When the moment came for him to speak, he jumped up, perhaps a little too briskly, faced his audience with less than his usual solemnity, nay, with something very like a grin, and struck the first note of his great speech in a manner which they had hitherto never heard from his lips. It was certainly calculated to compel their attention if not their conviction, for the very first words which he shouted into the body of the hall, were these: “_WHAT ARE WE HERE FOR?_” After that rhetorical question, delivered in a roar that would have filled the largest railway station in London, he repeated it in a somewhat lower tone, clenched his fists, struck them squarely on the table, and answered as though he were delivering a final judgment: “_MONEY!...._ Ladies and gentlemen,” he went on, raising his right hand and wagging his forefinger at them--“we are here for money! And don’t you forget it!” He blew a great breath, watched them quizzically a moment and then continued: “What _most_ of you _most_ lack is the power of thinking clearly. I can see it in your faces. I can see it in the way you sit. And people who can’t think clearly don’t make _money_. No one can think clearly who hasn’t got a good grip of his first principles and doesn’t know first of all what he wants before he tries to get it. Well, I repeat it, and I challenge any one to deny it: what we want is _money_! Let us make that quite clear. Let us anchor ourselves to that ... and when we once have that thoroughly fixed in our minds we can go on to the matter of how we are to get it.” “Now ladies and gentlemen,” he proceeded in a more conversational manner, rubbing his hands together, and smiling at them with excessive freedom, “let us first of all take stock. Sitting here before me and round me here upon this platform (he waved his right arm in a large gesture) are four million pounds of Van Diemens stock. Four million pounds, ladies and gentlemen! But wait a moment. At what price was that stock bought? I am not asking at what price _I_ bought,”--here he looked to the left and the right, sweeping the hundreds of faces before him--“I am not asking at what price _I_ bought: my position differs from yours, my hearties; I’m in the middle of things and my official position obtains me even more knowledge than I should gather with my own very excellent powers of observation: I’ve spent a whole lifetime in watching markets, and I have never cared a _dump_--I repeat, ladies and gentlemen, a DUMP, for anything except the profit. I have never listened to any talk about the ‘development of a country’ or ‘possibilities’ or ‘the future,’ or any kid of that sort. I’ve bought paper and sold paper ... and I’ve done uncommonly well out of it.”