Beit did not seem to wish to talk of Barney Barnato; he admitted his gifts, but evidently did not like him. But if Beit disliked being compared with Barnato, nothing flattered him more than to be compared with Rhodes. He had a profound and pathetic admiration for Rhodes, the admiration which only a born idealist could keep through many years of ultimate companionship.
And in connection with Rhodes, he had no disinclination to talk about himself; the phrase of Goethe, paraphrased at the beginning of this portrait, seemed to touch him.
'Yes,' he said, 'that's the good time of a man's life, if he only knew it, the Entwicklungsperiode.'
'It is the beginning,' I went on, 'that is supremely interesting; how from nothing you won the first fifty thousand pounds, that interests everyone; but how afterwards you turned the fifty thousand into twenty millions is much less interesting.'
'Well,' said Beit, 'I was one of the poor Beits of Hamburg; my father found it difficult even to pay for my schooling, and you know that is cheap enough in Germany; I had to leave before I had gone through the Real- schule. Of course, in Hamburg at that time everyone was talking about the discovery of diamonds in South Africa, and so, after helping my father for a little time, he made up his mind to send me to Amsterdam to learn all about diamonds. I went there and spent two years, and in that time got to know a good deal about diamonds.'
'Of course,' I interjected, 'hi that time you must also have learnt Dutch.'
'No,' replied Beit; 'no. I just did my work, and wasted my spare time like other young men. A little later my father had some interest with the house of Jules Forges in Paris, and I was sent out by him to Kimberley. I got my passage money and three hundred pounds for the first year. When I reached Kimberley, I found that very few people knew anything about diamonds; they bought and sold at haphazard, and a great many of them really believed that the Cape diamonds were of a very inferior quality. Of course, I saw at once that some of the Cape stones were as good as any in the world; and I saw, too, that the buyers protected themselves against their own ignorance by offering for them one-tenth part of what each stone was worth in Europe. It was plain that if one had a little money there was a fortune to be made, and I remember I wrote to Forges, offering to give up my position and pay him back my passage money if he would let me off my engagement to work for him for a year; but he would not let me off, so I went on working.
'I wrote to my father frequently, long letters, telling him all about Kimberley; how incredibly rich the ground was; how easy it was to make money with a little capital; and I begged him to send me as much as he could get together by the end of the year, and I promised him to return whatever money he lent me with good interest within a year.
'Before the end of my time with Forges, my father got together a couple of thousand pounds and sent it to me; but I did not use it in buying diamonds, as I should have done if he had sent it to me in the first six months. Kimberley was growing so fast that the demand for houses was extraordinary, so I bought a bit of land and put up twelve or thirteen offices, corrugated iron shanties, of which I kept one for myself. I let out these twelve or thirteen shanties, and I got eighteen hundred pounds a month for them.'
'Eighteen hundred pounds a month!' I said. 'How long did that continue?'
'For years and years,' said Beit. 'Twelve or thirteen years, I think, and then the pit had grown so large that my ground was wanted, and I sold the ground on which the shanties were built for a fair sum-I think it was about two hundred and sixty thousand pounds. I got something for the dwellings, too, I think,' and he laughed. 'Not a bad speculation!'
'No,' I said, 'indeed; that solves the question of how you came from poverty to riches.'
While getting a subscription once for a charity, I came across a curious trait in his character-he seemed to over-estimate the value of small sums of money. If you spoke to him of two or three pounds, or twenty-two or twentythree, he was always eager to show you how thirty shillings could do in the one case, and how it was possible to attain the desired end with half the amount in the other. But the moment you spoke in thousands, he seemed to treat them as counters. He would jump from five thousand to fifty thousand as if there were no intervening figures. The truth was, of course, that Beit had learned the value of small sums of money when he was young and poor in Hamburg and Amsterdam, and no one knew better than he did how much could be done with a pound. But when you talked in thousands you were speaking to Beit the millionaire, who made fifty thousand in an afternoon, and did not attach precise importance to either sum.
