Читать книгу All in a Life-time онлайн

83 страница из 133

The rivalry between the insurance companies was represented by A. D. Juilliard and James Hazen Hyde. Juilliard, the distinguished merchant, philanthropist, and patron of music, personified the Mutual Life Insurance Company, of which he was one of the directing spirits; and young Hyde, the perfumed dandy and spoiled child of quickly gotten riches, personified the Equitable Life Insurance Company and its astonishing rise to financial greatness.

By a strange irony of fate, my association with these men was destined to make me one of the key figures in the life insurance investigation of 1905, which hurled young Hyde from a dazzling financial eminence and limitless possibilities and transferred him to Paris among the expatriates there, and which, by the legislation that followed the exposure of corrupt financial practices, altered the whole financial structure of America.

I shall tell that story at its proper place in this chapter, but, first, I propose to give the reader a picture of the way in which some financial deals were made in “Wall Street,” and the control of corporations bandied about by a nod of the head, frequently given as a reward for a personal favour, or withheld as punishment for a personal slight.