14

The War Between the States had brought great industrial expansion to the North, even during the years of the war. Far behind British industrialization, which was superb, complete, and universal, the Union, discreetly headed by the new buccaneers, had a vision of the United States becoming the industrial empire of the world. Unperturbed, during the war, at the prospect of defeat at the hands of the Southern Confederacy, they were equally unperturbed at the collapse of government credit, for it brought debasement of the currency and a consequent inflation. The prices of all goods leaped upward. Northern citizens, however, paid but vague attention to this, for they were engaged in the immense business of war, consuming and destroying, and over the North a bogus prosperity burgeoned which was enthusiastically proclaimed to be the beginning of “a new era of industrial expansion and limitless wealth and opportunity for all citizens.”

Bankers and investors were able to raise a million dollars a day to pursue the conflict against the South. Meat had poured from Chicago in unbelievable quantities for the military and the people; the production of iron became mountainous; railroads expanded enormously; oil wells spouted in various sections; machines were rapidly invented for farm use in order that farm workers could be drawn off into the Union army. The factories making war goods bulged incredibly. The protective tariffs against foreign goods had operated to the advantage of native manufacturers in the throes of a delirious war prosperity. America, whose industrial growth had been sluggish, now found herself hurling madly into the industrial revolution. All this was regarded joyously by a heedless citizenry who never even dimly perceived that a prosperity created by a war must end in chaos at the end of a war.

Only the farmers were adversely affected. Believing, like their city brethren, that the golden tide of industrial expansion would pour over them also, they had incontinently expanded, and ran into debt. The western farmers particularly suffered. The Hessian fly destroyed crops; the elevators offered but fifteen cents for corn; the farmers signed more notes at as much as fifteen or twenty per cent. Only the middleman of the cities prospered on the growing misery of the farmer, who had to pay excessive prices for necessary city-made goods during the war. The custom duties and the internal-revenue taxes were particularly oppressive to the farmer. While the buccaneers of the cities and other prosperous men engaging in the manufacture and sale of war goods to the government nimbly evaded taxes, the farmer could not escape the tax collector and his peering surveillance.

By 1871 the people of America became aware of a frightful breakdown in the morals of their government. Had the war prosperity continued, the citizens would not have cared that corruption extended from Washington into every city and hamlet. But the sudden decline of a war-fevered delirium in the cities, with desperate unemployment, gave the people leisure to observe what had happened and was still happening. There were countless instances of wholesale robbery, including the losses of the insurance companies. Business ethics were completely abandoned in the mad rush to acquire such properties as the railroads, oil wells, and mines, and speculation remained uncontrolled and unchecked. The wounded and exploited South continued to be victimized and made desperate by Northern robbers and swindlers, with the blessing of a supine and corrupt government whose members desired nothing but personal power and gain.

As the American people’s faith declined in their government, their faith declined in themselves and the whole govern mental and business structure. They did not hold themselves guilty of their misery and despair. They thronged the streets vainly looking for employment, while their families starved or became homeless. In the meantime, the banks uneasily remained on the alert, fearful of a run, which, however, was not to materialize for a few months.

The utter collapse of the American economy had been delayed for a short time after the War Between the States by the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War. English and American industrialists, already disturbed over a threatened economic debacle in 1869, felt reprieved. They competed furiously with each other for the markets supplying France and Germany with war materials, and bad feeling, already very intense between the British and American governments and people, grew to dangerous proportions. England believed the European continent to be her God-endowed source of industrial markets, but now, to her indignation, this new barbarian country, vastly growing and expanding in both cultivated territory and industry, was becoming a sinister threat to the British industrial empire. Britain had hoped that a divided America, still staggering bloodily after a terrible civil war, would be removed from competition in markets for a long time. But, on the contrary, the war had so expanded industry in the United States, and had revealed so many enormously rich natural resources, that for the first time in the nineteenth century Britain had occasion to pause and to fear.

Only a few men anywhere, among them Stephen deWitt, had begun to observe an ominous phenomenon in the world. In past centuries wars had occurred for territory, or by reason of private quarrels between royalty, or as a result of racial antagonisms. Never before had wars deliberately or inadvertently burst out for the control of industrial markets.

And now these few alarmed men began to suspect, without any other evidence but their intuition, that an industrial economy might have to be supported by future wars. As industry expanded, and more and more goods were available in a market bound to contract, or remain the same, or fail to keep up with production, wars would be necessary to produce national prosperity or to eliminate competitors. To these few men this was the utmost in human degradation and infamy.

A crisis had come upon the world, though few realized it. Stephen often thought to himself with consternation: No one has studied the possibility of creating new markets through aid to countries too poor to buy our immensely increasing goods. No one has lifted his voice to insist that progress does not necessarily mean steel mills and endless smoking factories where goods are produced which people cannot buy. There must be a healthy balance between agriculture and industry, or the warehouses of nations will be heaped high with unsold goods while the cities starve for want of food. The rise of great cities will see the decline of agricultural acreage, and while we in America still have more than a safe margin between agriculture and industry, there may very well come a time when that margin is fatally narrowed.

