XI. Nathan Meyer Rothschild
(1776-1836)

In Frankfort, as in most other busy towns, the dirtiest quarter is that occupied by Jew money-lenders, pawnbrokers, and hucksters. A hundred years ago, when it was dirtier than it is now, one of its inmates was Meyer Anselm, whose little shop was known by its sign of a Red Shield, or Roth-Schild, whence he came to be called, and to call himself, Meyer Anselm Rothschild. He sold all sorts of second-hand goods; but he had a special reputation as a collector of old coins, jewels, cameos, and pictures, and on that account his shop came to be frequented by great people as well as little, who came to look at and to buy his curiosities, and often to borrow money of him. One of his customers was William, Landgrave of Hesse, who, after several years' dealing with him, liked him so well, that, when the French bombarded Frankfort in 1796, he gave him and his treasures safe housing in his fortified dwelling-place at Cassel. The French ransacked the Jews' quarter, and, on their retirement, its old inmates were allowed to disperse themselves over Frankfort, and to live on an equality with their Christian neighbours. Meyer Anselm, therefore, as soon as he went back to the town, built himself a handsome house in one of its most fashionable parts.

He was appointed foreign banker and financial agent to the Landgrave William, and at once entered on a more extensive and more profitable sort of business than had previously been within his reach. He was a rich man in 1806, when the Landgrave, being in his turn forced to flee from a new French invasion under Napoleon, placed in his keeping all his treasure, amounting to 3,000,000 florins, or about £250,000. This money Rothschild invested very skilfully; lending at exorbitant rates, pawning for trifling sums the property of owners who in those unsettled times were never able to redeem it, and turning pence and pounds in every possible way. When he died, in 1812, he left 12,000,000 florins to be shared by his five sons, Anselm, Solomon, Nathan Meyer, Charles, and James. From these five sons, on his deathbed, he exacted an oath that they would keep the business together, extending it as much as they could, but always acting in partnership, so that the world might know only one house of Rothschild. The oath was strictly kept, with this exception, that Nathan Meyer, the third son, proving the cleverest of them all, came to be practically the head of the house, in place of his eldest brother, Anselm.

This third son, Nathan Meyer, was born at Frankfort on the 16th of September 1776. When he was about two-and-twenty, some fourteen or fifteen years before his father's death, he left Frankfort to settle in Manchester.

"There was not room enough for all of us in Frankfort," he said long afterwards. "I dealt in English goods. One great trader came there who had the market all to himself. He was quite the great man, and did us a favour if he sold us goods. Somehow I offended him, and he refused to show me his patterns. This was on a Tuesday. I said to my father, 'I will go to England.' I could speak nothing but German. On Thursday I started. The nearer I got to England the cheaper goods were. As soon as I got to Manchester I laid out all my money—things were so cheap; and I made good profit."

Manchester, which had been but a village, and afterwards a small town, for more than a thousand years, was just then beginning to be made a great place of business by the new trade in cotton, and the new manufacture of cotton goods. In it were plenty of young men glad to borrow money at high rates of interest, for the sake of establishing themselves as merchants and manufacturers, and young Rothschild was ready to lend money to every one whom he could trust to return it. Besides being a money-lender, however, he was also a merchant.

"I soon found," he said, "that there were three profits—the raw material, the dyeing, and the manufacturing. I said to the manufacturer, I will supply you with material and dye, and you shall supply me with the manufactured goods. So I got three profits instead of one, and I could sell goods cheaper than anybody. In a short time I turned my £"20,000 into; £60,000. My success all turned on one maxim. I said, 'I can do what another man can, and so I am a match for the man with the patterns, and all the rest of them!' Another advantage I had, I was an off-hand man—I made my bargains at once."

It was a favourite maxim with Rothschild also "to have nothing to do with an unlucky place or an unlucky man."

"I have seen many clever men, very clever men," he said, "who had not shoes to their feet. I never act with them. Their advice sounds very well. But fate is against them. They cannot get on themselves; and if they cannot do good to themselves, can they do good to me?"

