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Theocritus C. Benson, now familiar to the whole Anglo-Saxon race of every colour and clime, was of that type always rare but now, though rare, conspicuous, which can so organise and direct the acts of others as to bring order out of chaos, chaos out of order, and alternately accumulate and disperse fortunes hitherto unprecedented in the history of the world.

He was accustomed (in the interviews which he was proud to grant to the newspapers of England, America and the Colonies) to ascribe his great position to unwearied industry and to an abhorrence of all excess (notably in the consumption of fermented liquors) and particularly of the horrid practice of gambling. His puritan upbringing, which had taught him to look upon cards as the Devil’s picture-book, and upon racing as akin to the drama in its spiritual blight, was, he would constantly assert, the key to all that he had done since he left his father’s home. But in this manly self-judgment the Hon. Mr. Benson did himself an injustice. These high qualities are to be discovered in many million of his fellow-citizens, and he might as well have pointed, as sometimes he did point with pride, to the number of his Lodge or to his ignorance of foreign languages as the causes of his repeated triumphs.