es." And
so, adroitly, dangerous deductions were prevented.

For the uninstructed I may say that a capitalist's "tin box" is the
receptacle for the stocks and bonds that largely represent his fortune,
and pinholes in a stock certificate are in Wall Street conclusive
evidence that such certificate has, at some period, temporarily passed
into other's hands as collateral for loans, for there has been pinned to
it a memorandum or note stating the details of the transaction in which
its owner parted with it. Pinholed securities are looked upon by the
upper crust of big financiers with much the same horror as that with
which members of the American social upper crust look upon their No. 10
boots and gloves--reminders of their peasant ancestry.

But to return to "Standard Oil's" financial weavings: Their next move
was to use Standard Oil stock as the basis for loans, that is, as
collateral for money borrowed from the banks, trust and insurance
companies, and treasuries of other great corporations and estates. The
money thus acquired was paid out to purchase the control of banks and
trust and insurance companies in all parts of the United States, the
Standard Oil ownership being represented by dummy directors and
officers.

The next move represents another of the dazzling devices of finance in
which "Standard Oil" is adept, and brings the process of artificial
expansion still further along. Control of a certain number of these
savings and national banks and trust and insurance companies having been
acquired, the funds of each were so manipulated by depositing those of
one institution with another, and the latter's in turn with the first,
as to swell the deposits of all and create in all of them an apparently
legitimate basis for increases of capitalization. At the same time there
was shown an apparently legitimate necessity for the establishment of
additional banking and trust companies, which were duly organized and
their assets juggled around by the same process. The result of all this
manipulation defies description. Throughout the series of correlated
institutions loans and deposits are multiplied in such an intricacy of
duplication that only a few able experts, employed by the "System"
because of their mathematical genius, are able to unravel the tangle to
the extent of approximating the proportion the legitimate funds bear to
those which have been created by the financial jugglery I have
indicated.

When "Standard Oi