Beit went into the Jameson Raid at Rhodes's request, but he protested against every stage of that mad and stupid enterprise. Indeed, the story of Jameson's Raid would only show that Beit was intensely loyal to Rhodes, even when he believed him to be entirely in the wrong. Beit was a good type of business man. He had an instinctive aversion to politics and raidings, and was chiefly interested in such enterprises as could be shown in a profit and loss account.
But there was another side of his nature: like many Jews, he had a real love and understanding of music; and he admired pictures and bronzes, too, though he was anything but a good judge of them. At bottom Beit was a sentimentalist, and did not count or reckon when his feelings were really touched. This was the fine side of the man, the side through which Rhodes used him, the side which, by contrast with his love of money, showed the breadth and height of his humanity. Of all the millionaires I had chanced to meet, Beit was the best. He had a great deal of the milk of human kindness in him, quick and deep sympathies, too, sympathies even with poverty, perhaps through his own early struggles; and if any plan of a social Utopia had been brought forward in his time, no one would have detected its weakness more quickly that Beit, no one would have seen its good points more clearly or been more willing to help it to accomplishment.
After Cecil Rhodes's death, I had written an article about him and about his will, in which I declared that posthumous benefactions seemed to me no proof of benevolence because they lacked the savor of sacrifice, and, to use Bacon's phrase, "were but the painted sepulchre of alms." Beit expressed his astonishment at this criticism, and thought there was a great deal of unselfish nobility shown in Rhodes's will, and added that he only hoped to make as good use of whatever he might possess when he died. Indeed, when Beit died in 1906, he left over two million pounds to charity.
It was in the late summer of 1896, after my return from South Africa, that A.
M. Broadley called on me one day in the office of the Saturday Review and brought a new interest into my life. I had known Broadley for a good many years and had long been convinced of his business ability, as well as his journalistic skill. He told me that he was making a good deal of money with Ernest Terah Hooley, whom I had just heard of as the successful promotor of the Dunlop Company. Broadley offered to bring me up to see him, suggesting that I should find it to my profit to help him in his financial schemes. Nothing loath, I went with Broadley and was introduced to Hooley at the Midland Grand Hotel. To my surprise, I learned that the financier had taken the whole of the first floor of the Midland Grand Hotel for his offices. I don't know how many rooms there were, but I believe there were certainly fifty; and from ten o'clock in the morning until six at night, almost every room was filled with people who had axes to grind. Hooley flitted from room to room, always good humored and decisively quick in dealing with the most heterogeneous projects.
At one moment he was discussing the raising of a loan of sixteen millions with Li Hung Chang on the security of the Chinese customs, and with him was Sir Robert Hart, the Englishman who knew more about China than any other living westerner. In Hooley's private room, one would meet Arthur du Cros who had more to do with the successful Dunlop promotion than any other member of his family, and who afterwards became a member of Parliament and was knighted, I believe, for this achievement: an alert, intelligent man, a good organizer, but intensely combative. In another room a nobleman who had come to sell Hooley the Prince's yacht Britannia; in still another room, a persuasive Spaniard, who appeared with the news that sugar had been made from sea water, and all he wanted was a million for the discovery. From room to room went Hooley, a rather tall, well-made man with black hair, black beard, black moustache, a long beaked Jewish nose, and long half-closed Jewish eyes, well dressed and always polite without a particle of "side," too earnestly busy to show any conceit. He told me at once that Broadley had been very useful to him and he hoped that I should be. I replied that I was quite willing to follow my friend Broadley's lead; and after two minutes' talk Hooley hurried away to another room.
From that time on I went up to the Midland Grand Hotel practically twice a week, and soon became conversant with Hooley's financial methods and with many of Hooley's ideas. He certainly knew more about the value of land in England than any one I had ever seen, and he had a perfectly open mind for any and every scheme, and was most easy of access. In his bankruptcy two years afterwards, the official receiver proved that Hooley had made over six millions of hard cash in just these two years. Hooley himself always said that he had made a million and a half over the Dunlop promotion alone. His astounding success can only be explained by the fact that he was lifted on the most astonishing wave of prosperity that perhaps has ever been known in any country-never in my thirty years of residence has London known so prosperous a period; and Hooley was an optimist to the fingers' tips, suited perfectly to the time, without a suspicion that there could be a change in feeling or a slump in finance.
When I got to know him pretty well, I found to my amazement that he had a man named Martin Rucker for a partner, who never helped him in any way; and it was months before I learned that Rucker had been a bicycle agent and had put some money in with Hooley at the very beginning and had remained with him as a sort of deadweight ever afterwards. It was he, in fact, who brought about Hooley's first fall.
I soon got the idea that the best companies to promote would be those which had spent most in advertising in the past and were therefore widely known. I put this idea to Hooley, and he accepted it at once. "You ought to turn Bovril into a company," I said, "because every one knows of it and it would go like wildfire; and Schweppe's soda water, too."
"Go to it," said Hooley; "get me an option on any such concern, bring it to me, and you can count on a fair deal."
I immediately went to work to get to know the owners of Bovriclass="underline" it was really in the hand of one person, a Mr. Johnson, I think. Coming from Hooley, I was admirably received and soon found that the company was making something over a hundred thousand pounds a year, and that they wanted a good deal over a million for it. I went with the news to Hooley, who told me to go ahead if the figures were correct. I returned and began to bargain; the seller wanted about a million and a half, and I wanted to bring him to a million and a quarter. We had practically decided on a million and three hundred and fifty thousand pounds, when one day he laughed at me and told me that he had accepted an offer of two millions that day, that it was all settled and that Hooley was the purchaser. I drove immediately to the Midland Grand Hotel to see Hooley and found it was all true.
"You were too slow, my boy," he said, "much too slow: another man told me he could get it for two millions and I told him to put it through, and I gave him a check as deposit."
"You have done me out of the ten percent which you promised me," I said,
"because I was trying to get it under a million and a half, and it was practically settled."
"Don't talk like that: " cried Hooley, "do you wish to show your brains? In that room there are twenty financiers, all rich men; you know more about Bovril than almost any one; you have been at it over a fortnight; go in and persuade them that two millions is a fair price and I will give you ten thousand at once.