Following Cowperwood's coup in securing cash by means of his seeming gift of three hundred thousand dollars for a telescope his enemies rested for a time, but only because of a lack of ideas wherewith to destroy him. Public sentiment--created by the newspapers--was still against him. Yet his franchises had still from eight to ten years to run, and meanwhile he might make himself unassailably powerful. For the present he was busy, surrounded by his engineers and managers and legal advisers, constructing his several elevated lines at a whirlwind rate. At the same time, through Videra, Kaffrath, and Addison, he was effecting a scheme of loaning money on call to the local Chicago banks--the very banks which were most opposed to him--so that in a crisis be could retaliate. By manipulating the vast quantity of stocks and bonds of which he was now the master he was making money hand over fist, his one rule being that six per cent. was enough to pay any holder who had merely purchased his stock as an outsider. It was most profitable to himself. When his stocks earned more than that he issued new ones, selling them on 'change and pocketing the difference. Out of the cash-drawers of his various companies he took immense sums, temporary loans, as it were, which later he had charged by his humble servitors to "construction," "equipment," or "operation."
He was like a canny wolf prowling in a forest of trees of his own creation.
The weak note in this whole project of elevated lines was that for some time it was destined to be unprofitable. Its very competition tended to weaken the value of his surface-line companies. His holdings in these as well as in elevated-road shares were immense.
If anything happened to cause them to fall in price immense numbers of these same stocks held by others would be thrown on the market, thus still further depreciating their value and compelling him to come into the market and buy. With the most painstaking care he began at once to pile up a reserve in government bonds for emergency purposes, which he decided should be not less than eight or nine million dollars, for he feared financial storms as well as financial reprisal, and where so much was at stake he did not propose to be caught napping.
At the time that Cowperwood first entered on elevated-road construction there was no evidence that any severe depression in the American money-market was imminent. But it was not long before a new difficulty began to appear. It was now the day of the trust in all its watery magnificence. Coal, iron, steel, oil, machinery, and a score of other commercial necessities had already been "trustified," and others, such as leather, shoes, cordage, and the like, were, almost hourly, being brought under the control of shrewd and ruthless men. Already in Chicago Schryhart, Hand, Arneel, Merrill, and a score of others were seeing their way to amazing profits by underwriting these ventures which required ready cash, and to which lesser magnates, content with a portion of the leavings of Dives's table, were glad to bring to their attention.
On the other hand, in the nation at large there was growing up a feeling that at the top there were a set of giants--Titans--who, without heart or soul, and without any understanding of or sympathy with the condition of the rank and file, were setting forth to enchain and enslave them. The vast mass, writhing in ignorance and poverty, finally turned with pathetic fury to the cure-all of a political leader in the West. This latter prophet, seeing gold becoming scarcer and scarcer and the cash and credits of the land falling into the hands of a few who were manipulating them for their own benefit, had decided that what was needed was a greater volume of currency, so that credits would be easier and money cheaper to come by in the matter of interest. Silver, of which there was a superabundance in the mines, was to be coined at the ratio of sixteen dollars of silver for every one of gold in circulation, and the parity of the two metals maintained by fiat of government. Never again should the few be able to make a weapon of the people's medium of exchange in order to bring about their undoing. There was to be ample money, far beyond the control of central banks and the men in power over them. It was a splendid dream worthy of a charitable heart, but because of it a disturbing war for political control of the government was shortly threatened and soon began. The money element, sensing the danger of change involved in the theories of the new political leader, began to fight him and the element in the Democratic party which he represented. The rank and file of both parties--the more or less hungry and thirsty who lie ever at the bottom on both sides--hailed him as a heaven-sent deliverer, a new Moses come to lead them out of the wilderness of poverty and distress. Woe to the political leader who preaches a new doctrine of deliverance, and who, out of tenderness of heart, offers a panacea for human ills. His truly shall be a crown of thorns.
Cowperwood, no less than other men of wealth, was opposed to what he deemed a crack-brained idea--that of maintaining a parity between gold and silver by law. Confiscation was his word for it--the confiscation of the wealth of the few for the benefit of the many.
Most of all was he opposed to it because he feared that this unrest, which was obviously growing, foreshadowed a class war in which investors would run to cover and money be locked in strong-boxes.
At once he began to shorten sail, to invest only in the soundest securities, and to convert all his weaker ones into cash.
