"the good sense of our citizens may be
confidently relied upon to prevent the creation of such a barricade
against national prosperity." Oh, it is "national prosperity" then
that we have in view! That is good. If there be anything under heaven
which Wall Street adores and dotes on more than any other thing in the
world it is national prosperity! When it comes to national prosperity
Wall Street is always full-handed. With the mere mention of national
prosperity Wall Street raises a shout of sympathetic enthusiasm which
reverberates from Passamaquoddy to San Diego, and from the Florida
everglades to the snow-capped shoulders of Shasta!

Let me, however, explain to Mr. Clews one thing, and that is that the
blessed condition of universal society in which Wall Street, having
absorbed Lombard and Threadneedle, shall be supreme over the nations
will occur only when our free American institutions shall be crushed
into fragments and when civil liberty shall lie bleeding among the
ruins. It will occur _then_, and not before. It will occur when the
residue of the old American spirit has been stamped out, and when a
miserable, slavish subserviency shall have been substituted for the
revolutionary freedom which our fathers won and made sacred with their
blood on every patriot battlefield from Lexington to Appomattox.

Temperately and patiently I will follow Mr. Clews's paper through. The
writer of the article is a gentlemanly and able representative of that
colossal power which he has helped to build up and fortify. From being
a child of that power he has now become, in a most theosophical
manner, one of the fathers of it! As such he has made himself the
apologist of a gigantic and rampant beast on whose horns of hazard
the values produced by the labor of seventy millions of Americans are
tossed about as if the wreckage were so much waste excelsior thrown on
the horns of a bull! Mr. Clews tells us that in 1792 twenty-seven
gentlemen met under a buttonwood tree and formed the association known
as Wall Street. The purpose of the association was "the purchase and
sale of public stocks at a fixed and unvarying commission, with a
proviso of mutual help and preference." The result was the addition of
"the prestige and power of the stock exchange to the prestige and
power of the banks." That indeed is a combination worthy to be
considered! A consolidation of interests was effected between the
exchange and the banks to purchase and sell s