not nervous, but remarkably cool. He is a
bachelor, of course, as families are expensive
things; but he keeps a carefully brushed
suit for evening dress, his plan being to dine
very often at the expense of his friends.
Five pounds invested with his tailor, some
three years ago, have paid him a very
respectable interest ever since. His omnibus-
hire is not much; his cab-fare even less;
for in wet weather he generally manages to
secure a friendly lift. His amusements are
selected from the national free list; and he
has none of the small vices which eat into
the heart of wealth. He is called a mean and
shabby hunks by those who fancy they have
caught a glimpse of his inner-life. His name
was never seen as a subscriber to a charitable
fund; but he is a benefactor to his country,
for all that. His savings are poured into
the great ocean of capital, which alone gives
food and employment to the labouring mass.

Such is more like the actual miser—(sometimes
male, sometimes female)—than the
wild, old, moping idiot, that we have clung to
so long. If we are to claim any credit as
depicters of human nature as it is, it is time
that we drove out the old puppet, and
welcomed in the new.

The next puppet to be sacrified is that
favourite variation of the miser,—the old
money-lender. We put him into a dingy
office that we never saw; gave him
parchments and mouldy furniture that he did
not want; and we made him aged, weird,
and grasping, which he never was. We
caused him to affect a disregard for
that business, by which he hoped to live, as
if the trade of selling money was different
from the trade of selling goods. We made
the shopkeeper-puppet cringing and
obsequious; but the money-lender puppet must
be retiring and severe. We told him to say
that he had no money himself, but he knew
a friend in the City who had. If a wine-
merchant had given such an answer to a
customer, we should at once have perceived
the absurdity of that. It was the old
economical mistake of regarding gold as a
commodity different from everything else.

We called our old money-lender puppet
Sixty Per Cent.; a singular name that was
based upon some vague tradition of his rates
for accommodation. We were told that the
usury laws had been long abolished; but we
scarcely understood what our informants
meant. We had been accustomed for so long
to connect money with old, withered puppets,
who ground down the needy for their own
selfish advantage, that we forgot all about
the law of supply and demand, and the
freedom which was open to the borrower of
looking for a cheaper market.

While we have been hoisting this miserable
caricature on high, the real money-lender
has been plying his trade, unconscious that
any banded brothers of genius have been
trying to gibbet him in effigy. There is
nothing very remarkable in this, when the
old puppet is compared with the living
model. The latter is stout, jolly, polite, a
man of the world, and not a retiring, morose
hermit. He is a father of a family, an
affectionate son, and a most exemplary husband.
He is always anxious to do business at the
market-price; properly shaved, in a clean
shirt with diamond studs, and generally in a
comfortable mansion. Far from being tender
about asking sixty per cent., he has often
demanded a hundred; and he has sometimes,
on the other hand, lent money at four-and-a-half.
It all resolves itself into a question of
security; and the lowest rates are found to
pay the best in the end. He sometimes
makes a show of plate upon his dinner-table,
and jewellery upon his wife and daughters at
the opera, which have been left with him as
substantial security for equally substantial
loans. This is a weakness, not a crime; and
is allowed for in the bill. Some traces of the
old persecuting stigma still hang about him
which have come down from the bad, dark
days of the early English Jews. If he makes
his mistakes—like other trades—and falls
into bankruptcy, never to rise again, the old
name will cling to him as he shuffles in
shabby clothes along the streets, and he will
be known as "that cursed money-lender" to
the end of his days.

Take him with all his virtues, and with all
his faults, he is still the actual money-lender
of the world; and the old false puppet must
be again driven out, to make way for the
new one, and the true.

The next puppet to be destroyed is one
that we ingeniously made by mixing the
miser and the money-lender. We boldly
called it a Capitalist; and the imposition
was never discovered beyond the narrow
limits of the class so falsely and imperfectly
portrayed. We made him thin and
parchment-faced, exact, methodical, cold, cautious,
gloomy, and curt; tyrannical to work-people
and inferiors; a grinder-down of labour; a
circurmventer of his brother men.

We gave him no imagination, no courage,
no sympathy: and, above all, no heart. We
sent him crawling about the city streets, bent
double with anxiety and age. We peopled
exchanges and market-places with such
melancholy shadows, until they became, in
appearance, the abodes of the damned. We
made him pace his small, dingy, counting-
house, waiting for an important post, like a
hungry tiger in his cage. We made his life
one never-ending rack, his capital a curse,
his occupation a round of torment, risk, and
loss. We made the line that divided him
from the gambler-puppet so narrow, that a
few slight touches sent him over the barrier;
while a few heavier touches converted him
into the forger, the felon, and the suicide!

All this time the real capitalist, an open-
hearted, bold, cheerful, dashing creature, has
been devouring his mid-day pastry at a popular