ted and attempted; how after the ship
arrived at an island in foreign seas the great lawyer's dead body
received hurried burial, and his secretary's was later dropped, with
weights about its feet, to the ocean's depths; and how ever since the
natives whisper among themselves their gruesome suspicions.

I shall devote a chapter to the doings of certain financial reputation
sandbaggers and blackmailers; show how through their agencies they hold
up corporations and their managers for large sums, which upon being paid
start into motion a perfected system for the false moulding of public
opinion for the purpose of making more easy the plundering of the
people. I shall photograph the men and draw accurate diagrams of the
machinery through which their nefarious trade is carried on.

My story will carry me down Wall Street, into the Stock Exchange,
through its hundred and one or million and one open and hidden passages,
and into State Street, that ever-hung hammock of financial somnolence,
and into the courts of justice of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania,
Delaware, Massachusetts, and Montana, and into many other interesting
abodes of justice and injustice, of trickery, fraud, and simple, honest
trustfulness.

When my story is ended and the great American people, whose simple but
proud boast is that they cannot be fooled in the same place by the same
methods and the same instruments twice, know as much as I now know of
Amalgamated and its relation to the "System" which has for years as
boldly, as coarsely, and as cruelly robbed them as the coolie slaves are
robbed by their masters--it will be for them to decide whether my story
has been, because of the facts which entered into it, so well told that
they will not be satisfied with the restitution of the vast sums which
the Amalgamated took from them, which United States Steel took from
them, and which other financial enterprises took in lesser amounts but
by equally flagrant methods; but will demand the overthrow of the
"System" itself. It will be for them to decide; and if their decision
should be for a conclusive revolt, I shall be amply repaid for the pains
and the miseries which must necessarily follow in the wake of a task
such as the one I undertook when I decided to tell the story of
Amalgamated.

CONTENTS

PAGE

FOREWORD vii

PART