The Montgomery advertiser., 1907-12-20

bankrupt gets ready for the eyes of
 his creditors tr
 often he thought of what he had
 said to Jack Vincent about Sir John
 and financial operations. You see. sir. gentleman like your father soon gets adrift in financial operations It's a special business training straight up from the bottom Speaking mus
 kindly and consequently, he had teit
 so sure. of himself. so strong In ms Knowledge of all the conditions or ms enterprise. And yet-as he thought now with bitter elf-contempt-if he had been some fortieth baronet, some pampered duke fresh from Eton ana oxford. with no other learning than a little Latin and Greek. he could not have muddled things more completely. All his life's work had gone 10 water all his painfully acquired experience | had been futile; boastfuily, bumptious- | Iy. contemptibly. he had biundered headlong to ruin.
 he must. therefore, succeed Tn DE; There was the ruinous fallacy In all | his iaborious reasoning. It was as IT | d man should say after jumping over | some ditches: See. how simpie' W.lh | a run of eighteen feet can jump nine | feet clear. Therefore. 1T take pIo- | portionately longer run. can Jump over the widest river. But there isa fatal ee- | TOT in arguing thus from little 10 | large. Hill Rise had been 2 fataliy 1 larger leap than anything ne had ever
 attempted before. T, .h. | He could understand now. n ene
 past when successfully aeveiops ,pa,s. he | had riyeu perhaps four hundred ana fifty pounds for an acre ana haIt. l f5e was then the big capitalist-with loads of money for the small task. l obtaining big trade discounts. setI.ns | his men upon the work when ,-'ns 1 might otherwise have been idle, takihs them off when he wanted them TOT some remunerative contract;-he nad I been master and lord, of money, tune. evervthins; controlling the enterprise. not being driven by 1t. Now witn his ! vast effort, all the conditions nad oeeh reversed
 croaking In his path when he was SUI. high in baseIess hope. Y nad my ! monev out of bricks and mortar once, 1 hnt was fool enough to put 1t oack again. And again: "A big task yeve got. A mighty big task. All the eles
 mental truth was summed up In ola Selhv's words. Easy If you are work- | ing we'll within the scope or your own own means. but cruel hard if you're using l narrowed capital. And to enforce tne l hitter lesson, here were the London ana I suburban Company trinmphing at HI
 House because they a nad un, n,arts sr | as much, land and hundred times as
 much money. those dreaded neignpors had gloriously succeeded while Crun- den was most disnally failing
 II From the very first he had failed; everything had gone wrong; you
 considered the estate as a whole or
 divided the work into separate jobs
 and considered each part in detail failure plainly disclosed itself. Dur
 ing the last months Jack Vincent anu
 he had been toiling as accountants to
 set out the final cost of all that had
 been done; and the figures. however
 you tested them, told the same story.
 Thus. the thirty-six feet roads which
 should have cost thirty shilling per
 foot run, had in fact cost two pounds
 per foot when finished: the first cot
 tages had cost 190 pounds instead oi
 1S0 pounde apiece; the second lot oi
 cottages, taken over from the man of
 straw, stood at 215 pounds apiece; each
 of the decoy-houses should have been
 finished for A1.50o, pounds and the cheapest had run away with 1.70e
 pounds. You could account for the in
 crease of cost over estimate easily
 enough; this was the difference in re-
 suit between taking discounts ana pay, ing for credit; between working al leisure and working as if driven by demons. But the difference meant 2 loss instead of profit on all tht buildings so far done-except his first cottages.
 Suppose that one were forced to stoT now and present one's financial state.
 menti Twenty-two thousand pound. sunk in the purchase. seven thousand su;.k in roads. over ten thousand ab' sorbt d by cottages, eight thousand five hundred locked up in the houses. six teen thousand still owing to the bank All that he had realized by sale of the balance of his old investments by salt of freehold and leasehold plots ane of one decoy-house, by mortgage anc by rents. etc. had gone to reduce tho bank debt and pay interest. or on tht land, or into the pockets of MT. Dow ling and Mir. Eaton. The charges oi those two experts were very moderate and yet they made handsome total
 Suppose that. stopping now. one soit
 all the new buildings and the covered \ II ground for what they would fetch there would be a loss to face: sold II a hurry they would never bring cos price. And yet it might be wise U swallow such loss. Then ones asset would consist of the twenty untenante' \ derelict houses of Hill Rise and tn bulk of the land and the roads--witl charge upon them of sixteel thousand pounds. Noble assets still- if one were given indefinite time t deal with them.
 He could not stop; he must go on. One morning as he sat talking | the parlor of the United Bank, tn manager said something that made tn
 blood rise to his forehead. made hir
 spring up indignantly and/strike tn managers table with his cIenched fis "Mr dear MT. Crunden. sit down. am telling you what my directors sa II am only a servant, not the master you know"
 They had been discussing those nobl assets, and Crunden had been pleadin for more lenient and considerate treat ment, tlIan of late he had enjoyed Al The hank people were always reveiw