Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 15.pdf/625

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page needs to be proofread.
The Green Bag.


574

property by Allison to the corporation. An derson paid off the mortgage on the t'niber land, and a few years later, when prosperity had returned and a railroad had been built into Tillamook County, he sold the property for fifty thousand dollars. CONCLUSION. Anderson shrewdly invested his available assets while prices were low and in scarcely an instance did his judgment prove at fault. On the return of prosperity he sold at one hundred dollars a share stocks which he had picked up for ten and twenty dollars. He now had money enough to supply all his wants and to give him the influence which money can buy. In his singular career his iron nerve had never for an instant failed him and his knowl edge of corporation law had never been at fault. He contributed liberally to the public and benevolent enterprises of the community and was regarded as a generous man. He spent his money freely at the clubs and enter tained frequently and well; he was therefore regarded as a jolly good fellow. Without ever asking anything in return he contrib uted liberally each year to the campaign fund of his political party; he was, therefore, re garded as a party man from principle. His culture, leisure, money and ability enabled him to shine in society; he was regarded as the greatest matrimonial catch in St. Louis. He was loyal to his friends and had helped many of them, financially and otherwise: his acquaintance was large, and he made it a point to remember faces and names. If he

had run for office now, he would have polled his full party vote and more. He had neglected the admonitions of his conscience so often, that it no longer both ered him much. He had half persuaded him self that a large share of the wealth of the nation had been amassed by methods quite as reprehensible as his, and that methods sanctioned by success, approved by custom and not contravening the law of the land were not far out of the way. And yet he knew full well that while he had grown in wealth, in power and in popu larity, he had declined in manhood. The dis honest dollar in the pocket brought a lower ing of ideals, a sacrifice of the clearness of moral vision. He no longer drew the clear distinction as of old between tneum and titum. As he looked back on the old days, when he had righteously battled for the purification of the bar, as he compared his old self with his present self, he sometimes asked, "Has it paid?" He took up a course of historical reading; he read Motley's Dutch Republic and United Netherlands and was powerfully impressed with the heroism of the sturdy Dutchmen who won their land from the sea and pre served it from Spanish oppression in the most unequal struggle of the ages; as Hamilton Anderson turned the search-lights inward, he was conscious that his was no longer the fibre from which heroes were made, and there came to his mind the familiar couplet from Goldsmith: "111 fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, When wealth accumulates and men decay."