The Stourbridge Observer, Cradley Heath, Halesowen & District Chronicle.
Stourbridge, West Midlands, England, 1872-01-13 00:00:00

"AND WHAT IS THE END OF IT
ALL ?"

The Erie Scandal has come to a most impressive end.
James Fisk, Junior, has been—in the brief worels of
the telegram—" fatally shot at the Grand Central Hotel
in New York by a person against whom he had brought
an action for libel " (remarks the Daily Tehgraph). A
fate ten ibly sudden and disastrous has thus over-
taken one whose character, exploits, and unenviable
notoriety have during the last few years been
the uppermost theme in the thoughts of many
thousands on both sides of the Atlantic. Most
people will see in the circumstances of dramatic sur-
prise am! lawless violence that attend the event the
fitting climax of a notorious career. Fisk was a young
man, but he had compressed the energies of a lung
ordinary life-time into three years of feverish gain.
lung. aided by unscrupulous trickery and by
calculated, deliberate corruption. . .. . With
the revenues (I a saluable railroad entirely in
his own hands, issuing fresh stock whenever he chose,
and pocketing the proceeds of the sales effected for him
by his creatures, he lived a life of unbridled and law-
less indulgence, which excites! the envy of every
profligate in one of the most profligate cities of
the world, and caused the honest and the pure
to bow their heads in shame. The freaks of showy
and reckless debauchery which startled even the
fastest spendthrifts in .New York have been often
quoted with astonishment and disgust, but never,
we believe, exaggerated. On the contrary, the life
of the man was probably lower and more immoral
than the darkest outlines that rumour ever painted.
But what the whole world knew was quite enough
in all conscience. His rapid advance to fortune,
and the use that he made of wealth, partly
earned but mostly embezzled, were topics of
glorification with Fisk himself, and with the crea-
tures who ministered to his pleasures. The per-
sonal splendour of this noureau riche distanced
description and set rivalry at defiance. His business
and his domestic arrangements, his palatial apart-
ments, his Apician banquets, his Opera House, his in-
comparable suppers, his gorgeous equipages, the
"permanent harem" with which his opera troupe sup-
plied him—all these accessories figured among the
stock stories of New York ; described sometimes with
ill-suppressed envy, sometimes with unconcealed loath-
ing, but never claimd in question by the hero of the
scandalous tales.

And what is the end of it all A short life and a
merry one—a life of feverish speculation, leading to the
unlawful possession of wealth which only ministered
to sensual excesses—has been ended by the quick, com-
plete agency of an assassin's bullet. Fisk, as we
have said, used the weapons of law whenever it
suited his purpose ; and indeed, Sc, long as lie could,
he preferred to varnish over his brigandage with
a thin coating of legal sanction. He was, therefore,
never out of the Courts, either as plaintiff or as de-
fendant; and there is probably is touch of direct retri-
bution in Cie murderous deed. At the same time, it is
also probable that the outrage at the Grand Hotel only
antedated by a few months at furthest the fall of Fisk.
His career, illustrated by the infamies of his private
life, had become a scandal which honest and upright
Americans could no longer tolerate.

The Daily News also makes the following reflections
upon the career of Fisk
The murder of Mr. James Fisk, In New York, is the not
Inappropriate end of a career as strange as fiction itself has
ventured to draw. No society in the world, except just that
which at present exists in the United States, could have
afforded a favouring scope for such a man. The absence of
all the barriers of caste, the liberty allowed to every career,
the almost limitless opportunities of money-making,
and the lack of those distinctions of rank and dignity which
would give even to selfish ambition ironic other object than
mere money-making— these are the conditions which specially
favoured the course of such a being as Fisk. Bold and Un-
scrupulous as a brigand, he had the cleverness and cunning
of a police detective, and the boisterous animal spirits of a
schoolboy. Ile was like no other famous adventurer in
finance the world has known, lie was not like Law
or De Monty, because he was utterly unlettered and vulgar
he was not like Hudson or Mires, for he took a buoyant and
exuberant delight ill the wild excitement of his gam-
bling adventures, and the enterprises which would have
made another man thoughtful aild grave only rendered
him more roystering and jovial. his energy and activity
were positively impressible. These qualities could only
find relief In inciaaant excitement and adventure of
every kind. Coarse in mannei s and in tastes, full of strange
oaths, reckless of speech, he hod a rough, broad sort of
humour which often was remarkably shrewd, pithy, and
expressive. A man of undoubted ability, possessed of some-
thing bearing a grotesque resemblance to genius, endowed
certainly with a cool and calculating brain, lie might easily
have been taken liv is Bil anger for a foolish buffoon or over-
grown schoolboy. While lie was gambling for millions, staking
fortune after fortune on thiser that cast of the financial dice, lie
delighted In little vanities of which a waiting-maid would
have been ashamed, and humours which sometimes brought
with them suggestions of a lunatic asylum. He made him-
self one of the sights of New York as he drove his open
carriage with sir or perhaps eight white horses slowly through
..the streets. He organized a regiment, and was proud to wear
the uniform, and to be called Colonel • indeed, he turned
out with his regiment during the riot of last summer,
and got wounded in the leg. He " ran " a Me of magni-
ficent steamers from New York to Boston, and it used to
gratify him to bedizen himself In the costume of a
naval Officer, and the more people laughed, the better
he seemed to be pleased. He adorned with his
own portrait or bust the palace-cars of the famous Erie
hue of railway. He became the proprietor of a huge
theatre in an out-of-the-way part of the city, and
he loved to play at Manager, and to sit nightly in the
manager's box, in full evening costume, with diamonds
glittering on his fat fingers and on the vast breastplate of
snowy shirt which he displayed. His habits were—there Is
little scandal in saying it—openly and daringly profligate.
He lost his life consequence of a shameless quarrel and
a law intrigue. He was probably under forty years of age
when the bullet of his former associate put a premature
stop to his career. He may he said to have lived and died
like the Cavalier soldier In Scott's romance, "hoping nothing,
believing nothing, arid fearing nothing."

