tune which he and his agents
pretended he was 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 organisation, 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 of 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 millionaire! 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 oceans 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 its attendant outriders; 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 hi