Resolving to govern his life by such rules, not over-exalted, but certainly good models of selfishness, Nathan Meyer Rothschild put himself in a sure way to wealth. In or near the year 1803, after five or six years passed in Manchester, he proceeded to settle in London. He considered that money-lending, the most profitable of all his businesses, could be carried on quite as well in one place as in another, and that other work, quite as remunerative, would be more within his reach in London than in any smaller town. This change, indeed, was part of a plan by which eventually the five brothers took possession of all the chief centres of European commerce—Anselm remaining in Frankfort, Solomon being sometimes in Berlin, sometimes in Vienna, Charles being in Naples, James in Paris, and Nathan in London.

London had been a favourite resort of money-making Jews ever since the Norman Conquest. In the middle ages, having the neighbourhood of the Old Jewry for their special residence, they steadily enriched themselves by trade with the Christians, who thought it a virtue to persecute them. It is not strange, seeing how hardly they were treated, that their natural love of wealth should have resulted in miserly ways, and that their natural hatred of Christians should have grown into a fierce antipathy. Shakespeare's "Merchant of Venice," showing their position in the trading towns of Italy, showed also, without much exaggeration, their position in London and other English cities. When Antonio, in the play, comes to ask for a loan of money, Shylock answers—

"Signior Antonio, many a time and oft In the Rialto you have rated me About my monies and my usances: Still have I borne it with a patient shrug; For sufferance is the badge of all our tribe: You call me misbeliever, cut-throat dog, And spit upon my Jewish gaberdine, And all for use of that which is mine own. Well, then, it now appears you need my help, You that did void your rheum upon my beard. And foot me as you spurn a stranger cur Over your threshold: monies is your suit. What should I say to you? Should I not say, 'Hath a dog money? is it possible A cur can lend three thousand ducats?' Or Shall I bend low, and in a bondman's key, With bated breath and whispering humbleness. Say this: 'Fair sir, you spit on me on Wednesday last; You spum*d me such a day; another time You caird me dog; and for these courtesies I'll lend you thus much monies?'"

Through four or five centuries the Jews in England were spurned and spit upon, yet made great use of, by the Christians, who gave them a grudging residence among them. But some two hundred years ago they began to take a better place and fill it better. Their prudent ways of money-making came to be closely followed by their rivals and persecutors. They were allowed to trade with Christians on equal terms, and they showed a disposition at any rate not less Christian than that of many who bore the title.

The most famous, and the most deserving of fame, among the wealthy Jews who were in London when Rothschild settled in it, were the Brothers Goldsmid. Their father, Aaron Goldsmid, had come from Hamburg about the middle of the eighteenth century, and established himself as a small merchant in Leman Street. His small business was made a great one by his four sons, the two younger of whom, Benjamin and Abraham, were the most prosperous. In 1792 they removed from Leman Street to a house in Capel Street, opposite the Bank of England, and began using the wealth they had already accumulated as stock-brokers and money-lenders. That was the time of English fighting with France, and the Government, being in urgent need of money with which to pay for the expenses of the war, were beginning the great system of national loans which are now so frequent and stupendous. The Goldsmids were intrusted with much of this business, and they managed it, as well as everything else that they took in hand, with remarkable honour and ability.

Chance, as well as their own good sense, was in their favour. In 1794, when several of their neighbours were ruined, their entire losses from bad debts amounted to only £50. Both brothers were as generous as they were rich. Accumulating wealth with unheard of rapidity, they distributed in charity much more than the tithes prescribed by their Mosaic law. Numberless instances of their sharing in every sort of philanthropic work are on record, and the memory of their princely benevolence has not yet ceased among old City men. They were also famous for the splendid hospitality with which they entertained all the leaders of society in their day. They died young, however, and dismally. In a fit of melancholy Benjamin Goldsmid hanged himself from his own bedstead in 1808; and in 1810 Abraham Goldsmid shot himself in his own garden.

