l intervention of Murad Ault.

The conceit is flattering to human nature, but it is not borne out by
the performance of human nature in what is called the business world,
which is in such intimate alliance with the social world in such
great centres of conflict as London, New York, or Chicago. Mr. Ault is
everywhere an integral and necessary part of the prevailing system--that
is, the system by which the moral law is applied to business. The
system, perhaps, cannot be defended, but it cannot be explained without
Mr. Ault. We may argue that such a man is a disturber of trade, of
legitimate operations, of the fairest speculations, but when we see
how uniform he is as a phenomenon, we begin to be convinced that he is
somehow indispensable to the system itself. We cannot exactly understand
why a cyclone should pick up a peaceful village in Nebraska and deposit
it in Kansas, where there, is already enough of that sort, but we cannot
conceive of Wall Street continuing to be Wall Street unless it were now
and then visited by a powerful adjuster like Mr. Ault.

The advent, then, of Murad Ault in New York was not a novelty, but a
continuation of like phenomena in the Street, ever since the day when
ingenious men discovered that the ability to guess correctly which of
two sparrows, sold for a farthing, lighting on the spire of Trinity
Church, will fly first, is an element in a successful and distinguished
career. There was nothing peculiar in kind in his career, only in the
force exhibited which lifted him among the few whose destructive energy
the world condones and admires as Napoleonic. He may have been an
instrument of Providence. When we do not know exactly what to do with
an exceptional man who is disagreeable, we call him an Instrument of
Providence.

It is not, then, in anything exceptional that we are interested in
the operations of Murad Ault, but simply on account of his fortuitous
connection with a great fortune which had its origin in very much the
same cyclonic conditions that Mr. Ault reveled in. Those who know Wall
Street best, by reason of sad experience, say that the presiding deity
there is not the Chinese god, Luck, but the awful pagan deity, Nemesis.
Alas! how many innocent persons suffer in order to get justice done in
this world.

Those who have unimpaired memories may recollect the fortune amassed,
many years previous to this history, by one Rodney Henderson, gathered
and enlarged by means not indictab