In that event, we shall be forced to engage in wars to consume our goods and to compete for world markets. There is another alternative, and that is less emphasis on the mere possession of goods and more emphasis on spiritual values and the land. Food had always been the answer to men’s problems, and it would remain the answer.

For the first time in the history of the world, men were confusing materialism with progress and civilization. Out of that confusion catastrophe and war would leap from a million open hearts in hundreds of Pittsburghs. The roar of the catastrophe was already gathering sound in every corner of the Western world.

The industrial revolution might very well produce not only a revolution in man’s physical existence but in his moral and spiritual life as well—to his desperate peril.

On November 11, 1871, Stephen deWitt received a letter from Mr. Guy Gunther, senior member of The Gunther Company of New York, financiers and brokers of railroad stocks and bonds. The firm consisted of four brothers, all astute, genial, and rapacious. Guy had been Aaron deWitt’s friend, and between them there had been a guarded respect for each other’s entrepreneur qualities. Friendship, however, had not stood in the way of one or two attempts on Guy’s part to secure the controlling stock of the Interstate Railroad Company on a certain occasion of crisis, some years ago, before the Fielding money had come to the rescue. Nor had Aaron held this against his friend. It was all business.

Rufus had understood this completely, and had never borne any resentment against the powerful New York financier. Only Stephen, the impractical and honorable, had been angered and disgusted. He had hardly acknowledged the presence of Mr. Gunther at his father’s funeral, to the intense if hidden amusement of Rufus and the other man. “Stephen is—incomprehensible,” Guy had murmured to Rufus on one occasion, keeping his face solemn. “He is an idiot,” Rufus had replied, equally as solemnly. Mr. Gunther had smiled, just a little, and had moved away, and Rufus had wondered, with discomfiture, if he had said something ridiculous.

The letter to Stephen was a masterpiece of discreet flattery, admiration, and kindness, and Stephen, to whom hypocrisy was an esoteric language, felt some of the hard affront in him soften. Mr. Gunther was to be in Philadelphia for a few days, “visiting some old friends.” He and Stephen and Rufus had not met for quite a few years, and Mr. Gunther “wondered” if the two brothers would be in “the city” during his, Gunther’s, visit. “It would be refreshing to see you both again, and talk about my dear friend Aaron,” he added.

Stephen read and reread the letter several times. It was after the sixth reading that he became uneasy. He asked his clerk to get him “Mr. Guy Gunther’s file.”

Rufus had read some of the “dossiers” on businessmen and even on casual acquaintances. Nothing was too small for Stephen to note, whether it was to the effect that a local banker had recently bought a new and more elaborate home, or that a lumberman had married off his daughter to a member of a Philadelphia Main Line clan, or a notation that a certain coalmine operator near Scranton was “drinking too much, according to reports.” He has the instincts of a small-town gossip, Rufus would think, enjoying himself.

The Gunther secret file was one of the thickest and heaviest, and Stephen devoted over two silent hours to the study of it.

A few weeks ago Mr. Gunther had “visited” in Chicago, where his wife had some distant American relatives. This interesting fact had been mentioned proudly in the Portersville evening paper, for had not Mr. Gunther been Mr. Aaron deWitt’s friend, and had he not attended Mr. deWitt’s funeral? It was over this last item that Stephen spent at least twenty brooding minutes. Then he asked his clerk to bring him the dossier of the Chicago Railroad System.

The Chicago Railroad System, though not as old and established as the Interstate Railroad Company, was considered as “sound” as such a railroad could be. “Railroading” was still a precarious business, dependent upon crops and conditions in the nation generally. But precarious as it was, a decline in railroad stocks could bring the threatened “panic” closer, could aggravate it enormously. Stephen knew the officers of the company, and admired them as men of integrity. The Interstate Railroad Company had considerable stock in the System. Stephen’s last notation was to the effect that the System, manned by ambitious men, was planning to build an independent line from the Pittsburgh terminal to Philadelphia, thus carrying all traffic direct from Chicago to Philadelphia and possibly New York. However, Stephen had jotted down with relief, “They are not in a financial condition to do this, thus competing with us, possibly to a disastrous extent. Must watch carefully. Gunther might finance them? In spite of a feud between the company and Gunther? Hardly think so; they despise him.” Another notation: “Who would finance them?”

Stephen read on. The System had “passed” its last dividend. Was this report of their “plans” merely an attempt to bolster faith in themselves in the eyes of the public? Of course, other railroads had “passed” not one but several dividends over the past three years, because of national conditions. The Interstate Railroad Company and the Chicago Railroad System had been almost alone in paying dividends recently.

