LXIX.
BORROWING AND BORROWERS.
HOW THE BUSINESS IS PROSECUTED IN NEW YORK.—THE NUMBER OF BORROWERS.—THEIR DIVISIONS AND SUBDIVISIONS.—HOW THEY OPERATE.—THE STORIES THEY TELL.—THEIR ENERGY.—ABILITY TO READ CHARACTER.—SUFFERINGS OF THEIR VICTIMS.—FRAUDS UPON HORACE GREELEY.—DEVICES TO AVOID THESE SWINDLERS.—ANNUAL AMOUNT OF THEIR SWINDLES.—HOW A MAN CUTS HIS EYE TEETH.
Money is the motive power of the world. In executive capacity, it is an angel or devil. By it civilization must be measured, and all accomplishment wrought. A material blessing, it is the parent, too, of such an amount of spiritual comfort as may not be reckoned. Money will buy everything but health and affection; and, through its aid, the one is protected and the other provoked. No marvel that men worship money; it is the strongest of secular deities, the firmest of supporters, and the staunchest of friends. Nobody can live without it; it is life itself. Every one must and will have it in certain quantity, either by fair means or foul. Every community is composed of borrowers and lenders, and the former are always in stupendous majority. They who have most lend least; and, consequently, borrowers are brought to depend on the class widely removed from prosperity.
The number of men who subsist upon others by persistent fleecing can scarcely be estimated. They abound in this country, especially in New York, which may well be called the haven of the hard-up, and the blissful seat of the professional borrower. All roads lead to New York; all swindlers and adventurers journey thither in expectation of finding victims. Their anticipations are generally realized, andthey bless the stars which have guided them to monetary Manhattan. They come by every boat and train, from every state and nation, with devices, plans, and pretexts for genteelly defrauding that colossal goose known as the Public.
Fortunes are so much more easily and quickly made here than in any other city, that the borrower, whatever his calling or his clime, is tempted to visit us because confident of his reward. Europeans often wonder at the carelessness of Americans in respect to money, and are astounded when told that, in this Western land, the chief requirements for procuring loans without security are falsehood and effrontery. They cannot understand how it is possible for hundreds and thousands of men to live by politely robbing others, and yet keep up an assumption of honesty and respectability. Aware that such things could not be in the old world capitals, they are surprised at the opposite order of affairs over here.
THE METROPOLIS AS A FIELD FOR SWINDLERS.
It would be extremely interesting to know the amount that this community is swindled out of annually, not only by its own citizens and people, but by foreigners of every grade. I venture to affirm, that there are almost always here from twenty to twenty-five thousand persons whose principal business it is to filch from the purse of whomsoever they can. Borrowing is their exclusive profession. They have reduced it to a science, and arranged it as an art. They have a certain genius for imposition, a dramatic power of misrepresentation, a fecundity of invention which would have inured to their great advantage in some honest calling. But of honesty they will have none; preferring to wheedle, falsify, and plunder by the niceties of manipulation and the subtleties of deception. These professional borrowers are of divers degrees and countless types, though their end is continuously and persistently the same.
The normal mind would suppose that borrowing is the hardest way to get money; that earnest and honest work of any kind would be much the easier of the two. But the mind of the professional borrower is abnormal. Having no clear conception of truth, justice, or advantage, it sees life atan extremely obtuse angle. It may have been healthful at first, but it becomes diseased by continued violation of integrity, and finally ceases to have cognizance of its own operations.
Money is often called, and generally seems to be, a vulgar commodity, which generous souls ought to be above considering. The mere possession of money may not be, and indeed it very rarely is, either refining or ennobling; but to be without it, begets unhappiness, opens the door to temptation, provokes a tendency to disesteem, if not to degradation. Nothing is so demoralizing as to be under material obligations that cannot be discharged; and when these obligations are voluntarily and continually assumed, he who assumes them grows to be, ere long, a sycophant and a slave.
BEWARE OF DEBTS.
“Beware of debts!” is an excellent motto for secular guidance, and its conscientious follower will, in the long run, thank his stars for its adoption. To owe is to be owned, to surrender individuality, to lose independence, to forfeit self-respect. The debtor soon parts with his sensibility, and waxes callous. His course winds downward; at every turn he is forced to do greater violence to his natural self and the cause of truth. Eventually, he becomes a worse offender than those the laws punish; for he is an enemy to society whom society has no power to confine.
THE CLASSES OF BORROWERS.
The metropolis is infested with so many and such different borrowers, and they are so much a part of the community, that they may be divided and subdivided into classes.
