The Way of All Flesh
should like to see professorships of speculation established at Oxford and Cambridge. When I reflect, however, that the only things worth doing which Oxford and Cambridge can do well are cooking, cricket, rowing and games, of which there is no professorship, I fear that the establishment of a professorial chair would end in teaching young men neither how to speculate, nor how not to speculate, but would simply turn them out as bad speculators.
I heard of one case in which a father actually carried my idea into practice. He wanted his son to learn how little confidence was to be placed in glowing prospectuses and flaming articles, and found him five hundred pounds which he was to invest according to his lights. The father expected he would lose the money; but it did not turn out so in practice, for the boy took so much pains and played so cautiously that the money kept growing and growing till the father took it away again, increment and all—as he was pleased to say, in self defence.
I had made my own mistakes with money about the year 1846, when everyone else was making them. For a few years I had been so scared and had suffered so severely, that when (owing to the good advice of the broker who had advised my father and grandfather before me) I came out in the end a winner and not a loser, I played no more pranks, but kept henceforward as nearly in the middle of the middle rut as I could. I tried in fact to keep my money rather than to make more of it. I had done with Ernest's money as with my own—that is to say I had let it alone after investing it in Midland ordinary stock according to Miss Pontifex's instructions. No amount of trouble would have been likely to have increased my godson's estate one half so much as it had increased without my taking any trouble at all.
Midland stock at the end of August 1850, when I sold out Miss Pontifex's debentures, stood at £32 per £100. I invested the whole of Ernest's £15,000 at this price, and did not change the investment till a few months before the time of which I have been writing lately—that is to say until September 1861. I then sold at £129 per share and invested in London and North-Western ordinary stock, which
359
