CHAPTER V.
The position occupied by Jacob Welse was certainly an anomalous one.
He was a giant trader in a country without commerce, a ripened product of the nineteenth century flourishing in a society as primitive as that of the Mediterranean vandals.

A captain of industry and a splendid monopolist, he dominated the most independent aggregate of men ever drawn together from the ends of the earth.

An economic missionary, a commercial St.Paul, he preached the doctrines of expediency and force.
Believing in the natural rights of man, a child himself of democracy, he bent all men to his absolutism.

Government of Jacob Welse, for Jacob Welse and the people, by Jacob Welse, was his unwritten gospel.
Single-handed he had carved out his dominion till he gripped the domain of a dozen Roman provinces.

At his ukase the population ebbed and flowed over a hundred thousand miles of territory, and cities sprang up or disappeared at his bidding.
Yet he was a common man.