City Bank, and the proof is to be found in the
books of said National City Bank. My readers may say here that this
constitutes a fortunate condition rather than a crime to be punished,
for the less Amalgamated a man had, the better he was off, as the stock
afterward declined. This conclusion is a false one, however.

Here, in simple terms, is an illustration of what was done in
Amalgamated and of what the wrong was.

B had a valuable race-horse and decided to dispose of him in five
shares. He offered these five shares for public subscription and
advertised that if over five were subscribed for he would split up the
shares and allot them pro rata. There were on the final day seven
subscriptions. Instead of turning over the horse to the seven
subscribers to own and race in their own way, B notified them that
twenty-one subscriptions had been received, and that for their seven he
had allotted them a one-third ownership, while the other subscribers
would retain two-thirds. In the two-thirds resided the right to manage
and race the horse, and the seven had no say whatever in this direction.
The seven honest subscribers, not suspecting that B had simply sold them
one-third of his horse for nearly his whole cost, and that he still
retained a two-thirds ownership in him, supposed that fourteen others
had subscribed on the same terms as themselves. If the horse were really
able to race and thereby earn large sums of money, it was by this fraud
in B's power to make him appear so worthless that the seven bona-fide
subscribers would be inclined to turn over their ownerships to B at his
own figure. Contrariwise, B could so dose the horse as to make him
appear more valuable than he really was, and use the advantage to
dispose of his fourteen shares for fictitiously high prices.

The world assumes an attitude of horror and amazement at the mention of
crime, and thousands of words are written to describe what led up to and
away from any given overt deed; but the deed itself, however grave,
shameful, or portentous, seems strangely barren and bloodless set down
in naked words. Yet the mountain peak that tops the great ranges is but
a shoulder over its neighbor, though it may be the apex of a continent.
A misconstrued word has caused the spilling of the blood of millions;
the needle-point of a stiletto has severed kingdoms. Between temptation
and consequence there is but little space, yet it is deep and wide
enough for all the poison in