at National
City Bank to honor their checks for immense sums every day, the proceeds
being used to carry on a series of fictitious transactions in Montreal &
Boston stock for the purpose of beguiling the public into purchasing it.
The affair was a ten-days' wonder, and was finally squelched by the
great bank's throwing over its vice-president, Archibald G. Loomis, who
had bravely shouldered the responsibility for the transaction. At
writing, two professional gamblers, who seem to have been the principal
victims of the underwriting end of the swindle, are being settled with,
and the whole affair will soon be buried from public gaze.

The episode was, on the whole, so foul in its revelation of greed that
even Wall Street was horrified--not at the arrant double-dealing
exposed, but that the "System" should descend to such vulgar
malpractice. The documents now in my possession, which I shall publish
later in my story, include the original underwriters' agreement, which,
at great cost of time and money, has so far been kept from the public,
and they show some of the greatest bankers in the land deliberately
planning, by the use of fraudulent papers and bogus agreements, to
beguile investors to adventure their money in a scheme the sole purpose
of which was the enrichment of its organizers. The whole performance
reveals a depravity so profound and a greed so heartless that the people
may well tremble for the safety of their savings intrusted to the
custody of men of this type. It also proves my contention that the
"System," while depending on burglary for its largest returns, does not
despise the small profits of the pick-pocket.

FOOTNOTES:

[21] Groups of Stock-Exchange members each day appear to buy from other
groups great quantities of shares of different stocks at advancing prices.
In reality all the brokers--the ones appearing to buy and those who sell to
them--are in league with each other, and none of the transactions is
actual. The performance bears the same relation to legitimate
Stock-Exchange trading that the purchase and sale of a gold brick among
confederates at a circus do to the genuine work of the gamblers and
pick-pockets who are really attending to business around them. On certain
days in the months I refer to, when the official records of the Stock
Exchange told that one and a half million shares had been bought and sold,
and prices had advanced until the aggregate increase in the worth of the
stocks de