for loans; and the reconstitution of the
capital of the Bank of France." Monsieur
Mirès gives himself the credit—such as it is—
of having suggested the first of these schemes,
by the practical but incomplete attempt which
he made between 1850 and 1853, under the
title of Caisse des Actions Réunies; his share
in the second was not, he asserts, less direct;
and he claims the merit of having set the third
on foot by propositions made by him to the
Bank of France, which, though not directly
accepted, were afterwards partially adopted. These
circumstances are recalled by Monsieur Mirès
"because they add to the services which he has
rendered to industry, since the month of
September, 1848," when he undertook the direction
of the Journal des Chemins de Fer, which had
ceased to appear a few weeks after the revolution
of February.

For this newspaper, on the editing of which
he greatly prides himself—as well he may—
Monsieur Mirès gave a trifle more than a
thousand francs (say, forty-five pounds sterling). His
first care, he tells us, was to reassure the public
mind, to restore depressed confidence in the
value of railway shares, and to prevent their
being sold at a ruinous price. His process in
editing resembled the literary arrangement
between the King of Prussia and Voltaire. "At
first," says Monsieur Mirès, "I experienced
some difficulty in rendering my thoughts so
as to convey the impression I desired. I
wrote the articles such as I conceived them,
and then handed them to an editor, who
corrected the style. But, thanks to daily
perseverance for several years, I succeeded at last
in expressing my ideas with a facility I never
expected when I first became the proprietor of
the journal."

This was not his sole success. Monsieur Mirès
succeeded in persuading the public that the best
thing they could do was to take shares in
certain companies of his formation. The first of
these was called "La Caisse des Actions
Réunies," and the object of it was the creation of
a financial society, the capital of which was to
be employed in buying shares at a favourable
moment, in order to sell them again at a profit
to be divided amongst the subscribers. Incessant
advertising, with the promise of a profit
ranging from thirty to forty per cent,
rendered this project successful—to Monsieur
Mirès certainly, if not to the shareholders—for,
at the expiration of three years when the affairs
of the society were wound up, he was in a
condition to enter upon speculations of the greatest
magnitude. By that time he had bought two
more newspapers, Le Pays and Le Constitutionnel;
and, having thus got two of the most
influential organs ot the press in his power—
with Monsieur Ie Vicomte de la Guerronière as
editor-in-chief of the first-named journal—he
took his full swing. For these two newspapers
Monsieur Mirès paid, he says, 2,700,000 fr.,
and having added 300,000 fr. more, he created a
company, with a capital of 3,000,000 fr., which,
for nine years, produced an average of more
than ten per cent. Something must have paid
Monsieur Mirès well to put him in a condition,
in the course of three years, of buying a
property worth 120,000l. sterling.

From this time forward we near nothing more
of operations on an ordinary scale; all figures not
expressed in millions are passed over as "vulgar
fractions." Thus, in 1852, the city of Paris
wanted a loan of 50,000,000 fr.; all the great
financial influences contended for it, and the
adjudication was made to a firm with which
Monsieur Mirès had combined. Again, in
1853, Monsieur Mirès entered into arrangements
with the "Crédit foncier" of the two
cities of Marseilles and Nevers to supply each
of them with 24,000,000 fr.; but here the
contracts were annulled through the interposition
of certain powerful financiers in Paris,
and the result was a loss to Monsieur Mirès
of 500,000 fr. He complains of this loss; but
what was it to the man whose speculations
"for the account," in the course of the four
last years of his career, amounted to the
incredible sum of 60,880,000l. sterling? The
grand affair of 1853 was the formation of the
"Caisse Générale des Chemins de Fer" (General
Railway Banking Company), the founders
of which were the Baron de Pontalba and
Messieurs Blaise and Solar, the bankers. A
project of this nature could not, as a matter
of course, get on without the co-operation
of Monsieur Mirès; and, in an evil hour
(according to his own account), he consented to
take the place of Monsieur Blaise; the financial
management (or "raison sociale") being
constituted by J. Mirès and Co., the "Co."
being Monsieur Solar, who had the wit not to
wait for his trial when he and Monsieur Mirès
were first inculpated.

The capital of this new company was originally
only twelve millions of francs, but it was
speedily increased to fifty millions; and, with
this amount for the base of his operations,
Monsieur Mirès "went at it." There was,
first of all, the purchase of the collieries of
Portes and Senechas, with the construction of
the necessary railway, for supplying Marseilles
with coal at a greatly diminished rate. Then
came the iron foundries of St. Louis, in the
suburbs of Marseilles, worked with ores of Elba
and the coke of Portes; an enterprise subsidiary
to the collieries. After this, ensued the
contract for lighting Marseilles with gas—the four
undertakings being fused into one company.
There would have been two more schemes, the
purchase of ground in Marseilles for new docks,
and a network of railways, called "le Réseau
Pyrenéen," if, from some unexplained cause of
hostility, the successive Ministers of Public
Works (MM. Magne and Rouher) had not
refused their consent to the sale of the one, or the
cession of the other, to Monsieur Mirès. That
this refusal should have been persisted in,
surprises Monsieur Mirès excessively. "I never
could discover how this hostility originated:
the proprietor of journals devoted to the
defence of the policy of the government, I had