order to clear the air. There are people also who
hold that the moral atmosphere of the world does not require the
occasional 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 t