A CHEQUERED CAREER.

Dunstan Times, Issue 1172, 15 August 1884, Page 3

A CHEQUERED CAREER.

There died iu Benin, on June 1, a man whose name was once as notorious as it afterwards came to he almost complete l / forgotten, Dr Henry Bethel Strousberg. Born of a poor Jewish family in East Piussia, the deceased was a seif made man in e»ery sense of the term; and, like most persons of this class, he bore about him to the last the unmistakable stamp of the fact that he had beeu the architect of his own fortune. Emigrating to London at an early age, as may he gathered from a sort of autobiograpo v or “ apologia pro vita men," which he pu Lished after his fall from the giddy financial peak to which he had clambered rather than climsd, he first found an outlet for his versatile and exuberant resources in the field of j urnalism, especially of art criticism From criticising work of a-t he passe I to dealing in them, and established touch with the financial world by endeavouring to negotiate the sale of German pictures in England. Having acquired the confidence of some English capitalists, he was then entrusted by them with the construction of a railway in his native province or East Prussia ; am then, settling in Berlin, he built in quick suce >ssion a series of minor lines in the same region, contriving by these various transactions to pocket enormous sun s of money. He purchased mines in Westphaia, bought estates in Bohemia and elsewhere, and bud; a oalatial mansion in Berlin, now the British Embassy. But that his pace had been much too fast was prove ! by his failure to execute his contract for the construction of the Roumanian railways; and then followed some desperate attempts to retrieve his fori ones, which resulted in his bankruptcy and his detention for nearly a year io a Prussian gaol; and then he fell, like Lucifer, never to rise again. A year or two ago lie founded a hj Ifpenuy newspaper, the Kleine Journ I, favourable to the Government. But his luck had wholly left him, and transferring the enterprise to other hands, he removed to Loudon, whence he again returned to Berlin a few weeks since, completely broken in fortunes, but not in spirit, only to die. Prince Bismark himself was always ready to admit that Dr Strousberg was a man of extraordinary energy and fertility of mental resources ; and had his moral and intellectual faculties been anything like equally balanced, his life’s tale would doubtless have bam different.