In the latter year, also, at a riper age, died a yet greater City worthy. Sir Francis Baring. Baring, the grandson of a Lutheran minister, who came to England soon after the accession of William of Orange, and the son of a cloth merchant, who started a small business in Devonshire, and made it a large one in London, was born in 1736. He carried on his father's trade, and greatly augmented it. He established an immense traffic with the East Indies and America, and promptly following the lead of the younger Goldsmids, dealt largely in national loans and public securities. Even his enemies declared him to be "a man of consummate knowledge and inflexible honour." "Few men," it was said, "understood better the real interests of trade, and few men arrived at the highest rank of commercial life with more unsullied integrity." Dying at the age of seventy-four, he left a fortune worth £1,100,000 and a great house of business, to be made yet greater through the enterprise of his sons, chief of whom was Alexander Baring, afterwards Baron Ashburton. "There are six great powers in Europe—England, France, Russia, Austria, Prussia, and Baring Brothers," said a great statesman in 1818, when Alexander Baring, courted and dreaded by sovereigns because of his vast wealth and the vast influence that it gave him, was deciding whether there should be peace or war in Europe.

The Goldsmids and the Barings were the men with whom young Nathan Meyer Rothschild, coming to London in 1803, with a determination to become the greatest man of all in the commercial world, had to compete. He lacked the higher graces, the goodness of heart and the spotless honesty, of his first rivals. But he surpassed them, eminent as they were, in the tact and shrewdness which go so far to the making of commercial success. When he seemed to be most reckless in his speculations, he was acting with a cautiousness which insured success.

In 1806 he married the daughter of Levi Burnet Cohen, one of the wealthiest Jew merchants then in London. Prudent Cohen, it is said, after accepting him as his daughter's suitor, became nervous about the wisdom of the match. A man who traded so boldly, he thought, was very likely to squander his own and other people's money. He, therefore, asked for proof of young Rothschild's wealth, and of its safe investment. Young Rothschild refused to give it, answering that, as far as wealth and good character went, Mr Cohen could not do better than give him all his daughters in marriage.

If "good character" meant steadiness and skill in money-making, he was certainly right. Nathan Rothschild was without a peer in that art. Having steadily advanced his fortune in private ways through some years, he began in 1810, the year in which both Sir Francis Baring and Benjamin Goldsmid died, to trade in national securities. He bought up for a trifling sum a great number of the Duke of Wellington's drafts for the expenses of the Peninsular War, which the Government was too poor to pay when they fell due. These he sold to the Government at their full price, on the understanding that they were not to be paid for for some time to come. By this means he helped the Government out of a pressing difficulty, and at the same time insured a large profit to himself. "It was the best business I ever did." he said.

It was this business that started him on a new stage in his wonderful course of money-making. It made friends for him at the Treasury, and led to his employment in other services of the same sort, and also enabled him to procure early information as to the progress of the war then waging, and as to the policy of the English and foreign Governments, which gave him a notable advantage over his fellow stock-jobbers. The ramifications of the Rothschild establishment and connections on the Continent, moreover, made him the best agent of the State in conveying money to the armies in Spain and elsewhere, and this agency proved very lucrative to him in various ways. Seeing the great benefit that he derived from his appliances for securing early and secret information as to the progress of foreign affairs, he made it his business to extend and increase them to the very utmost. He turned pigeon-fancier, and, buying all the best birds he could find, he employed some of his leisure in training them, and so organised a machinery for rapid transmission of messages unrivalled in the days when railways and telegraphs were unknown. A note tied to a pigeon, taught to fly direct from Paris to London, reached him in a quarter of the time that was required for sending it by any other way. He also made careful study of routes, distances, and various facilities for rapid travelling, and mapped out new roads for his messengers. The SouthEastem Railway Company, it is said, established their line of steamers between Folkestone and Boulogne, because it was found that Rothschild had already proved that route to be the best for the despatch of his swift-rowing boats.

