ier, a Pacific Railroad
atrocity, a Manhattan Railroad brigandage, would make Trafalgar Square
or the Place de la Concorde howl with savage tumult.

But let us return to our would-be Wall Street magnate. Suppose he has
not the "grit" or the "go" (or whatever it would be termed in that
classic purlieu so noted for elegance of every-day rhetoric) either to
crown himself with the tarnished crown of a monetary "king" or even to
hold a gilt-edged but scandal-reeking portfolio at the footstool of
some such reigning tyrant. In this case he may join the great
rank-and-file of those whose pockets have become irremediably voided
and who seldom refer to Wall Street unless with muttered curses while
dragging out maimed careers in various far less feverish pursuits; or
he may, on the other hand, drift into that humble crowd of petty
brokers ("curb-stone" or domiciled) whose incomes vary from fifteen
hundred to as many thousands a year, and who pass hours each day in
envy, whether secret or open, of the dignitaries towering above them.
As one of these inferior persons his existence will continue, no
doubt, until he changes it for the tomb: and meanwhile what sort of an
existence has it been? All the finer human aims have appealed to him
as pearls appeal to swine. He has, perhaps, possessed faculties which
might have allowed him to shine ably and yet honorably in the state or
national congress, whose votes his friends and rivals, to ensure the
passage of their unscrupulous railroad-bills, have bought so often and
with such bloodless depravity. But these faculties have been miserably
misused. He may have loved some woman, and married her, and begotten
children by her; domestic affection may have warmed his being, just as
it does that of many a day-laborer. But in the arid air of Wall Street
all his intellectual and ethical possibilities will have wilted and
died. Lust for greater riches and a mordant, ever-smouldering
disappointment at not having attained them, will replace the healthier
impulses of adolescence. Books will have no savor for him; men of high
attainments, unless their coffers brim with lucre, affect him no more
than the company of the most unlettered oaf. He becomes, in other
words, the typical Wall Street man, and he becomes this with a
stolid indifference to all known motors of mental betterment.

It is not in any sense an attractive type. The Wall Street men are
lilies that toil and spin ("tiger" lilies, one might te