Beit went into the Jameson Raid at Rhodes's request, but he protested against every stage of that mad and stupid enterprise. Indeed, the story of Jameson's Raid would only show that Beit was intensely loyal to Rhodes, even when he believed him to be entirely in the wrong. Beit was a good type of business man. He had an instinctive aversion to politics and raidings, and was chiefly interested in such enterprises as could be shown in a profit and loss account.
But there was another side of his nature: like many Jews, he had a real love and understanding of music; and he admired pictures and bronzes, too, though he was anything but a good judge of them. At bottom Beit was a sentimentalist, and did not count or reckon when his feelings were really touched. This was the fine side of the man, the side through which Rhodes used him, the side which, by contrast with his love of money, showed the breadth and height of his humanity. Of all the millionaires I had chanced to meet, Beit was the best. He had a great deal of the milk of human kindness in him, quick and deep sympathies, too, sympathies even with poverty, perhaps through his own early struggles; and if any plan of a social Utopia had been brought forward in his time, no one would have detected its weakness more quickly that Beit, no one would have seen its good points more clearly or been more willing to help it to accomplishment.
After Cecil Rhodes's death, I had written an article about him and about his will, in which I declared that posthumous benefactions seemed to me no proof of benevolence because they lacked the savor of sacrifice, and, to use Bacon's phrase, 'were but the painted sepulchre of alms.' Beit expressed his astonishment at this criticism, and thought there was a great deal of unselfish nobility shown in Rhodes's will, and added that he only hoped to make as good use of whatever he might possess when he died. Indeed, when Beit died in 1906, he left over two million pounds to charity.
It was in the late summer of 1896, after my return from South Africa, that A.
M. Broadley called on me one day in the office of the Saturday Review and brought a new interest into my life. I had known Broadley for a good many years and had long been convinced of his business ability, as well as his journalistic skill. He told me that he was making a good deal of money with Ernest Terah Hooley, whom I had just heard of as the successful promotor of the Dunlop Company. Broadley offered to bring me up to see him, suggesting that I should find it to my profit to help him in his financial schemes. Nothing loath, I went with Broadley and was introduced to Hooley at the Midland Grand Hotel. To my surprise, I learned that the financier had taken the whole of the first floor of the Midland Grand Hotel for his offices. I don't know how many rooms there were, but I believe there were certainly fifty; and from ten o'clock in the morning until six at night, almost every room was filled with people who had axes to grind. Hooley flitted from room to room, always good humored and decisively quick in dealing with the most heterogeneous projects.
At one moment he was discussing the raising of a loan of sixteen millions with Li Hung Chang on the security of the Chinese customs, and with him was Sir Robert Hart, the Englishman who knew more about China than any other living westerner. In Hooley's private room, one would meet Arthur du Cros who had more to do with the successful Dunlop promotion than any other member of his family, and who afterwards became a member of Parliament and was knighted, I believe, for this achievement: an alert, intelligent man, a good organizer, but intensely combative. In another room a nobleman who had come to sell Hooley the Prince's yacht Britannia; in still another room, a persuasive Spaniard, who appeared with the news that sugar had been made from sea water, and all he wanted was a million for the discovery. From room to room went Hooley, a rather tall, well-made man with black hair, black beard, black moustache, a long beaked Jewish nose, and long half-closed Jewish eyes, well dressed and always polite without a particle of 'side,' too earnestly busy to show any conceit. He told me at once that Broadley had been very useful to him and he hoped that I should be. I replied that I was quite willing to follow my friend Broadley's lead; and after two minutes' talk Hooley hurried away to another room.
From that time on I went up to the Midland Grand Hotel practically twice a week, and soon became conversant with Hooley's financial methods and with many of Hooley's ideas. He certainly knew more about the value of land in England than any one I had ever seen, and he had a perfectly open mind for any and every scheme, and was most easy of access. In his bankruptcy two years afterwards, the official receiver proved that Hooley had made over six millions of hard cash in just these two years. Hooley himself always said that he had made a million and a half over the Dunlop promotion alone. His astounding success can only be explained by the fact that he was