The first class is composed of those who, being in business, draw largely on the future at a venture, but with the expectation of paying in due season. They are usually hopeful, even sanguine, though less prudent and conscientious than they should be, and more considerate of themselves than of others. These men turn their confidence and audacity to profit, provided fortune favors them; but if she be adverse, they go down, and drag their lenders with them. They rise again, however, in new fashions for borrowing, and once more challenge circumstances to do their behest. If theywin at last, they boast of their energy, perseverance, and courage, and despise men who have been more conscientious and less lucky.
The second class have legitimate callings, but substitute credit for capital. They borrow largely without concerning themselves in regard to liquidation. They are not positively, though they may be considered negatively, dishonest. They will pay if they can conveniently; but if they cannot, they refuse to fret, resigning their financial burdens to those compelled to bear them. They have the support of an easy selfishness, and when their creditors complain, they invite them to be patient, and wait for the day of judgment.
The third class shift from one occupation to another, and in every shifting are liable to deterioration. Half the time they are out of business, but they are always going into something new that promises admirably. They dwell in to-morrow, and defer the fulfilment of all their engagements to that uncertain fragment of time. They borrow right and left, careless of whom, never reckoning the amount they have taken or the covenant they have made. They will pay if they are dunned; but if not, they will scatter their obligations with their breath. After a certain range of experience in effecting private loans, they learn that many persons would rather suffer loss than ask for a return of money, and they take advantage of this sensibility. They fortify their want of principle by affirming that a debt is not due until demanded, and they always pretend to forget what it would be unpleasant to remember. They are poor in performance. They invariably want extensions, and regard to-day as if it were non-existent. Catch them with a full purse, and represent your right to a part of its contents, and you may count upon payment long deferred.
The fourth class are constitutionally dishonorable—the impersonation of selfishness. They have no intention of paying, even at the time of borrowing, and never will pay so long as they can avoid it. They talk a good deal of their integrity, for the express purpose of imposing upon theirhearers. They consider every man a potential creditor, and try to influence him to that end. They are good for what they pay cash for. Their word ranks with their bond, and both are worthless. They can be depended upon to meet their obligations only when compulsion is employed.
The fifth class are still worse; for they not only regard borrowing as a virtue, but they deem payment a vice. To defraud anybody seems to give them a positive pleasure, and they never felicitate themselves so much as after a successful swindle. They are earnestly opposed to discharging any and every obligation, however sacred the circumstances under which it is contracted. They are among the very few of their kind who would rather throw away money than pay a debt with it; and a creditor whom they have been obliged to satisfy, they reckon ever after as an enemy. By some perversion of understanding and derangement of morals, they have come to believe that the world’s goods belong to the most ingenious swindlers, and that they are entitled to such distinction. This class seldom have any position, commercial or otherwise, but prey upon the public without mercy.
THE MOST PROFESSIONAL OF BORROWERS.
ENERGY OF THE CLASS.
The sixth class, so far as known, have never done anything but borrow. They are the most professional of professionals. Their only idea of property is to get whatever they can without an equivalent. Work is hateful to them, and fraud delightful. They struggle hard for the reward of dishonesty, and receive it with a feeling akin to enthusiasm. They have never had the slightest credit; and how they contrive to dupe their fellows, year after year, is one of the mysteries of humanity. Physiognomy and manners proclaim against them; and yet they accomplish such results through dishonesty as upright men would vainly strive for by honorable means. Continual practice renders them perfect in the art of cozening. They are able to espy a loan in a face as a banker is to detect alloy in coin. They appear to have an intuitive knowledge of the contents of an unseen pocket-book, and of its owner’s special weakness, which they proceed at once to play upon; they can get money out of ahunks, and have been known to raise the wind in the dead calm of a millionaire.
These principal classes include subdivisions too numerous and diverse to mention. Borrowers change their grade as they advance in meanness and recklessness. They may begin in the first rank and fall to the lowest. They will do this year what they would not have done last. They are always liable to sink, even below the level they occupy. They require a broad field for operations, because the proper victims cannot be gathered twice by the same hand. They droop their crest as they accumulate infamy, and exercise more and more hypocrisy and deeper and bolder falsehood as their career continues.
Borrowers roam the island of Manhattan from morning to midnight, invading every place and penetrating every corner. They can no more be shut out than the Atlantic Ocean; they are all-pervading, persistent, and resistless. They will climb to the apex of Grace Church, or walk to High Bridge in a driving storm, for the sake of a trivial loan, when they could not be hired to do honest work for ten dollars an hour. They never know dejection; if they did, they would be philanthropic enough to make a case for the coroner. They rob the credulous and cajole the weak with a zest and cheerfulness which can only spring from a serene consciousness of doing evil. While the good suffer and the deserving starve, they enjoy themselves and grow round with plenty.
