a buttonhole, now some
homely-speaking, shrewd Manchester man or some Scotchman eager to be
very clear and full.

Many came in couples or trios, often in tow of an explanatory solicitor.
Some were white and earnest, some flustered beyond measure at their
opportunity. Some of them begged and prayed to be taken up. My uncle
chose what he wanted and left the rest. He became very autocratic to
these applicants.

He felt he could make them, and they felt so too. He had but to say
"No!" and they faded out of existence.... He had become a sort of vortex
to which wealth flowed of its own accord. His possessions increased by
heaps; his shares, his leaseholds and mortgages and debentures.

Behind his first-line things he found it necessary at last, and
sanctioned by all the precincts, to set up three general trading
companies, the London and African Investment Company, the British
Traders' Loan Company, and Business Organisations Limited. This was in
the culminating time when I had least to do with affairs. I don't say
that with any desire to exculpate myself; I admit I was a director
of all three, and I will confess I was willfully incurious in that
capacity. Each of these companies ended its financial year solvent by
selling great holdings of shares to one or other of its sisters, and
paying a dividend out of the proceeds. I sat at the table and agreed.
That was our method of equilibrium at the iridescent climax of the
bubble.

You perceive now, however, the nature of the services for which this
fantastic community have him unmanageable wealth and power and real
respect. It was all a monstrous payment for courageous fiction, a
gratuity in return for the one reality of human life--illusion. We gave
them a feeling of hope and profit; we sent a tidal wave of water and
confidence into their stranded affairs. "We mint Faith, George," said my
uncle one day. "That's what we do. And by Jove we got to keep minting!
We been making human confidence ever since I drove the first cork of
Tono-Bungay."

"Coining" would have been a better word than minting! And yet, you
know, in a sense he was right. Civilisation is possible only through
confidence, so that we can bank our money and go unarmed about the
streets. The bank reserve or a policeman keeping order in a jostling
multitude of people, are only slightly less impudent bluffs than my
uncle's prospectuses. They couldn't for a moment "make good" if the
quarter of what they guarantee w