gulations which had bound its individual members;
competition was eliminated and rates were raised.

As time went on new "trust" possibilities were discovered and other
institutions linked up--corporations of all kinds, insurance companies
and national banks and savings-banks, were brought together for the
benefit of the "System" and the detriment of the public. The end of the
trustification of the institutions of the nation is not yet, but the
people are to be shown a way by which the plundering process can be
reversed and through which they can make their freedom complete and
absolute by the complete and absolute enslavement of the "System"
itself.

CHAPTER V

HOW THE "SYSTEM" DOES BUSINESS

To follow the various steps in the crimes of Amalgamated, my readers
should know how the securities of a corporation are manufactured, how
"put upon the market," how admitted to the Stock Exchange, how prices
are made in the Stock Exchange, how fictitious and fraudulent quotations
are created and disseminated, until the very shrewdest members of the
Stock Exchange cannot distinguish those which are real from the
fictitious in cases outside their own manufacturing. Then there is an
elaborate and ingenious procedure by which public opinion is moulded,
that is, by which people are made to believe that the prices at which
they buy and sell the stocks and securities are bona fide; and this is a
procedure as compact and as well understood by the "System's" votaries
as are the methods of the bank-breaker or burglar--who sends his "pals"
ahead to "pipe" the lay of the land--by felony's votaries. When I have
shown these things, about which little is known to-day by the public, my
readers will have no difficulty in comprehending what I shall lay before
them of the actual robberies in the case of Amalgamated and other
notorious enterprises.

The underlying principle of the several organisms through which the
commerce of the country is conducted is the protection at once of the
interests of the individuals composing them and of the public with which
they do business. Provided this principle is adhered to, no harm can be
wrought to either. Most of the contemporaneous swindles through which
the people have been plundered were perpetrated through the agency of
corporations, and this organism has become a sort of synonym for corrupt
practice. Yet the original corporation invention as I have described it
was devised to meet a real wa