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Show The Kind of Man Needed. i Could William Sharon be restored to life with his intellectual faculties as they were thirty thir-ty years ago, he would be more to San Francisco ! today than would a great loan from the govern ment or from the rich of the east. A great many men can see what is needed, a great many men could tell what could he done if there were only millions to do it. William Sharon was a man that could not only see at a glance what it was necessary nec-essary to do, but with the means at hand could figure out how to go to work. He picked up the Comstock when it was in almost a slough of despond. There were no great fortunes then as there are now, but he planned to have tho men who did the work on the Comstock 'at the same time pay for the developments. He l)aid them generous wages; at the same time the coast was so fond of speculative propositions that not only the miners but the servant girls and host-lers host-lers and professional men not only of Virginia City but of California Invested in the stocks. A great many of them lost and some, of them won, an( for ten yeurs whatever their business was, the one thing that the majority of California and Nevada thought about was Comstock stocks, what , was best to buy, what was best to sell, what would do to short and what would do to hold on to. If he could be back in San Francisco today he would know within three days the condition ot every man, who owns property there, what his means to Improve that property, who to help, who to buy out; there would be a perfect organization, organiza-tion, a community of Interest and the work would start and would not stop. His strong suit was to hold his nerve when other men wanted to let down, not only hold his own but brace the others f) and compel work to go on. He told tho writer of this once that he planned to build up a great empire on the Comstock, tnat he did reasonably well but nothing to what he would have done had he had full swing, anl he pded: "Conservatism in business is the be&t feature fea-ture in the world, only that like everything else y wants to be hold In control, and there are times when absolute conservatism makes imperative the boldest kind of investments." And he added: "I am not often deceived in men. I have been betrayed here by two or three men, but 1 would not have been had not other men in partial authority insisted that my judgment of certain other men was wrong, that they were true as steel, when I knew they would betray me and mine at the very first opportunity." When the Bank of California failed he was the master spirit who brought order out of the chaos, restored the bank and made it one of the great institutions of the west. His enemies said that he had a selfish purpose in doing it. Ho probably had, because it was a place where pnil-anthropy pnil-anthropy would not do. It was cold-blooded business. busi-ness. He pursued the plan to make the business win, alid the result showed not only the clearness of his judgment and his executive ability, but it showed a generalship as splendid as was ever manifested by a great soldier in the crisis of a doubtful battle. San Francisco needs a William Sharon today more than any other one thing. |