onal and savings-banks and trust and insurance companies
to control practically unlimited amounts of such funds. Once in control
of these funds dollars could be absolutely "made" at will by the three
following steps: 1st. Using the money in these institutions to acquire
properties. 2d. Consolidating such properties on an inflated basis, and
selling them to the people (who, in fact, already owned them; because
they owned the funds with which they had been purchased); and, 3d, by
stock-market trickery scaring their owners into re-selling them at an
enormous shrinkage from the price they had paid. To understand a
situation with "Standard Oil" is to act, and twenty years ago it began
to weave a net to secure control of the four classes of institutions I
have named.

Its first move was to establish a great corporation, the Standard Oil
Company, and make its stock, 1,000,000 shares, sell at from $650 to $800
per share, or $650,000,000 to $800,000,000. It kept its affairs
mysteriously secret, it paid enormous dividends, and from time to time
it caused to be published broadcast throughout the world the statement
that it was held in such value by its creators, the Rockefellers,
Rogers, etc, that they continued to own all but a few shares of the
entire capital. To prove that there could be no doubt of such continued
ownership, the public's attention was repeatedly called to the fact that
the Standard Oil Company was the only great corporation which did not
allow its shares to be traded in upon any of the stock-exchanges. As a
matter of fact, though they are not traded in on the regular
stock-exchanges, they are actively bought and sold daily on the New York
"Curb."

At the height of the recent financial storm word went round that the
crafts of three over-night-made multimillionaires, men foremost in the
seventh group of "Standard Oil" votaries, were in the trough of the
financial sea and headed for the breakers, which were already strewn
with the wrecks of the people's savings. Following closely on the heels
of these stories came the astounding one that each of these enormously
rich men had, in his endeavors to raise large amounts of cash, disclosed
among his assets blocks of "Standard Oil" stock ranging from 5,000 to
20,000 shares each. Hardly had the public heard this before all
financialdom knew that the storm-tossed crafts had received succor, and
that the crisis had passed. For one brief day the financial press of the
coun