CHAPTER V

MY MORALS

The concrete evidence of my success as represented by my accumulated capital—­outside of my uptown dwelling house—­amounts, as I have previously said, to about seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars.  This is invested principally in railroad and mining stocks, both of which are subject to considerable fluctuation; and I have also substantial holdings in industrial corporations.  Some of these companies I represent professionally.  As a whole, however, my investments may be regarded as fairly conservative.  At any rate they cause me little uneasiness.

My professional income is regular and comes with surprisingly little effort.  I have as clients six manufacturing corporations that pay me retainers of twenty-five hundred dollars each, besides my regular fees for services rendered.  I also represent two banks and a trust company.

All this is fixed business and most of it is attended to by younger men, whom I employ at moderate salaries.  I do almost no detail work myself, and my junior partners relieve me of the drawing of even important papers; so that, though I am constantly at my office, my time is spent in advising and consulting.

I dictate all my letters and rarely take a pen in my hand.  Writing has become laborious and irksome.  I even sign my correspondence with an ingenious rubber stamp that imitates my scrawling signature beyond discovery.  If I wish to know the law on some given point I press a button and tell my managing clerk what I want.  In an hour or two he hands me the authorities covering the issue in question in typewritten form.  It is extraordinarily simple and easy.  Yet only yesterday I heard of a middle-aged man, whom I knew to be a peculiarly well-equipped all-around lawyer, who was ready to give up his private practice and take a place in any reputable office at a salary of thirty-five hundred dollars!

Most of my own time is spent in untangling mixed puzzles of law and fact, and my clients are comparatively few in number, though their interests are large.  Thus I see the same faces over and over again.  I lunch daily at a most respectable eating club; and here, too, I meet the same men over and over again.  I rarely make a new acquaintance downtown; in fact I rarely leave my office during the day.  If I need to confer with any other attorney I telephone.  There are dozens of lawyers in New York whose voices I know well—­yet whose faces I have never seen.

My office is on the nineteenth floor of a white marble building, and I can look down the harbor to the south and up the Hudson to the north.  I sit there in my window like a cliffdweller at the mouth of his cave.  When I walk along Wall Street I can look up at many other hundreds of these caves, each with its human occupant.  We leave our houses uptown, clamber down into a tunnel called the Subway, are shot five miles or so through the earth, and debouch into an elevator that rushes us up to our caves.  Only between my house and the entrance to the Subway am I obliged to step into the open air at all.  A curious life!  And I sit in my chair and talk to people in multitudes of other caves near by, or caves in New Jersey, Washington or Chicago.