eputation of being rich can be made a wealth-giving asset.

Even as I was reading these fables of my millions, there lay on the
desk before me a statement of the exact posture of my affairs--a
memorandum made by myself for my own eyes, and to be burned as soon as
I mastered it. On the face of the figures the balance against me was
appalling. My chief asset, indeed my only asset that measured up
toward my debts, was my Coal stocks, those bought and those contracted
for; and, while their par value far exceeded my liabilities, they had
to appear in my memorandum at their actual market value on that day. I
looked at the calendar--seventeen days until the reorganization scheme
would be announced, only seventeen days!

Less than three business weeks, and I should be out of the storm and
sailing safer and smoother seas than I had ever known. "To indulge
_hopes_ is bad," thought I, "but not to indulge _a_ hope, when one has
only it between him and the pit." And I proceeded to plan on the not
unwarranted assumption that my coal hope was a present reality.
Indeed, what alternative had I? To put it among the future's
uncertainties was to put myself among the utterly ruined. Using as
collateral the Coal stocks I had bought outright, I borrowed more
money, and with it went still deeper into the Coal venture.

The morality of these and many of my other doings in those days will
no doubt be severely condemned. By no one more severely than by
myself--now that the necessities which then compelled me have passed.
There is no subject on which men talk, and think, more humbug than on
that subject of morality. As a matter of fact, except in those
personal relations which are governed by the affections, what is
morality but the mandate of policy, and what is policy but the mandate
of necessity? My criticism of Roebuck and the other "high financiers"
is not upon their morality, but upon their policy, which is
shortsighted and stupid and base. The moral difference between me and
them is that, while I merely assert and maintain my right to live,
they deny the right of any but themselves to live. I say I criticise
them; but that does not mean that I sympathize with the public at
large in its complainings against them. The public, its stupidity and
cupidity, creates the conditions that breed and foster these men. A
rotten cheese reviling the maggots it has bred!

In those very hours when I was obeying the great imperative law of
self-preserva