He has come into the neighbourhood with the character of a man worth a million pounds, who is to make everybody's fortune; at this time, however, he is not worth a shilling of his own, though he flashes about dexterously three or four thousand pounds, part of which sum he has obtained by specious pretences, and part from certain individuals who are his confederates.

But in the year forty- nine, he is really in possession of the fortune which he and his agents pretended he was worth ten years before--he is worth a million pounds.

By what means has he come by them?
By railroad contracts, for which he takes care to be paid in hard cash before he attempts to perform them, and to carry out which he makes use of the sweat and blood of wretches who, since their organisation, have introduced crimes and language into England to which it was previously almost a stranger--by purchasing, with paper, shares by hundreds in the schemes to execute which he contracts, and which are of his own devising; which shares he sells as soon as they are at a high premium, to which they are speedily forced by means of paragraphs, inserted by himself and agents, in newspapers devoted to his interest, utterly reckless of the terrible depreciation to which they are almost instantly subjected.

But he is worth a million pounds, there can be no doubt of the fact--he has not made people's fortunes, at least those whose fortunes it was said he would make; he has made them away: but his own he has made, emphatically made it; he is worth a million pounds.

Hurrah for the millionaire! The clown who views the pandemonium of red brick which he has built on the estate which he has purchased in the neighbourhood of the place of his grand _debut_, in which every species of architecture, Greek, Indian, and Chinese, is employed in caricature--who hears of the grand entertainment he gives at Christmas in the principal dining-room, the hundred wax-candles, the waggon-load of plate, and the oceans of wine which form parts of it, and above all the two ostrich poults, one at the head, and the other at the foot of the table, exclaims, "Well! if he a'n't bang up, I don't know who be; why, he beats my lord hollow!" The mechanic of the borough town, who sees him dashing through the streets in an open landau, drawn by four milk-white horses, amidst its attendant outriders; his wife, a monster of a woman, by his side, stout as the wife of Tamerlane, who weighed twenty stone, and bedizened out like her whose person shone with the jewels of plundered Persia, stares with silent wonder, and at last exclaims, "That's the man for my vote!" You tell the clown that the man of the mansion has contributed enormously to corrupt the rural innocence of England; you point to an incipient branch railroad, from around which the accents of Gomorrah are sounding, and beg him to listen for a moment, and then close his ears.