"But great as Mr. Gould was as a financier and railway manager, he would, if bred to the bar, have made a greater lawyer. That is a fact. I have seen him greatly provoked, but never saw him lose his temper or utter a threat. Nevertheless, he had a good memory, both for benefits received and injuries done. He was probably, in the language of Dr. Johnson, 'a good hater without loquacity and pomposity.'"
A popular error about Jay Gould is the notion that he was invincible. In 1866 a promissory note for $500 with his name went a-begging round Wall street at a heavy discount, yet he left a fortune estimated at $100,000,000. If Gould had died poor, what would have been the general verdict on his career? And yet, only eight years ago he was on the verge of failure. This was after the panic of May, 1884, one of the few times that he was tempted into the stock market as a speculator in order to hold up the price of stocks with which he was burdened.
The late Charles F. Woerishoffer, Henry N. Smith, and other operators were united in a combined effort to bear the securities which Gould was carrying. He had supported them for a time by obtaining sterling bills, giving his securites as collateral and then converting the bills into cash. But sterling loans, like all others, come to maturity; the bears were as unscrupulous as himself, bold and skillful and persistent. Gould's Western Union fell to 49 and his Missouri Pacific to 62. He was beaten.