Stephen read on, his thin brown brows knotted together. Was there a connection between Gunther’s visit to Chicago and the Chicago Railroad System, and another connection with his desire to see the sons of his “dear old friend,” Aaron deWitt? Stephen had had Chicago papers sent to him, and had studied them for any hints that Gunther had met the men from the System. There had been nothing at all. But Stephen continued to frown. Something was moving, somewhere. The Gunthers produced nothing except overextended markets for railroad stock, or panics. It was a horrible thing, to Stephen, that financial pirates were able to create panics at will, for their own profit. He believed there was something terribly wrong in the structure of an economy if the food and wages and shelter of a whole people were at the mercy of the Gunthers and their kind.

Stephen put aside the file and stared through the window at the ashy November sky. A few ruffled pigeons fluttered against it. The knifelike mountain lifted itself in a dark blur over the city. A few flakes of snow brushed the windows. Behind Stephen the fire blustered on the hearth. The afternoon began to darken rapidly.

Stephen’s first impulse was to call his brother into consultation, and to speculate with him on the whole matter. He kept nothing from Rufus now, as he had done before Aaron’s death. His hand kept creeping to his bell, which would summon his clerk, and inexplicably his hand kept withdrawing. Why should he not call Rufus? Why should he not tell Rufus that he, Stephen, must go at once to Chicago with a set plan which entailed a bold movement? He told himself that it was because matters were still too vague.

He began to go over in his mind all that he intended to do. A sense of increasing and powerful danger came to him. If it were not for Gunther, thought Stephen. Then he confessed to himself that Gunther was just the precipitating element, though an unknown one. Something, eventually, would have to be done about the Chicago Railroad System. He had known this, and had shrunk from it, hoping constantly that the inevitable might be delayed or eliminated. Now the time had come.

At length he did ring his bell. His clerk, a quiet young man of the utmost discretion, entered, and Stephen said in a low voice, “I am leaving the city for a few days. Please go down to the station and arrange passage for me to Chicago, in the name of—let me see—a Mr. Dawson. I don’t want to use our private car. For reasons known only to myself.”

“Yes, Mr. deWitt,” said the young man respectfully. “But when you are on the train, the crew will know you are there.”

Stephen smiled a little. “Yes, of course. But the train will be pulling out then, and news of where I am going won’t be back in the city for several days. After that, it won’t matter.” He paused. “Naturally no one—and I mean no one at all—must know where I am when I am absent You understand that, Gruger?”

“Yes, sir,” said Gruger gravely.

“The twelve-thirty-two, tonight, then. Hardly anyone will be about.” He drummed his fingers rigidly on the desk. “And now, will you ask Mr. Rufus to come in for a few moments, please?”

When Rufus entered, smiling, he was struck by his brother’s face and expression. Stephen was extremely pale; his eyes were fixed and still. He watched Rufus as the latter moved across the big warm room, and he thought: This is a stealthy and insulting thing I am doing, and I don’t know what impels me. He said, “Rufus, I am leaving tonight on the twelve-twenty for Scranton. I have an opportunity to buy up some more potential coal acreage.”

Rufus seated himself on the edge of his brother’s desk and he turned his head alertly. “Anything I should invest in?” he asked with interest.

Stephen was silent. He was himself concerned with negotiations for what seemed to be a very promising two hundred acres. He sighed. He must give Rufus this opportunity. It was only fair, he considered regretfully. In some way he must atone to his conscience for this mysterious deceit he was practicing on his brother. He said, “Yes, I think so. Of course, it won’t be developed for some years, but I can tell you that I’ve seen no better possibilities anywhere. Have I your permission to place an option on it in your name? You could give me a small check. …”

If “gray Stephen” thought the possibilities were excellent, then they must be so, thought Rufus with excitement. He expressed his gratitude, made out a check, and gave it to his brother. After he had left the office, Stephen called his clerk and dictated a letter to his attorney in Scranton, and enclosed Rufus’s check. He reflected that the attorney would be considerably surprised.

Rufus, back in his own office, did not go on with his work for some time. He remembered Stephen’s face. Something was going on, about which Stephen had not told him. But what? While Stephen was absent, he intended to inspect the files secretly.

Stephen was about to put Guy Gunther’s letter in the latter’s file, when he stopped, again assailed by that sense of danger. He finally folded the letter in his pocket. He called his clerk and dictated a letter to Mr. Gunther. He expressed his hope that Mr. Gunther would visit Portersville the next week end, after he, Stephen, returned from some pressing business in Fort Wayne. Mr. Gruger took the letter with no change of expression, and made no comment when Stephen asked him not to place the copy in Mr. Gunther’s file.

What they have done to me, thought Stephen with weariness. I am no man for chicanery and deceit, and it is thrust upon me.