-half or three per
cent. for the use of their balances, and their officers would scorn the
suggestion that they had put any of their money in jeopardy in a Wall
Street gamble. But what I have outlined happened, and has happened many
a time before and since, and goes to prove my assertion that every
financial institution which is taking the money of the people for the
ostensible purpose of safeguarding it or putting it to use for them, is
a part of the machinery for the plundering of the people.

Sooner or later, every dollar taken by the "System" through Wall
Street's manipulation of stocks directly affects every man, woman, and
child in the United States. Let us, for example, see how a stock slump
in New York affects the owner of a small life-insurance policy in
Wyoming. The shares of the American and English ocean steamship
companies were bought up by the "System" at double their worth and
converted into a "trust." New stocks and bonds to a number of times
their value were issued and sold to the public. The great insurance
companies bought many millions worth of these securities, using for the
purpose the money they had collected from the policy-holders, a dollar
at a time. This "investment," at the moment it was made, actually
represented a loss to the purchasing insurance companies of millions of
money, for millions more than the property was worth or could possibly
be made worth had gone to the people who formerly owned the steamship
properties, and many millions more to the "System" as its share of the
swag. And it should be remembered that the men who organized the
steamship trust were the men who invested the insurance company's money
in its securities.

The policy-holder in Wyoming knows about the steamship trust and about
the terrible loss sustained by those who invested in its securities. He
does not realize, however, that his insurance company has been buying
such poor stuff, for he is persuaded it is a great and noble
institution, and far above Wall Street and its rash gamblers. Even when
he and his kind find their yearly dividends on their policies growing
less and less and their premiums rising "because of the tremendous
increase in the expense of doing business," they do not dream of
connecting these misfortunes with the "System's" trustifications of
inflated securities; nor do they associate them with the glowing
accounts of the half-million-dollar seaside palace built by the
insurance company's offic