“The Speculations of Jefferson Thorpe”
Money prescribes one’s exact social standing among humanity: “As I say, it was when Jeff made money that they saw how gifted he was, and when he lost it,—but still, there's no need to go into that. I believe it's something the same in other places too.” Evidently, money indicates the worth that individuals ascribe to a person. Jefferson Thorpe’s import upsurges as result of the money he amasses. Correspondingly, his ranking shrinks when he mislays his money.
Mining exemplifies a gripping industrial revolution which guarantees to transmute the economic standing of the Marisposa populace: “The fever just caught the town and ran through it! Within a fortnight they put a partition down Robertson's Coal and Wood Office and opened the Mariposa Mining Exchange, and just about every man on the Main Street started buying scrip. Then presently young Fizzlechip, who had been teller in Mullins's Bank and that everybody had thought a worthless jackass before, came back from the Cobalt country with a fortune, and loafed round in the Mariposa House in English khaki and a horizontal hat, drunk all the time, and everybody holding him up as an example of what it was possible to do if you tried.” The palpable economic reform at Mariposa is emblematical of the social kinesis that is attributed to money. All the residents regardless of their rank yearn for a mobility that is why they are stimulated by the mining fever. The mining activates an economic explosion where the forecasts of making substantial money are extraordinary.
Jefferson’s Thorpe is a fatality of fraud, for he is fleeced all the money he accumulated from mining: “You remember the Cuban Land frauds in New York and Porforio Gomez shooting the detective, and him and Maximo Morez getting clear away with two hundred thousand? No, of course you don't; why, even in the city papers it only filled an inch or two of type, and anyway the names were hard to remember. That was Jeff's money—part of it. Mullins got the telegram, from a broker or someone, and he showed it to Jeff just as he was going up the street with an estate agent to look at a big empty lot on the hill behind the town—the very place for these incurables. And Jeff went back to the shop so quiet—have you ever seen an animal that is stricken through, how quiet it seems to move?” Jefferson mislays his money because he is duped to believe that he would reap more by capitalizing on the ‘Cuban Land.’ His quandary accentuates that perils that are integral in business investments. Some speculations can be lucrative whereas others could be downright losses. Accordingly, all investments are no contracts of colossal revenues especially in markets where deception is extraordinary.
“The Whirlwind Campaign in Mariposa”
“The Whirlwind Campaign in Mariposa” exemplifies an apposite logistic approach: “within a week they had the whole organization on foot. There was the Grand Central Committee and six groups or sub-committees of twenty men each, and a captain for every group. They had it all arranged on the lines most likely to be effective.” Subcommittees underwrite the segregation of obligations which results in appropriate synchronization among various groups. Had there not been sub-committees it would have been problematic to harmonize the engagements of the various occupations that are constituents of the campaign.
Besides, the tactic of operation sponsors the adeptness of the campaign: “It was all organized so that every team had its headquarters, two of them in each of the three hotels—one upstairs and one down. And it was arranged that there would be a big lunch every day, to be held in Smith's caff, round the corner of Smith's Northern Health Resort and Home of the Wissanotti Angler,—you know the place. The lunch was divided up into tables, with a captain for each table to see about things to drink, and of course all the tables were in competition with one another. In fact the competition was the very life of the whole thing.” The explicit headquarters expedites the operative proficiency of the different subcommittees. The headquarters are the centers of operation that nurture permanence of operation which would have contracted had they transformed their operational centers often. The devolution of procedures endorses the harmony of the complete campaign.
