Excerpt from The Destruction of Gotham Dear Sm You are entirely in the wrong about your great-little man Stone, ' of Wall Street. His habits are most exemplary. And if he has got hold of your money in Wall Street, why he has done no more than you or any other man would have done with his money if you only could have beaten him. No, my friend the fact is, the little giant of Wall Street has more money-brains than you and his other enemies. So be manly enough to admit it, and let him alone for he has his load in life to bear as well as you and the others. Do you think it any easy thing to take care of fifty railroads and fifty millions of dollars? It is not an easy thing. And if you could have seen his face to day as I saw it, all furrowed over, as if full of railroad tracks, hard, and dry, and bloodless, twitching nervously now and then as his bright eyes beamed with intense excitement, you would have felt no bitterness at all, but have been your dear old self, and have felt only pity. The fact is, for all his exemplary and well-ordered life, he is far from well in body or in mind. He is compelled to have con stant recourse to artificial stimulants to keep up and not fall under the great load under which he stoops. His hand trembles sometimes as if he had an ague. And what wonder The life he leads is too arduous. It is unnatural, and, of course, he must resort to unnatural stimulants for support. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.