"Oh, if you go in for wheat and steel--yes. But suppose you tackled a little thing, George. Just some leetle thing that only needed a few thousands. Drugs, for example. Shoved all you had into it--staked your liver on it, so to speak. Take a drug--take ipecac, for example. Take a lot of ipecac. Take all there is! See? There you are! There aren't unlimited supplies of ipecacuanha--can't be!--and it's a thing people _must_ have. Then quinine again! You watch your chance, wait for a tropical war breaking out, let's say, and collar all the quinine. Where _are_ they? Must have quinine, you know--Eh? ... "Lord! there's no end of things--no end of _little_ things. Dill-water--all the suff'ring babes yowling for it. Eucalyptus again--cascara--witch hazel--menthol--all the toothache things. Then there's antiseptics, and curare, cocaine.... "Rather a nuisance to the doctors," I reflected. "They got to look out for themselves. By Jove, yes. They'll do you if they can, and you do them. Like brigands. That makes it romantic. That's the Romance of Commerce, George." He passed into a rapt dream, from which escaped such fragments as: "Fifty per cent, advance, sir; security--to-morrow." The idea of cornering a drug struck upon my mind then as a sort of irresponsible monkey trick that no one would ever be permitted to do in reality. It was the sort of nonsense one would talk to make Ewart laugh and set him going on to still odder possibilities. I thought it was part of my uncle's way of talking. But I've learnt differently since. The whole trend of modern money-making is to foresee something that will probably be needed and put it out of reach, and then to haggle yourself wealthy. You buy up land upon which people will presently want to build houses, you secure rights that will bar vitally important developments, and so on, and so on. Of course the naïve intelligence of a boy does not grasp the subtler developments of human inadequacy. He begins life with the disposition to believe in the wisdom of grown-up people, he does not realize how casual and disingenuous has been the development of law and custom, and he thinks that somewhere in the state there is a power as irresistible as a head master's to check mischievous, foolish enterprises of every sort. I will confess that when my uncle talked of cornering quinine, I had a clear impression that any one who contrived to do that would pretty certainly go to gaol. Now I know that any one who could really bring it off would be much more likely to go to the House of Lords!