er who entered the employ of the institution a
few years before, with his salary for his fortune, and who is now
pointed to as an example of thrift, being worth from ten to fifteen
millions.

CHAPTER VII

ECONOMICS OF COPPER

A thorough familiarity with the facts and conditions set forth in the
preceding chapters will help my readers to an understanding of the
series of complicated transactions through which the snaky course of
Amalgamated must be pursued. Its flotation was the most tremendous and
public ever even attempted, much less successfully carried out, and in
its market career the full resources of stock jugglery were exercised on
its behalf. The crimes of Amalgamated are to the delinquencies of Bay
State Gas as the screaming of eagles to the chirping of crickets. From
its birth this great enterprise went hand-in-hand with fraud and
financial dishonor, and the facts I shall proceed to reveal are so
formidable in their indictment as to startle even those calloused to the
trickery of modern stock deals.

An armistice followed that last desperate battle of the gas fight in the
Delaware court-house, and gave me time to turn my whole attention to the
plans I had long been maturing in my mind in connection with quite
another project--"Coppers."

For sixty years past Boston had been the home of the copper industry.
From it great fortunes had been derived, and there was in course of
development a copper aristocracy which threatened the supremacy of the
East India aristocracy that had so long lorded it in Boston society.
Indeed, so far had the rival contingents progressed that there was a
serious searching of the pretensions of any new-comer whose origin had
to do with other enterprises. "Coppers" were respectable, were genteel,
and, above all, were not "trade," for the average old-time Bostonian
affects the Anglo-Saxon contempt for the traffickings of retail
commerce.

For the benefit of those in the outer darkness, to whom the ways of
Boston are strange, it may be explained that the East India trade goes
elsewhere under other less euphonious names, and consisted in the
swapping of New England rum, made from molasses, water, and other
things, for human cotton-pickers. It was a most profitable industry,
with a spice of adventure to it, and in which at the time it flourished
a gentleman might honorably engage. It may be said that with the
paradoxical conscientiousness characteristic of the Puritan mind, th