Trollope's "It Is What It Is" View of Capitalism in THE WAY WE LIVE NOW.

“When Melmotte’s affairs were ultimately wound up there was found to be nearly enough property to satisfy all his proved liabilities. Very many men started up with huge claims, asserting that they had been robbed, and in the confusion it was hard to ascertain who had been robbed, or who had simply been unsuccessful in their attempts to rob others.”

Trollope’s satire here is well taken. In a speculation filled, litigious capitalist society, the righting of large scale unjust enrichment is the occasion for a greater number of smaller unjust enrichments making economic justice an ever receding horizon.

  When Mr. Brehgert, the honest Jew, gets his investment capital back out of the Melmotte debacle, he hands his money over to a lawyer so as to better manage and protect the fortune his too trusting business sense almost lost. 

 “I shall just make Squercum [an unscrupulous but skilled lawyer] allow me so much a month, and I shall have all the bills and that kind of thing sent to him, and he will do everything, and pull me up if I’m getting wrong. I like Squercum.”
            “Won’t he rob you, old fellow?” suggested Nidderdale.            “Of course he will; - but he won’t let any one else do it. One has to be plucked, but it’s everything to have it done on a system. If he’ll only let me have ten shillings out of every sovereign I think I can get along.” (760)

            This exchange sounds like an especially trenchant “investment joke” conveying the endemic and systematic, but ultimately workable corruption of the new capitalist world order. Berghert can only protect his money from crooks by hiring one to steal from him. Those who recognize how much they have to gain by allowing a minimum of illegality – even when it cuts into their profits – are the ones who will thrive in the new world order. What I like about this scene is that it refuses the notion that Melmotte’s scam-capitalism is somehow expunged from the world of the novel once his Ponzi scheme fails. Melmotte is not the criminal economic aberration that, once excluded, restores the otherwise smooth running and just system of exchange. Quite the contrary, Melmotte’s dishonest speculation, his preying on the investors that trust him, is still the natural order of the novel’s economic universe if to a smaller, more manageable degree. Melmotte may be dead, but Brehgert and Nidderdale are still living in a world made in Melmotte’s image. Trollope isn’t jazzed about this new world order. But he seems to recognize that it is one in which we can live happily once, like Brehgert, we learn the rules; thus, Trollope accepts capitalism with a sighing eye roll.