Rothschild's greatest achievement in over-reaching distance and his fellow-speculators was in 1815. While the battle of Waterloo was being fought on the i8th of June, he stood on a neighbouring height, watching its progress almost as eagerly as did Buonaparte and Wellington themselves. All day long he followed the fighting with strained eyes, knowing that on its issue, to a great extent, depended his fortune, as well as the welfare of Europe. At sunset he saw that the victory was with Wellington and the Allies. Then, without a moment's delay, he mounted a horse that had been kept ip readiness for him, and hurried homewards. Everywhere on his road fresh horses or carriages were in waiting to help him over the ground. Riding or driving all night, he reached Ostend at daybreak. There, however, he found the sea so stormy that the boatmen refused to trust themselves to it. At last be prevailed upon one of them to risk his life for £80 to be paid to him if he would cross over to Dover; and in this way Rothschild succeeded in crossing the Channel with very little loss of time. At Dover, and at the other stopping places on the road to London, fresh horses were in waiting, and he was in London before midnight Next morning—the morning of the 20th of June—he was one of the first to enter the Stock Exchange. In gloomy whispers he told those who as usual, crowded round him for news, that Blucher and his Prussians had been routed by Napoleon before Wellington had been able to reach the field. He did not add, that afterwards Wellington had turned the fortunes of the day, and secured peace for Europe. The effect of his report was, as he intended, a sort of panic among the capitalists and speculators. Fearing that the funds would sink very low, they tried to sell out as quickly as possible, and in doing so sold out at very great loss. The men who bought from them were in secret league with Rothschild, and a great quantity of scrip was transferred to his coffers during that and the following day. On the afternoon of the second day, the real issue of the battle of Waterloo was made known. Very soon the funds were higher than they had been during many previous weeks—far higher than they had been during the two days of panic; and Rothschild, quickly selling the scrip that he had bought, found, it was reported, that he had made something like a million pounds by his rapid travelling and clever deception.

Other millions were collected, rather more slowly, in ways of which some, at any rate, can hardly be called honest. One of his smart speculations was in mercury. Nearly all the mercury procurable in Europe comes either from Idria in Illyria, or from Almaden in Spain. The Almaden mines, famous and profitable through five-and-twenty centuries, had fallen for some years into disuse before 1831, when Rothschild, becoming contractor for a Spanish loan, proposed, as part payment for his trouble, to hold them during a certain time at a nominal rent. That was cheerfully agreed to and the mines soon began to give token of unusual activity. In the meanwhile the great merchant also got possession of the mines at Idria. Thus he obtained a monopoly of mercury, and was able to charge for it whatever he thought fit. Its price was nearly doubled, and Rothschild was able to make an immense profit by the arrangement. It was nothing to him that the exorbitant prices drove some smaller tricksters to scrape all the quicksilver from old looking-glasses and the like, and work it up into poisonous calomel, as well as bad material for new mirrors, thermometers, and so forth.

Most of Rothschild's wealth, however, was made in less disreputable ways. After he had firmly established himself in London, his great business was in negotiating foreign loans. These he was the first to make popular in the English market. He became the principal agent of all the great and needy governments—French and German, Russian and Turkish, North American and South American—in disposing of their scrip to English stock-jobbers. London never had in it a man more thoroughly competent for the carrying on of all sorts of money-making projects. He was master of little things as well as great. "His memory was so retentive," we are told, "that, notwithstanding the immense transactions on which he entered on every foreign post-day, and that he never took a note of them, he could, on his return home, with perfect exactness, dictate the whole to his clerks."

Rothschild had few tastes or pleasures out of the Stock Exchange and his counting-house in St. Swithin's Lane. When Louis Spohr, the great German musician, called on him in June 1820, with a letter of introduction from his brother in Frankfort, he said to him, "I understand nothing of music. This,"—patting his pocket, and rattling the loose coins therein—"is my music; we understand that on 'Change."

Money-making was the one pursuit and enjoyment of Rothschild's life. He cared less than many do for the money when it was made. "He had no taste or inclination," says one of his friends, "for what every Englishman seeks as soon as he has money to buy it—comfort in every respect His ambition was to arrive at his aim more quickly and more effectually than others, and to steer towards it with more energy. When his end was reached, it had lost all its charm for him, and he turned his never-wearying mind to something else." It was in the scramblings and fightings, the plots and tricks, of making money, not at all in the spending, not much in the hoarding of it, that he delighted.

"I hope," said a dinner-companion to him on one occasion, "I hope that your children are not too fond of money and business, to the exclusion of more important things. I am sure you would not wish that."

"I am sure I should wish that," he answered; "I wish them to give mind, and soul, and heart, and body—everything to business. That is the way to be happy. It requires a great deal of boldness, and a great deal of caution, to make a great fortune: and when you have got it, it requires ten times as much wit to keep it."

