Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1907-12-22

Often he thought of what he had said
to Jack Vincent about Sir John and finan-
cial operations. You see, sir. gentle
man like your father soon gets adrift in
ness training straight UP froms the bot
TOM Speaking thus k ndly and conse-
quentialIy. he had felt SO sure of himself.
so strong in his knowledge of all the con-
ditions of his enterprise. And yet-aS he
thought now with bitter self-contempt-
if he had been some fortieth baronet,
some pampered duke fresh from Eten and
Oxford, with no other learning than lit
tie Latin and Greek, he could not have
muddled things more completely. All his
lfes work had gone to water; all his
painfully acquired experience had been
futile; boastfully, bumptiously. contempu-
bly,. he had Numbered headlong to ruin.
He had succeeded in small things: he
must therefore, succeed in big. Their WAS
the ruinous fallacy in all his laborious
reasoning. 1t was as if a man should say
after jumping over some bitches: See,
how simple! With run of eighteen feet
can Jump nine feet clear. Therefore, IL
take a proportionately longer run. l
can jump over the widest river. But
there is a fatal error in arguing thus
from little to large. Hill Rise had been
a fatally larger leap than anything he had
ever attempted before.
He could understand now. In the past.
when successfully developing one of his
many-cornered little fields he had given
for an acre and, half. He was then the
big capitalist-with loads of money Tor the
small task, obtaining big trade discounts,
setting his men upon the work when they
might otherwise have been IDLE, taking
them off when he wanted them for some
remunerative contract-he had been mas
ter and lord. of money, time, everything:
controlling the enterprise. not being
driven by it. Now. with his vast effort
all the cond lions had been reversed.
tlntic n SalhV-a raven
croaking in his path when he was still
high in baseess hope. Il had my money
out of bricks and mortar once, but was
fool enough to put it back again. Ana
again "A big task we've got. A mighty
big task" All the elemental truth was
summed UP in old Selbys words. Easy If
you are working well within the scope or
your own means, but cruel hard II you re
using borrowed capital. And to enforce
the bitter lesson. here were the London
and Suburban Company triumphing at
Hill House because they had unlimited
funds behind them. With quarter as
much land and a hundred times as much
money, those dreaded neighbors had
gloriously succeeded, while Crunden was
most dismally failing.
From the very first he had failed:
everything had gone wrong; If you con-
sidered the estate as a whole or divided
the work into separate jobs and con-
sidered each part in detail, failure
plainly disclosed itself During the last
months Jack Vincent and he had been
toiling as accountants to set out the
the figures, however you tested them. told
the same story. Thus, the thirty-six- foot
roads which should have cost thirty
shillings per foot run had in fact cost
two pounds per foot when finished: the
first cottages had cost ESQ instead OF
ESQ apiece; the second lot of cottages.
taken over from the man of straw, stood
al 9215 apiece; each of the decoy houses
should have been finished for al 800, and
the cheapest had run away with Ell, 100.
You could account for the increase of cost
over estimate easily enough: this was the
difference in result between taking dis
counts and paying for credit; between
working at leisure and working as IL
driven by demons. But the difference
meant d loss instead of a profit on all
the building so far done-except his first
cottages.
(To be concluded next Sunday.)