THE RISE OF THE HOUSE OF ROTHSCHILD—Count Egon Caesar Corti—Cosmopolitan ($5).
The Family. "Remain faithful to the law of Moses. Remain united to the end. Consult your mother. Intermarry."
Thus an old Jew, to his five sons. The House of Rothschild, born in the Frankfurt Ghetto "between the city wall and a ditch," was governed by rules as strict as those of a military academy.
All the sons were faithful, and became in time the chief strength and support of the descendants of Moses. All the sons were united though they scattered to the ends of Europe for the first international banking concern. Probably they came from their magnificent palaces to see Amschel the Younger, head of the House, and to consult the aged Gudula, Die Uralte, an illiterate Sibyl who had vowed never to quit her chair by the window "save only for the tomb." Finally, although Count Corti does not note it, 46 of the descendants of Meyer Amschel had intermarried before the 19th century was out, in a burst of shocking eugenics and sound economics.
As the family was fitted and welded, smoothed and polished, so was the Fortune. Little by little, Meyer Amschel wormed his way into the financial counsels of William IV, Elector of Hesse, until at length he held the strings of that ruler's considerable money bags. The needs of princes first, and later the needs of governments, were the opportunities of the Rothschilds. The wars of the Allies against Napoleon, the collection of the French indemnity, the efforts of Metternich to crush every outbreak of liberal ideas—all these required money. The Rothschilds provided it, at a profit.
This book, with its careful tracing of the Fortune's growth in each successive European crisis, is answer enough to the Waterloo legend. For years Europe believed that Nathan himself posted from Waterloo to London, took his accustomed place by a pillar on the Exchange and stood there, a picture of dejection and despair, while his agents bought what the world sold in frenzy, creating the Fortune in a single morning. Count Corti does not trouble to disprove the story; the Fortune was established long before Waterloo, and weathered the Napoleonic cyclone with its turbulent aftermath.
Not that the incident would have been impossible. The House was never troubled by ethical problems except when integrity was obviously the best policy. Metternich made the brothers Barons; they bought and fawned their way into the society of five capitals. But they remained shrewd moneylenders, with the noses and eyes of hawks, speaking and writing an uncouth jargon of many dialects of French, German, Yiddish. Count Corti quotes one contemporary comment upon a Rothschild: "King of Jews and Jew of Kings." Another, better, he omits: "Princes in the parlor and pawnbrokers in the kitchen."
Parlor and kitchen together, the financing of wars and the support of the bastard sons of kings, made the House of Rothschild master of a chaotic Europe for half a century.