But in the year 'forty-nine, he is
really in possession of the fortune which he and his agents
pretended to be worth ten years before--he is worth a million
pounds. By what means has he come by them? By railroad contracts,
for which he takes care to be paid in hard cash before he attempts
to perform them, and to carry out which he makes use of the sweat
and blood of wretches who, since their organization, have
introduced crimes and language into England to which it was
previously almost a stranger--by purchasing, with paper, shares by
hundreds in the schemes to execute which he contracts, and which
are his own devising; which shares he sells as soon as they are at
a high premium, to which they are speedily forced by means of
paragraphs, inserted by himself and agents, in newspapers devoted
to his interest, utterly reckless of the terrible depreciation to
which they are almost instantly subjected. But he is worth a
million pounds, there can be no doubt of the fact--he has not made
people's fortunes, at least those whose fortunes it was said he
would make; he has made them away; but his own he has made,
emphatically made it; he is worth a million pounds. Hurrah for the
millionnaire! The clown who views the pandemonium of red brick
which he has built on the estate which he has purchased in the
neighbourhood of the place of his grand debut, in which every
species of architecture, Greek, Indian, and Chinese, is employed in
caricature--who hears of the grand entertainment he gives at
Christmas in the principal dining-room, the hundred wax-candles,
the waggon-load of plate, and the ocean of wine which form parts of
it, and above all the two ostrich poults, one at the head, and the
other at the foot of the table, exclaims, "Well! if he a'n't bang
up, I don't know who be; why he beats my lord hollow!" The
mechanic of the borough town, who sees him dashing through the
streets in an open landau, drawn by four milk-white horses, amidst
his attendant out-riders; his wife, a monster of a woman, by his
side, stout as the wife of Tamerlane, who weighed twenty stone, and
bedizened out like her whose person shone with the jewels of
plundered Persia, stares with silent wonder, and at last exclaims
"That's the man for my vote!" You tell the clown that the man of
the mansion has contributed enormously to corrupt the rural
innocence of England; you point to an incipient branch railroad,
from around which the accents of Gomorrah are sounding, and beg him
to listen for a moment, and then close his ears.
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