was a candy shop, the owner of which, after six months' business failed for $100,000. So quickly after a fire was building begun, that a water bucket would have to be used before the new timbers were laid.

Since the days of the Medici, who ranked high among the class of Lombard money-changers, the insignia of the three golden balls, derived from their armorial bearings, hang over the entrance to the pawnbroker's shop.

Frenchmen were the first to raise the occupation of boot-blacking into an art. The cleaning, and dampening, and plastering, and polishing were not done by

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women, as Dibdin, in his bibliographical tour, pictures it all in the streets of Caen. The few women there were in those days were used to blacken characters, not boots.

Much has been said by a class of persons whose enthusiasm overshadows their judgment, of the breadth and bigness of everything Californian, as if size were worth, and bigness, greatness. I take no special pride in the size of California's turnips, nor in the amount of gold riddled from the placers; I rejoice in California's beauties, for beauty is a thing to rejoice in; I bathe in her mellow, misty light, and drink her sparkling air, and rejoice in her capabilities, in the intelligence of her men and women—all that is good in them; her frailties have no attractions for me, her sins are hateful to me.

By midsummer, 1850, fifty ships were in port, upon whose cargoes the owners could not pay freight, and put up at auction the ship's consignees would buy them in.

Traffic as here displayed, so loud, so large, so erratic, was the very irony of speculation; and for long afterward California was famous for wild ventures, and high rates of labor and interest; yet it was clearly enough demonstrated that such speculation may prevail unattended by general financial convulsions in a community whose circulation is purely gold and silver. The recuperative powers of the people after a fire, flood, or drought, were marvellous. An isolated community with a metallic currency tends to the originating and building up of private banks, and though a speculative inflated condition of things appears at intervals in a rapid spasmodic progress, the failure of any local or incidental element of prosperity, though affecting in some degree every member of society, involved in ruin comparatively few. Nevertheless, the country, and all about it was old and extravagant, the people and their doings being no less whimsical and bizarre than the streets and the houses of the towns. Over the sudden and wonderful development of wealth,

commerce in the young metropolis had become crazed. A few actual transactions which I will cite will illustrate the diversities and vagaries of trade better than any general description.

There were not lacking men, and a large class of them at one time on California and Pine streets in San Francisco, who were free and frolicking enough. During the height of the mining stock excitement the board of brokers boiled like a geyser cauldron. It was a queer fraternity this brotherhood of air-beating knights; surging and screeching in their struggles for commissions, which, when obtained, were pitched hither and thither with the reckless indifference common to all kinds of gambling. The champagne seller, the cigar seller, the jeweller, and livery-stable keeper, all came in for their share. Merrily these brokers made their money, and merrily they spent it. Most innocent were they in their broad and philanthropic egotism. In their eyes the universe revolved round their boardroom; and the man who hammered the anvil and yelled in well-recognized tones of superior discordance, was the Great and only One, the First Cause and the Last. Their creed and catechism were easy affairs. "I believe in the only one and respectable board of brokers," the former began, referring to the "big board," as distinguished from two or three smaller boards, whose members in the eyes of the aristocratic band were vulgar parvenus, and bad society; and to every such question as "Who made you?" and "What is the chief end of man?" the answer was "A broker," "to be a broker," and the like. Their gehenna, which though large was not a very because of their uniform kind-heartedness, was filled with that vast horde of unfortunates whom fate had denied the blessedness of being brokers; these and bad members were refused admission to the heavenly hall.

hot one,

It was an exceedingly nerve-splitting occupation. The hours of business were few, but the clatter and

bang of hammered iron and human voices raised to a pitch of wild phrensy made the excitement fearfully wearing. The calling of a stock was sometimes as the flinging of a carcass to a mixed pack of ravenous hyenas, wolves, or other bloody or bellowing beasts. Then it behooved them to be quick; for often an instant of time was thousands of dollars for and against certain interested ones. The fashion of their buying and selling was no less senseless than it was infernal; but such a thing as questioning the manner of their calling never occurred to them. On the contrary it was their pride, their glory.

"One of the wealthiest stock-brokers of San Francisco to day," writes one, "formerly peddled potatoes along the same streets where he can now count his own buildings by the dozen. Another well-known resident, then a lawyer, now a judge in one of the courts, worked for several weeks as cook in a restaurant. Overhearing one of the patrons of the place complain that he could not find a lawyer to take up a case he had in court, he proffered his services, took off his apron and went before the court, won the case, charged a fee of $200, and was retained for two other cases before leaving the court-room. A certain college professor who went out from New York in '49, while working with a shovel on the public streets, overheard a Frenchman trying to arrange some business with a wealthy real-estate dealer. Neither of them could understand the other. The professor leaned upon his shovel and explained the meaning of the Frenchman. The matter was arranged in a moment. Drop that shovel and take off your overhalls. You're just the man I want,' bluffly said the real-estate man; and the next morning the professor commenced his career as business interpreter at twenty dollars a day."

Once in a while a staid old merchant from Boston or New York, braved the dangers and disgusts of the voyage, to look after some consignment or other busi

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ness, when he would be struck dumb with astonishment at the reckless whirlpool of business that surrounded him. He would see the shop-keeper sweep with his arm into a bag silver coin stacked upon his counter in payment for goods, as not worth the counting; he would see screaming auctioneers crying off goods to whittling, tobacco-juice-spirting bidders, who between jokes would buy whole cargoes, ship and all with terrible sang froid.

Thus the city-builders carried their work forward in wild irregular spasms but ever onward, unceasingly unhesitatingly. Often the arrival of a vessel, the completion of a wharf, or some such excuse would double the price of property within a few days.

Again and again one wonders how it is that so many of the shrewd and enterprising so soon became bankrupt. With such foresight, such practical common sense, uniting energy, and golden opportunities, all as it would seem wisely applied and earnestly embraced, it was pitiful to see them later, all there were left of them, or well-nigh all, wandering the streets that they had made, by houses they had built but now no longer theirs, moving silently and sadly over long-familiar ground, yet amidst scenes strange to them though fruits of their own untiring energywandering thus alone unrecognized skeletons of their former selves, while a new generation of millionaires flaunted its wealth in their faces. It was sad to see their wrecked hopes reconstructed by men of lesser worth, whose proud argosies bore heavily upon their slender craft; to see the commerce of a great metropolis, once their own, ruled by upstart speculators; to see their sand-hill home, with its acres of garden and barn-yard, become thick with magnificent mansions, whose lords were lucky gamblers, whose parvenu mistresses flouted and overshadowed their humble wives, while they themselves plodded quietly through their declining years, happy indeed if wife, and children, and food, and shelter, might be left to them.