on the people. There should be
nothing in finance that any man or woman of ordinary intelligence and
experience cannot understand, and I purpose to explain here the
machinery of the "System" so that every one will exactly understand it
from headlight to rear-end lantern. Many intelligent people have no
clear idea of what a certificate of stock or a bond really is, and the
words "money," "stock-exchange," and "finance" are mere terms which they
glibly use without knowledge of their meaning.

It is not difficult to understand the grocery or the dry-goods business.
Standard articles of well-known form are sold by weight or measure over
the counters for fair prices. The patrons of such businesses insist on
knowing what they are buying--what they are to get in exchange for the
money which is the fruit of their labor, and then, after they have been
told, and they trade, they require that the goods be as described or
they will know why not. The average American would consider it a huge
joke should his grocer undertake to induce him to buy one hundred times
more sugar than he could use, on the ground that he might find in the
sugar bags when he reached home gold and diamonds. But would he not
wrathfully seek the police if, after opening his sugar bag, for which he
had paid $1, he found it contained only 50 cents' worth of sugar? He
would tell you if you met him at this stage: "You can bet that chap on
the corner cannot get away with any such trick as that--not in America.
He might in Zanzibar or in the kingdom of the Sultan of Sulu, but I will
show him he cannot rob Americans in these enlightened times." The grocer
would be hustled to jail without a "by your leave," and thenceforward
his name would be a by-word among all honest tradesmen.

And so it goes in every business but finance--finance, the most
important of all, the business into which is merged all other
businesses, the business of taking and preserving the results of all
other businesses, of all other human endeavor. Over our land to-day are
big, able Americans, long-headed and experienced, adept at a jack-knife
swap or a horse trade--industrious farmers, hard-handed miners, shrewd
manufacturers, each in his own line a good business man, yet these
sturdy traders, whom the "gold-brick" artist or the "green-goods"
practitioner would never dream of tackling, come weekly into Wall
Street, or into such branch shops as exist in every community on the
continent, and are don