To all who were willing to work in this fashion, he was, after his fashion, a good friend. Some of the wealthiest commercial houses now in London owe their prosperity to the readiness with which Rothschild, seeing good business qualities in the young men around him, helped them on with his great influence. There were cases in which he went out of his way to put exceptional opportunities of money-making in the way of his favourites. Even his charities, according to his own confession, were eccentric, and chiefly indulged in for his own entertainment. "Sometimes, to amuse myself," he said, "I give a beggar a guinea. He thinks it is a mistake, and, for fear I should find it out, off he runs as hard as he can. I advise you to give a beggar a guinea sometimes; it is very amusing."

The great man's jokes were not very witty. One of the best of them owes its point to his Jewish pronunciation. At a Lord Mayor's dinner he sat next to a guest noted for his stinginess, who chanced to say that, for his part, he preferred mutton to venison. "Ah, I see." Rothschild answered; "you like mutton because it is sheep (cheap), and other people like venison because it is deer (dear)."

Another saying attributed to him gives evidence, if true, of some humour. Once, it is said, a German prince, visiting London, brought letters of credit to the banker. He was shown into the inner room of the famous countinghouse in St. Swithin's Lane, where Rothschild sat, busy with a heap of papers. The name being announced, Rothschild nodded, offered his visitor a chair, and then went on with the work before him. For this treatment the prince, who expected that everjthing should give way to one of his rank and dignity, was not prepared. Standing a minute or two, he exclaimed, "Did you not hear, sir, who I am? I am ______ (repeating his titles). "Oh, very well," said Rothschild; "take two chairs then."

At another time, two strangers were admitted into this same private room. They were tall foreigners, with mustachios and beards, such as were not often seen in the city thirty or forty years ago, and Rothschild, always timid, was frightened from the moment of their entrance. He put his own interpretation upon the excited movements with which they fumbled about in their pockets; and before the expected pistols could be produced, he had thrown a great ledger in the direction of their heads, and brought in a bevy of clerks by his cries of "Murder." The strangers were pinioned, and then, after long questionings and explanations, it appeared that they were wealthy bankers from the Continent; who, nervous in the presence of a banker so much more wealthy, had had some difficulty in finding the letters of introduction which they were to present.

During the latter years of his life, Rothschild was said to be always in fear of assassination. "You must be a very happy man, Mr Rothschild," said a guest, at one of the splendid banquets for which his Piccadilly house was famous, "Happy! me happy!" he exclaimed. "What, happy! when just as you are going to dine you have a letter placed in your hands, saying, 'If you do not send me £500 I will blow your brains out!' Me happy!"

Perhaps, however, Nathan Rothschild was as happy as any one as full of the cares of business as he was could be. He was a zealous moneymaker to the last. His father had directed that the house of Rothschild should continue united from generation to generation. Each of the brothers had a share in all the others' concerns. It was in furtherance of the general scheme of keeping the family as compact as possible, that, some time before, Nathan's youngest brother, James, had married one of his nieces. In 1836 it was resolved that Nathan's eldest son, Lionel, should marry one of his cousins, a daughter of Anselm Rothschild, of Frankfort. With that object the father and son went to Frankfort in June. But on the wedding-day Nathan fell ill. He died on the 28th of July, not quite sixty years of age. On the morning following his death, one of his own carrier-pigeons was shot near Brighton. When it was picked up there was found under one of its wings a scrap of paper with these words written on it, "II est mort."

None but his own kindred ever knew what was Rothschild's real wealth. The guesses ranged between £3,000,000 and £10,000,000.

He was buried in London, in a coffin "so handsomely carved and decorated, with large silver handles at both sides and ends, that it appeared more like a cabinet or splendid piece of furniture than a receptacle for the dead." The chief rabbi, who preached the funeral sermon, applauded in it the charity of Nathan Meyer Rothschild, who, during his lifetime, had intrusted him with some thousands of pounds for secret almsgiving. But that was all that the world ever heard of the rich man's use of his riches in any sort of disinterested charity, or in any way which, whether it did good to others or not, was not chosen chiefly for his own amusement or his own advantage.