se of
the people's savings, in stock gambling enterprises, speculations as
unsafe and as frenzied as those of the wildest plunger of Wall Street. I
will give one illustration:

The New York Life Insurance Company's directors and managers created the
New York Security and Trust Company. $1,000,000 capital; $500,000
surplus--in all, $1,500,000. $150 per share, of which the insurance
company held about two-thirds. The Trust Company soon secured deposits
to the extent of about $50,000,000, and these it loaned out by
"financing" new and old enterprises. Among them was the New Hampshire
Traction. The Trust Company flourished. Its stock advanced in price to
over $1,300 per share, or over $13,000,000, and its different
speculative ventures prospered exceedingly. New Hampshire Traction kept
pace with the rest and simultaneously with them bounded upward in value
until the amount of this stock owned by the Trust Company represented a
value of between $5,000,000 and $6,000,000. There came a time when the
directors of the New York Life Insurance Company decided to dispose of
their stock in the Trust Company, and did so to a syndicate composed of
their own members, headed by John D. Rockefeller, at $800 per share.
Afterward the stock disposed of at $800 per share advanced to over
$1,300, or, with the third which had not been owned by the insurance
company but by the "insiders" and their friends, to a total of over
$13,000,000. Then came the slump, and the price of the New Hampshire
Traction fell to twenty-five cents on the dollar, and the Trust
Company's stock to less than $600.

If in all the histories of the wildcats of the wild catteries of Wall
Street a wilder case of "frenzied finance" can be discovered, I don't
know it, and yet this is only one of many I could quote, selected at
random. Boiled down, it means that what was bought at $150 went to
$1,400 and back to $590, and that it changed hands at $800 before it got
to $1,400, and that the plunger in this transaction, which made this
plunging possible, was one of the most conservative life insurance
companies in America.

I will answer "Buffalo's" question by asking another:

Suppose all the insurance companies have been doing business on the same
scale, and have tied up billions of the people's money in such schemes
as New Hampshire Traction, and the people, learning these facts, should
demand their savings to the extent of the $9,000,000,000 which they have
deposited in