Making money requires FLAIR, instinct,
insight or whatever you like to call it, but the qualities that go
to make a business man are grotesquely unlike those which make a
statesman; and, when you have pretensions to both, the result is
the present comedy and confusion.
I write as the daughter of a business man and the wife of a
politician and I know what I am talking about, but, in case Mr.
Bonar Law--a pathetic believer in the "business man"--should
honour me by reading these pages and still cling to his illusions
on the subject, I refer him to the figures published in the
Government White Book of 1919.
Intellectual men seldom make fortunes and business men are seldom
intellectual.
My father was educated in Liverpool and worked in a night school;
he was a good linguist, which he would never have been had he had
the misfortune to be educated in any of our great public schools.
I remember some one telling me how my grandfather had said that he
could not understand any man of sense bringing his son up as a
gentleman. In those days as in these, gentlemen were found and not
made, but the expression "bringing a man up as a gentleman" meant
bringing him up to be idle.
When my father gambled in the City, he took risks with his own
rather than other people's money. I heard him say to a South
African millionaire:
"You did not make your money out of mines, but out of mugs like
me, my dear fellow!"
A whole chapter might be devoted to stories about his adventures
in speculation, but I will give only one.
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