In my relation of certain reminiscences of Wall Street, and in discussing the checkered career of certain brokers, operators and politicians, I have endeavored to be guided by a historic aphorism of Lord Macaulay: “No past event has any intrinsic importance,” says the great essayist, litterateur, historian and statesman. “The knowledge of it is valuable,” he adds, “only as it leads us to form just calculations with respect to the future.” In the samples of my experience which I have given in this book I have aimed, to some extent, at this rendition of the noble purposes of history and biography in their philosophic and scientific application of teaching by example. If I have fallen far short of this high ideal of the British Essayist, as I humbly feel that I have, I must throw myself on the kind indulgence of the readers, and ask them to take the will for the deed. For the presentation of the facts themselves I crave no indulgence. They are gems worthy of preservation in the light of the above definition. I only submit that the setting might be much better. My chapters on politics may be considered foreign to the main issue, but as many of the events therein described were intimately connected with my business career, I think they are not much of a digression. HENRY CLEWS. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ INTRODUCTORY. MY PART IN MARKETING THE UNITED STATES CIVIL WAR LOANS. BY HENRY CLEWS, LL.D. To a very large majority of Americans now living the great Civil War—waged from 1861 to 1865—between the North and the South is only known as a matter of history. But it was the greatest war the world ever witnessed, involving the loss of nearly a million of men, and I have a vivid recollection of it, for I was an actor in it, from its beginning to its end, to the extent of providing some of the sinews of war for the United States Government, without which it could not have defeated the armies of secession, and preserved the Union.