“Grass growing at the door of the New York Stock Exchange,” said Harbinger, grinning warily as one does at a joke that is both bad and irresistible. The origin of the grass was obvious. An untidy horse had been fed at that spot from a nose bag and some of the oats that were spilled had sprouted in a few ounces of silt gathered in a crevice at the base of the curbstone.
The incident gave me a morose turn of thought. As a jest it was pitiable. What had happened to people to abase their faith in themselves and in each other? Simple believing seemed everywhere bankrupt. Nobody outside of it believed in Wall Street. That you might understand. But here was Wall Street nurturing in fun a symbol of its own decay, and by this sign not believing in itself. Harbinger denounced the Stock Exchange speculators who depressed the price of Great Midwestern shares and circulated rumors damaging the railroad’s credit. But did Harbinger himself believe in Great Midwestern? No. The Great Midwestern did not believe in itself. Its own president did not believe in it. He was busily advertising his disbelief in the whole railroad business. Why had he no faith in the railroad business? Because people had power over railroads and he disbelieved in people. Therefore, people disbelieved in him.
I was saying to myself that I had yet to meet a man with downright faith in anything when I thought of Galt. He believed in the country. I remembered vividly what he said about it on the ferryboat. It was rich and nobody would believe it. He believed also in Great Midwestern, for he was buying the stock in the face of those ugly rumors.
The fact of this one man’s solitary believing seemed very remarkable to me at that instant. In the perspectives of times and achievement it became colossal.
The president was in Chicago on two errands. One was to hold a solemn quarterly conference with the operating officials on the ground. There was supposed to be much merit in having it take place on the ground. The first time I heard the locution it made me think of Indian chiefs debating around a camp fire. The executive offices in New York were more than a thousand miles from the Great Midwestern’s first rail’s end. It does not matter so much where a railway’s brains are; but its other organs must remain where they naturally belong, and that is why all the operating departments were in Chicago. Four times a year the brains were present in the physical sense. At all other times the operating officials either brought their problems to New York, solved them on the spot, or put them in a pigeon hole to await the next conference.