A taw years ago James Flak was a travelling pedlar, as his

-sw
father had been before him. He was born at Brattleborough,
in Vermont, where the beautiful Connecticut river divides
the broken and picturesque landscapes of the Green Moun-
tain State froni the yet liner scenery of New Hampshire.
He hawked buttons and staylaces through the towns and vil-
lages of New England, and was known furs voluble tongue,
pleasant, boyish, and rather handsome face, and a remarkable
giftof making bargains. He pushed himself in the world, and
became a commercial traveller. At last, following his star he
came to New York. He conic there at a time when the two
great powers, the two grand sources of influence and ileitis
of adventure—the railways and the gold market—were be-
ginning to tempt unscrupulous ambition. The rail-
way corporations in the United States are the most
powerful influence existing there ; no powerful that
people talk of the necessity of some radical change in
the conditions of their organisation, if the railway boards
are not absolutely to govern the country. The fluctuations
In the value of gold caused by the vicissitudes of the war,
the impossibility of knowing with any certainty what might
be the effect of this or that impending battle, had converted
the Gold Room of the Stock Exchange into a vast gambling hall,
where men coolly played for sums tenfold as great as those
which the most ree kiess gam esters of Baden- Baden will venture
to stake. Into both these fields of enterprise the intrepid Fisk
plunged forthwith. . . Fisk began to wallow in money.
It does not appear that he cared much about the
money when be had it. Many generous things are
said to have boon done by hlm. Rut he loved the excitement
of getting the money, of winning it from other people, of
spending it, and having his prodigal expenditure talked about.
He had a faith worthy of Walpole himself in the power
of bribery. lie seems to have honestly believed; there was
nothing any man or woman would not sell for a sufficient
price. When he and his colleagues planned the famous
Gold Conspiracy—one of the moat daring and stupendous
swindling camp ima on rtcord—Fisk appears to have taken
it for granted that he could buy the connivance of President
Grant, and not to have believed, until the President's decisive
action crushed his enterprise, that there could be official
integrity above the temptation of money. The history
of that enterprise is too well known to need recapitu-
lation. Fisk bore the collapse, exposure, and danger
with the same jovial effrontery which always cha-
racterised hini. Ile afterwards gave evidence before a Com-
mittee of Congress, and explained his own share in the con-
spiracy with a jaunty aud good-humoured cynicism worthy
of Robert Maca ire. "I knew," he coolly said, deseribing his
own sensations when the tidings came that Government had
resolved to interfere, "that the time had come for every
man to drag his corpse out the best way he could." Failure
seemed to Fisk almost as capital a piece of pleasantry as
success.

The Gold Conspiracy over, Fisk schemed and swaggered,
gambled and spent, just the same as before, always
seeming to have limitless resources at his command.
The carriage ant the white horses were still as showy
as ever . the champagne flowed as freely ; the diamonds
glittered not less brightly on the shirt-frost of
the amateur Manager. A weekly contemporary, speaking
of risk's career at the time of the Gold Conspiracy,
asked whether there was anything that money could
not enable a man to command in New York. There was one
thing that nu money and no apparent success could do for
Mr. Fisk there—neither motley nur success could open for
him the doors of soy decent lionsc. It would have been as
easy to procure for Bill Sykes an invitation to a
small dinner party in Paik-laue, as to induce ally
espectable merchant, banker, or journalist of New
York to receive lir. Fisk under Lis roof. Fisk was
a social outlaw, and. probably rather liked it, preferring
his own congenial associates of both sexes to any manner of
companionship which might have made him feel less at his
ease. Of late his reign was obviously threatened with dis-
aster. Ilia position and hia chances were bound up with those
of Tammany, and in the fall of that noble institution he
must have seen foreshadowed his own doom. But he was
as young a man, so full of animal activity and mental
energy, and he lived In a comitry so inexhaustible In its
fields of enterprise, that even had every one of his existing
schemes collapsed beneath him, Fisk might have been ex-
pected to come up fresh and smiling on the crest of some new
enterprise. Ile narrowly escaped a violent death during the
fury of the Cold Conspiracy, and only death could quell his
restless and unscrupulous passion for excitement. Half his
life he gave to money-making, half to pleasure, each pastime
alike vulgar and lawless ; and the very manner of his end,
and the low intrigues which led to it, have robbed death it-
self of the dimiity of a tragedy. It may be hoped that each
succeeding day will tend to remove from American enter-
prise the peculiar condition which allowed ot such a career
as that now elpsed by the bullet of an assassin—the career
of a man who Inight have been a Catiline ifi Old It ,me, but
was Colonel James Fisk in New York.