The Deluge

Excerpt

I. MR. BLACKLOCK

When Napoleon was about to crown himself—so I have somewhere read—they submitted to him the royal genealogy they had faked up for him. He crumpled the parchment and flung it in the face of the chief herald, or whoever it was. "My line," said he, "dates from Montenotte." And so I say, my line dates from the campaign that completed and established my fame—from "Wild Week."

I shall not pause to recite the details of the obscurity from which I emerged. It would be an interesting, a romantic story; but it is a familiar story, also, in this land which Lincoln so finely and so fully described when he said: "The republic is opportunity."

One fact only: I did not take the name Blacklock.

I was born Blacklock, and christened Matthew; and my hair's being very black and growing so that a lock of it often falls down the middle of my forehead is a coincidence. The malicious and insinuating story that I used to go under another name arose, no doubt, from my having been a bootblack in my early days, and having let my customers shorten my name into Matt Black. But, as soon as I graduated from manual labor, I resumed my rightful name and have borne it—I think I may say without vanity—in honor to honor.

Some one has written: "It was a great day for fools when modesty was made a virtue." I heartily subscribe to that. Life means action; action means self-assertion; self-assertion rouses all the small, colorless people to the only sort of action of which they are capable—to sneering at the doer as egotistical, vain, conceited, bumptious and the like. So be it! I have an individuality, aggressive, restless and, like all such individualities, necessarily in the lime-light; I have from the beginning lost no opportunity to impress that individuality upon my time. Let those who have nothing to advertise, and those less courageous and less successful than I at advertisement, jeer and spit. I ignore them. I make no apologies for egotism. I think, when my readers have finished, they will demand none. They will see that I had work to do, and that I did it in the only way an intelligent man ever tries to do his work—his own way, the way natural to him!

Wild Week! Its cyclones, rising fury on fury to that historic climax of chaos, sing their mad song in my ears again as I write. But I shall by no means confine my narrative to business and finance. Take a cross-section of life anywhere, and you have a tangled interweaving of the action and reaction of men upon men, of women upon women, of men and women upon one another. And this shall be a cross-section out of the very heart of our life to-day, with its big and bold energies and passions—the swiftest and intensest life ever lived by the human race.

To begin:

Imagine yourself back two years and a half before Wild Week, back at the time when the kings of finance had just completed their apparently final conquest of the industries of the country, when they were seating themselves upon thrones encircled by vast armies of capital and brains, when all the governments of the nation—national, state and city—were prostrate under their iron heels....