Page:The Wizard of Wall Street and his Wealth.djvu/113

 to dispose of his grain, and thus distance the three hundred sail which were hastening from the Danube to supply the English market. Gold, which was then heavy at 34, must be raised to 45.

"This clever idea, like all the other ideas of these gentlemen of Erie, seems to have had the single fault of requiring that some one somewhere should be swindled. The scheme was probably feasible; but sooner or later the reaction from such an artificial stimulant must have come, and whenever it came, some one must suffer. Nevertheless, Mr. Gould probably argued that so long as the farmer got his money, the Erie railway its freights, and he himself his small profits on the gold he bought, it was of little consequence who else might be injured; and indeed by the time the reaction came, and gold was ready to fall as he expected, Mr. Gould would probably have been ready to assist the process by speculative sales in order to enable the Western farmer to buy his spring goods cheap, as he had sold his autumn crops dear. He himself was equally ready to buy gold cheap and sell it dear on his private account, and as he proposed to bleed New York merchants for the benefit of the Western farmer, so he was willing to bleed Broad street for his own. The patriotic object was, however, the one which, for obvious reasons, Mr. Gould preferred to put forward most prominently and on the strength of which he hoped to rest his ambitious structure of intrigue."

Here is the story in brief: In March, 1869, the price of gold touched 130-1/4, which was the lowest