Professional borrowers have a knowledge of human nature equal to Shakspeare or Cervantes; and in physiognomy they laugh Lavater to scorn. They often ask loans without getting accommodation; but this does not prove their insight at fault,—only their love for experiment. The demands they make upon the unwilling are tentative efforts to be treasured up as warning in the future. They would never go to the wrong man were not the right one absent. They cannot always have things as they want, and so they take them as they must. The merest novice makes no approaches to the Astors, or Stewarts, or Vanderbilts; their reputationhas gone before them, and he can discover at a glance that not a single dollar can be torn from their financial souls. Such an absolute incapacity for procuring money gleams from every lineament of the rich, that the rudest savage would recognize it on instinct.
If borrowers preyed upon the prosperous, they would do little harm; but, unfortunately, they find their victims among those who have not locked up their hearts and thrown away the key. The man who lends is primarily a good fellow; and that he should be driven into scepticism and cynicism by deliberate swindles, is deplorable indeed. Such shattering of faith is a sin against the race; and if a professional borrower did not aspire to total depravity, he would hesitate before committing it. But he stops at nothing, except it be the vision of a debt discharged, or the ghost of an unredeemed due-bill.
THE FEAR THEY INSPIRE.
Hundreds of our citizens, strange as it may appear, are in perpetual dread of borrowers. They are aware that their countenances and their hearts are against them, and that, resolve as they will, they are in danger of being wheedled. They are angry with themselves whenever they succumb to the blandishments they have suffered so much by; and still, when assailed by a direct petition for a loan, they yield without protest.
Plausible swindlers seem to keep in memory every over-amiable man who will open his purse for the telling of a piteous tale or specious story. They are ever on the trail of such a member of the tender-hearted tribe, and they inevitably run him down. Go where he may, they invariably find him out, and, with wheedling tongue, lick up his substance.
HORACE GREELEY AS A VICTIM.
The kind and gentle Horace Greeley was, until the last day of his life, the victim of impecunious cheats. He was opposed, on principle, to giving them a penny; and yet, in practice, he was a perpetual purveyor to their imaginary needs. For many years, I doubt if any energetic applicant for a loan ever left the presence of the great journalist without carrying his point. During the last twenty-five years ofhis life, Mr. Greeley must have lent to entirely irresponsible persons, without the slightest expectation of getting anything back, not far from fifty thousand dollars. Every week he would berate himself for his encouragement of such “confounded loafers,” as he styled them, and express his determination to reform his loose and lavish habit. But with the new week would be resumed the open-handed generosity, from the impossibility of saying “no” even to the most transparent impostor.
While entering the Tribune office, the editor would often notice a borrower lying in wait, and tell him beforehand there was no use of asking for money; that he could not get another penny under any circumstances. The cozener, however, knowing his man, would follow him into the sanctum, and in less than a minute Mr. Greeley would be seen opening his pocket-book, and be heard to say, “Now, take that, and don’t come here any more; for I’m going to turn over a new leaf.”
Of course the new leaf was never turned over, unless in a backward direction. The journalist’s reputation as a succorer of suckers was so firmly established that he drew them from every quarter, and could not shake them off.
Hundreds of other New Yorkers have acquired much the same kind of fame, and are exposed to the same sieges, with similar results. Fearing borrowers as Captain Cuttle feared his landlady, they seek their places of business furtively, and go home by back streets. Not infrequently they lock themselves in private rooms and hide in out-of-the-way corners, to escape itinerant chevaliers of industry. While honorable gentlemen are thus skulking to avoid borrowers, unscrupulous debtors walk composedly through the crowd, and stare their creditors out of countenance—thus showing the outward advantage that dishonesty possesses over uprightness and fair dealing.
Some persons have been victimized so often, that they have hung up placards like these in their offices:—
PRECAUTIONS OF THE PRUDENT.
“No money lent here in sums less than ten thousand dollars.”
“All applicants for loans are expected to furnish mortgages on real estate in the city.”
“Gentlemen desirous of borrowing are referred to the Rothschilds, in London, Paris, and Frankfort.”
“First-class collaterals required on all loans.”
“Rates of lending to-day, five per cent. a minute, and nothing received as security except double eagles.”
“Persons who are hard up are politely, but firmly, requested to go to the devil.”
The effect of these announcements is reputed to be excellent. In numerous instances they prevent professionals from revealing their chronic wants; in others, they abash fellows who had made up their minds to arrange for a loan; and in others again, they cripple the hopes formed of a successful swindle.
