anything to match with?” said the Doctor, growing a trifle irritable.
“You can match your credit against my quarter,” said the Idiot. “We can make it a mental match – a sort of Christian Science gamble. What am I thinking of, heads or tails?”
“Heads,” said the Doctor.
“By Jove, that’s hard luck!” ejaculated the Idiot. “You lose. I was thinking of tails.”
“Oh, thunder!” cried the Doctor, impatiently.
“Try it again, double or quits. What am I thinking of?” said the Idiot.
“Heads,” repeated the Doctor.
“Somebody must have told you. Heads it is. You win. We are quits, Doctor,” said the Idiot.
“But I am still without the quarter,” the physician observed.
“Yep,” said the Idiot. “But there’s one more way out of it. I’ll buy the telegram from you – C.O.D.”
“Done,” said the Doctor, holding out the message. “Here’s your goods.”
“And there’s your money,” said the Idiot, tossing the quarter across the table. “If you want to buy this message back at any time within the next sixty days, Doctor, I’ll give you the refusal of it without extra charge.”
And he folded the paper up and put it away in his pocketbook.
“Do the banks really ask for so much security when they make a loan?” asked the Poet.
“Hear him, will you!” cried the Idiot. “There’s your lucky man. He’s never had to face a bank president in order to avoid the cold glances of the grocer. No cashier ever asked him how many times he had been sentenced to states-prison before he’d discount his note. Do they ask security? Security isn’t the name for it. They demand a blockade, establish a quarantine. They require the would-be debtor to build up a wall as high as Chimborazo and as invulnerable as Gibraltar between them and the loss before they will part with a dime. Why, they wouldn’t discount a note to his own order for Andrew Carnegie for seventeen cents without his indorsement. Do they ask security!”
“Well, I didn’t know,” said the Poet. “I never had anything to do with banks except as a small depositor in the savings-bank.”
“Fortunate man,” said the Idiot. “I wish I could say as much. I borrowed five hundred dollars once from a bank, and what the deuce do you suppose they did?”
“I don’t know,” said the Poet. “What?”
“They made me pay it back,” said the Idiot, mournfully, “although I needed it just as much when it was due as when I borrowed it. The cashier was a friend of mine, too. But I got even with ’em. I refused to borrow another cent from their darned old institution. They lost my custom then and there. If it hadn’t been for that inconsiderate act I should probably have gone on borrowing from them for years, and instead of owing them nothing to-day, as I do, I should have been their debtor to the tune of two or three thousand dollars.”
“Don’t you take any stock in what the Idiot tells you in that matter, Mr. Poet,” said Mr. Brief. “The national banks are perfectly justified in protecting themselves as they do. If they didn’t demand collateral security they’d be put out of business in fifteen minutes by people like the Idiot, who consider it a hardship to have to pay up.”
“As the lady said when she was asked the name of her favorite author, ‘Pshaw!’” retorted the Idiot. “Likewise fudge – a whole panful of fudges! I don’t object to paying my debts; fact is, I know of no greater pleasure. What I do object to is the kind of collateral the banks demand. They always want something a man hasn’t got and, in most cases, hasn’t any chance of getting. If I had a thousand-dollar bond I wouldn’t need to borrow five hundred dollars, yet when I go to the bank and ask for the five hundred the thousand-dollar bond is what they ask for.”
“Not always,” said Mr. Brief. “If you can get your note indorsed you can get the money.”
“That’s true enough, but fellows like myself can’t always find a captain of industry who is willing to take a long-shot to do the indorsing,” said the Idiot. “Besides, under the indorsement plan you merely ask another man to be responsible for your debt, and that isn’t fair. The whole system is wrong. Every man to his own collateral, I say. Give me the bank that will lend money to the chap that needs it on the security of his own product. Mr. Whitechoker, say, is short on cash and long on sermons. My style of bank would take one barrel of his sermons and salt ’em down in the safe-deposit company as security for the money he needs. The Poet here, finding the summer approaching and not a cent in hand to replenish his wardrobe, should be able to secure an advance of two or three hundred dollars on his sonnets, rondeaux, and lyrics – one dollar for each two-and-a-half-dollar sonnet, and so on. The grocer should be able to borrow money on his dried apples, his vinegar pickles, his canned asparagus, and other non-perishable assets, such as dog-biscuit, Roquefort cheese, and California raisins. The tailor seeking an accommodation of five hundred dollars should not be asked how many times he has been sentenced to jail for arson, and required to pay in ten thousand shares of Steel common, in order to get his grip on the currency, but should be approached appropriately and asked how many pairs of trousers he is willing to pledge as security for the loan.”
“I don’t know where I would come in on that proposition,” said the Doctor. “There are times when we physicians need money, too.”
“Pooh!” said the Idiot. “You are not a non-producer. It doesn’t take a very smart doctor these days to produce patients, does it? You could assign your cases to the bank. One little case of hypochondria alone ought to be a sufficient guarantee of a steady income for years, properly managed. If you haven’t learned how to keep your patients in such shape that they have to send for you two or three times a week, you’d better go back to the medical school and fit yourself for your real work in life. You never knew a plumber to be so careless of his interests as to clean up a job all at once, and what the plumber is to the household, the physician should be to the individual. Same way with Mr. Brief. With the machinery of the law in its present shape there is absolutely no excuse for a lawyer who settles any case inside of fifteen years, by which time it is reasonable to suppose his client will get into some new trouble that will keep him going as a paying concern for fifteen more. There isn’t a field of human endeavor in which a man applies himself industriously that does not produce something that should be a negotiable security.”
“How about burglars?” queried the Bibliomaniac.
“I stand corrected,” said the Idiot. “The burglar is an exception, but then he is an exception also at the banks. The expert burglar very seldom leaves any security for what he gets at the banks, and so he isn’t affected by the situation one way or the other.”
“Oh, well,” said Mr. Brief, rising, “it’s only a pipe-dream all the way through. They might start in on such a proposition, but it would never last. When you went in to borrow fifteen dollars, putting up your idiocy as collateral, the emptiness of the whole scheme would reveal itself.”
“You never can tell,” observed the Idiot. “Even under their present system the banks have done worse than that.”
“Never!” cried the Lawyer.
“Yes, sir,” replied the Idiot. “Only the other day I saw in the papers that a bank out in Oklahoma had loaned a man ten thousand dollars on sixty thousand shares of Hot Air preferred.”
“And
