d more than half his sentence
(less commutation), Miller a broken man, received his pardon, and went
back to his wife and child. When Governor Higgins performed this act of
executive clemency, many honest folk in Brooklyn and elsewhere loudly
expressed their indignation. District Attorney Jerome did not escape
their blame. Was this contemptible thief, this meanest of all mean
swindlers, who had stolen hundreds of thousands to be turned loose on
the community before he had served half his sentence? It was an outrage!
A disgrace to civilization! Reader, how say you?

VI

A Study in Finance

"He that maketh haste to be rich shall not be innocent."
--PROVERBS 28:20.

The victim of moral overstrain is the central figure in many novels and
countless magazine stories. In most of them he finally repents him fully
of his sins past and returns to his former or to some equally desirable
position, to lead a new and better life. The dangers and temptations of
the "Street" are, however, too real and terrible to be studied other
than in actuality, and the fall of hundreds of previously honest young
men owing to easily remedied conditions should teach its lesson, not
only to their comrades, but to their employers as well. The ball and
chain, quite as often as repentance and forgiveness, ends their
experience.

No young man takes a position in a banking-house with the deliberate
intention of becoming an embezzler. He knows precisely, as well as does
the reader, that if he listens to the whisper of temptation he is
lost--and so does his employer. Yet the employer, who would hold himself
remiss if he allowed his little boy to have the run of the jam-closet
and then discovered that the latter's lips bore evidence of petty
larceny, or would regard himself as almost criminally negligent if he
placed a priceless pearl necklace where an ignorant chimney-sweep might
fall under the hypnotism of its shimmer, will calmly allow a condition
of things in his own brokerage or banking office where a
fifteen-dollars-a-week clerk may have free access to a million dollars'
worth of negotiable securities, and even encourage the latter by
occasional "sure" tips to take a flyer in the market.

It is a deplorable fact that the officers of certain companies
occasionally "unload" undesirable securities upon their employees, and,
in order to boom or create a "movement" in a certain stock, will induce
the persons under their control to purchase