l Street means to
have been a Childe Roland who, indeed, to the Dark Tower did actually
come. The horn that such a victor lifts to his mouth has been wrought,
as one might say, from the bones of some comrade slain in the same
arduous pilgrimage, and the peal of triumph which his lips evoke from
it might be called a blending of countless wretched cries from the
lips of other perished strugglers in the same daring design. Great
success with him, if he achieves it, will be--what? An almost Titanic
power to torture and affright at will hundreds, thousands of his
fellow-men. He will have before him the example of a man who locked up
$12,500,000 in one of his riotous assaults against honest
stock-exchange dealing--money notoriously not his own. He may desire
to imitate that course of behavior which had Samuel Bowles abducted
and unlawfully imprisoned because he published in his paper the truth
about Wall Street trickery and villany, or which sandbagged Dorman B.
Eaton in the streets of New York for having fought with legal weapons
of honest denunciation that malodorous craft of a compact between
incarnate kleptomania in finance and the unspeakable "boss" burglar of
Tammany Ring.

But needless are further details of those abominations on which our
rising young aspirant may turn an envious eye. He cannot but acquaint
himself with the whole horrid list of chicanery, since its items are
rungs of the ladder on which he himself may hereafter seek to mount.
If he aims to be a great Wall Street spider he must perforce fully
acquaint himself with what material will go toward the spinning of
that baleful tissue, his proprietary web. It must be woven, this web,
out of perjuries and robberies. Its fibres must mean the heart-strings
torn from many a deluded stockholder's breast, and the morning dew
that glitters on it must be the tears of widows and orphans. The laws
of a great republic are the foliage (alas, of a tree not too sturdy!)
on which its devilish meshes are wrought! There is no exaggeration in
stating that the financial history of the past three decades in
America has been one of peerless turpitude. Rome under the dying
glories of the empire scarcely parallels its knavish gluttonies of
illegal seizure. And Wall Street has been the boiling point of all
this infectious train of outrages against a patient people--one that
presumes to rate itself really democratic, and to sneer at countries
over seas in which to-day a Credit Mobil