try printed the item: "Standard Oil came to the rescue by buying for
cash large blocks of Standard Oil stock which had long been held by this
or that interest for investment," and no more was thought of the
incident. Even the most alert financiers never suspected that the most
important stock secret of the age had been on the verge of becoming
public property.

Planted deep in the minds of the public that watches the comings and
goings of the Street is the conviction that Standard Oil is the holy of
holies among stocks. The world has been taught to believe that the
owners of Standard Oil regard the shares of the great oil corporation as
their most precious, most sacred possessions. Yet while "Standard Oil"
has been so scientifically spreading abroad the impression that the
public would never be permitted to own Standard Oil stock, secretly it
has been engaged in exchanging that stock for the securities of the
people in the form of banks and trust companies, railroads, and other
assets of definite value. So completely has "Standard Oil" pulled the
wool over the eyes of the votaries of finance that there cannot be found
in or out of Wall Street a single great financier who would not laugh to
scorn the suggestion that "Standard Oil" is engaged in a campaign for
the distribution of its Standard Oil stock to the public. Yet pin your
great financier down to the facts, and he'll admit that he himself has
quite a block of the stock, and that institutions of which he is a
director include among their assets in one form or another good-sized
parcels of the inestimable security. But so completely are these very
wise men held by the spells woven over them when for this or that
special reason they were allowed as a favor to acquire their holdings,
and so impressively have they been shown that their ownership in
Standard Oil stock must be kept secret, that no suspicion has ever
entered their minds that they were playing the part of lambs in its
purchase.

Nor was the episode I have described above allowed to disturb their
serenity. It soon became known to the innermost circle of Wall Street
that the stock the three men had resold to "Standard Oil" represented
the share of each in some of the gigantic deals to which he had been a
party during the last ten years, and that with its acquirement had gone
a pledge that it would always be kept in the purchaser's "tin box," and
whenever inspected by "Standard Oil" would be free from "pinhol