In making these remarks I have no intention of throwing any reflection upon Mr. George Gould, who seems to be a very promising young man for a rich man’s son. His careful education has, no doubt, done much to counteract the drawbacks incident to the sons of wealthy men to which I have referred more fully in another part of this book. His maternal training, I understand, has been of the most exemplary kind. This will go far to offset the disadvantages to a business career, which the accident of his birth in luxurious surroundings, according to my theory, otherwise entails. If his brain is composed of the genuine plastic material out of which the craniums of successful financiers are made, he may learn to forget that he has been nursed in the lap of luxury, and look back with due respect to the hole whence his father was digged and the rock whence he was hewn. He may have brains enough, possibly, to reflect with more pride on that ingenious mousetrap that first brought his father into prominence, than the gew-gaws of the gilded palace in Fifth avenue, the luxuries of the handsome parlors and rich conservatories at Irvington, and the gorgeous trappings of his father’s yacht and palace cars. I have, therefore, great hopes that George will be a conspicuous exception to the rule I have propounded elsewhere regarding rich men’s sons. When a large mercantile firm buys up goods in any line so that nobody else has the same goods, it then has a “corner” in these goods. “Corners” in goods differ from “corners” in Wall Street in regard to their influence on the organizers. They don’t act like a boomerang as the Wall Street “corners” mostly do. The “corner” is sometimes sustained during the life of the manipulator, as in the case of Mr. Stewart. The successors of the great operators sometimes maintain it, but in this instance Judge Hilton made a signal failure, though in some respects he is a far abler man than Stewart was. Yet, he had not the genius, for working “corners,” of his eminent predecessor. He is, probably, so well learned in the law that he has too much inclination to go around the “corners.”