-----------
$65,788,774

the balance, $4,423,679, being on deposit without interest.

The above aggregate represents 71.7 per cent. of the uninvested
interest-bearing funds of twenty-eight companies--leaving but 28.3 per
cent. for the remaining twenty-five (in which, by the way, is included
$6,801,789 of the Prudential, as large in proportion as the funds of the
Big Three, with which it is associated).

This sum, at the two-per-cent. interest allowed by the trust companies,
returned to the insurance companies $1,315,775, while it earned for the
trust companies in the different speculations in which they were
engaged, from five to twenty per cent., or an annual profit of
$1,973,663 to $11,184,079, over and above the interest paid the
insurance companies for its use.

But who owns the trust companies? you ask. Some are owned jointly by the
three great insurance corporations and their directors, others by the
directors alone. The men who control the Big Three organize these
flexible depositary institutions, allotting half or more of their stocks
to themselves, the balance to the insurance companies, or keeping all
the stock themselves, for the purpose of manipulating the stupendous
sums in the treasuries of the insurance companies. The trust company is
the irrigating canal of Wall Street, the insurance company the
reservoir. For the development of the various schemes of consolidation,
trustification, and amalgamation in which Wall Street profits are made,
money is required in large quantities. When the soil is ready for the
seed, when negotiations have been sufficiently matured, the trust
company's sluice is tapped and the gold flows out. And gold which makes
a $225 crop sprout, where previously only a $100 crop grew, is a
valuable commodity, for the use of which large compensation is given the
engineers. Thus the men who hold the treasury-keys of the Big Three, and
who decide how the accumulated premiums of the policy-holders shall be
used and where deposited, are actually the owners of these trust
companies and of other corporations and trusts which borrow the money
the trust companies have on deposit from the insurance companies.

The hackneyed defence of the insurance companies to this accusation is
that great corporations, such as they are, must keep on hand, ready for
emergencies, enormous amounts of cash. This is a futile argument, for in
the nature of thi