I have been told, by a person who tried the experiment, that these manifestoes have saved them thousands of dollars a year, and an infinite amount of annoyance besides. Such placards certainly have a fine extinguishing effect upon the flaming ardor of the social highwaymen so superabundant in Gotham.
The length of time that a borrower (outside of business) has been plying his vocation may be determined by the amount he asks for. When he is rather new to the trade, he wishes usually to be accommodated with a loan of five hundred dollars, and, if that sum be inconvenient, he thinks he can get along with something less. He has been known to accept thirty or forty cents on the dollar of his original proposition, and generally it is not safe to offer him any sort of compromise.
After a year or two of genteel swindling, the borrower fixes his demand at from one hundred to fifty dollars, but canbe induced to take twenty-five dollars as a sort of instalment on the obligation, which he fancies the community has, in some mysterious manner, incurred.
Ten-dollar swindlers have, for the most part, seen much dishonorable service, and are among the most numerous of their nefarious guild. They are to be found everywhere,—in the street, at the hotels, at the theatres, at the races, even at private parties sometimes,—where they make the stereotyped excuse that they have left their porte-monnaie in another coat, and that they would be profoundly obliged for a trivial loan until the day following.
PETTY IMPOSTORS.
The petty impostors, who solicit loans from five dollars to fifty cents, have usually met with so many rebuffs that they make their approaches with a diffidence that usually undoes them. They mention five dollars with an infirmity of voice, evincing that they have no expectation of obtaining it, and drop down to three, two, or one with a precipitancy revealing their familiarity with disappointment. As a last resort, they inquire dolefully for postal currency representing half a dollar; and it is seldom they fail to get it, through sheer commiseration, from the person besought.
One of the most transparent and impudent orders of swindlers are those who tell you they are in a certain strait, and could be easily helped if they would apply to their father, brother, or some other near relative. But they are too proud, they take pains to inform you, to demean themselves in that fashion, and therefore they have recourse to a stranger on whom they have not the slightest claim. This mode of borrowing, an insult to the lowest intelligence, deserves to be answered with the boot; and yet, as it involves a certain sort of flattery, it frequently meets with a practical response.
It is estimated that, independent of all regular or mercantile transactions, the denizens of New York lose from five to six million dollars annually by swindlers claiming to be philanthropists, reformers, scholars, business men, and gentlemen in temporary distress. These miscellaneous borrowers have pretexts of every kind, all of them appealing to the best part of our common nature, if they were only true.
The sole difference between professional borrowers and beggars is, that the former always promise to pay, and the latter never promise, though one can be as much depended upon for settlement as the other.
CONSTANT CALAMITIES.
Such recurring calamities as visit these unblushing negotiators of loans might have been gathered from the multitudinous woes of the Greek tragedies or the grand operas. The borrowers are very seldom unprovided with a dead mother, or an unburied wife, or starving children, or a dishonest partner, or a stolen pocket-book, or a deferred remittance, or an absolutely necessary journey, or a remarkable mishap of some sort. They infest the principal hotels at the busy hours of the day, and employ their best energies in introducing themselves to the pockets of the boarders. Nearly every public house appears to have its special haunters, and one ingenious story will serve their purpose for a month or more. Borrowing has long been systematized here, and every season is marked by new inventions and pathetic fictions to delude the generous and unwary.
The audacity of the professional borrower is grand and exalted. He will stop your carriage in the park, and invite you to a pecuniary desperation; will make known his financial embarrassment as you are walking out of church with the present or future Mrs. —— on your arm; seek a private interview, with a monetary purpose, before you are up in the morning.
If you were to be hanged,—of which there is no danger in New York, whatever crime you may commit,—he would steal up behind the sheriff, as the latter was drawing the black cap over your eyes, and ask you if you could not spare ten dollars, now that you were going to a country where national bank-notes are not current.
Most New Yorkers understand so thoroughly the trick of courteous cozening, that, whenever any man they do not know intimately seems anxious to see them, they are convinced that he is in quest of a loan, and in nineteen cases out of twenty their convictions are just. Neither friendship, norlove, nor detectives can trace a fellow to his lair, or scent out his sanctuary, like a borrower. He will pursue his game round the world, and shame a sleuth-hound from the start.
AT THE END.
“Lost in the great city” is often a sad truth; but it may be converted into a fiction if a man in need of money have his attention called to the pocket-book of the person supposed to be lost. You cannot so bury yourself in this Babylon of a new world that the borrower will not bring you to light. And, if you have had experience, when a stranger flatters you, you will understand, from the degree of his compliment, the exact amount of the loan he expects to obtain.