nancial pirates, captains
of commercial jugglery, and political intriguers who made these feasts
opportunities for outlining their predatory campaigns against that
most anomalous of creatures, the common citizen.

It was about this table, at whose head always sat the richly gowned
Beaubien, that the inner circle of financial kings had gathered almost
nightly for years to rig the market, determine the price of wheat or
cotton, and develop mendacious schemes of stock-jobbery whose golden
harvests they could calculate almost to a dollar before launching. As
the wealth of this clique of financial manipulators swelled beyond all
bounds, so increased their power, until at last it could be justly
said that, when Ames began to dominate the Stock Exchange, the
Beaubien practically controlled Wall Street--and, therefore, in a
sense, Washington itself. But always with a tenure of control
dubiously dependent upon the caprices of the men who continued to pay
homage to her personal charm and keen, powerful intellect.

At the time of which we speak her power was at its zenith, and she
could with equal impunity decapitate the wealthiest, most aristocratic
society dame, or force the door of the most exclusive set for any
protegee who might have been kept long years knocking in vain, or
whose family name, perchance, headed a list of indictments for gross
peculations. At these unicameral meetings, held in the great, dark,
mahogany-wainscoted dining room of the Beaubien mansion, where a
single lamp of priceless workmanship threw a flood of light upon the
sumptuous table beneath and left the rest of the closely guarded room
shrouded in Stygian darkness, plans were laid and decrees adopted
which seated judges, silenced clergymen, elected senators, and
influenced presidents. There a muck-raking, hostile press was muffled.
There business opposition was crushed and competition throttled. There
tax rates were determined and tariff schedules formulated. There
public opinion was disrupted, character assassinated, and the
death-warrant of every threatening reformer drawn and signed. In a
word, there Mammon, in the _role_ of business, organized and
unorganized, legitimate and piratical, sat enthroned, with wires
leading into every mart of the world, and into every avenue of human
endeavor, be it social, political, commercial, or religious. These
wires were gathered together into the hands of one man, the directing
genius of the group, J. Wilton Am