ll Street,
and pay it still more abundantly.

Thus were invented new banks and new banking systems. Thus came the
bull and the bear and the bucket-shop. Thus were projected a thousand
railways and canals. Many of these were laid into impossible
regions--all "for the benefit of the people!" Other enterprises which
were not sufficiently stocked began to be stocked more heavily--this
also for the benefit of the people. The plan of watering was invented;
the method of "promoting" enterprises was perfected,--until, as early
as the time of the Civil War, Wall Street had acquired the greatest
skill in _making_ debts, or, in the language of James Fisk, Jr., in
"rescuing the property of other people from themselves."

These beautiful processes are glossed over by Mr. Clews with a
pleasant account of how, with the growth of business and the discovery
of gold and the oncoming of the age of construction, great enterprises
were "promoted" by Wall Street, and how "capital instantly flowed
forth from its reservoirs in answer to the securities" that flowed
thereto. The author of "Wall Street, Past, Present, and Future,"
affirms "that but for the combined machinery of the New York banks and
the stock exchange the actual developments of twenty years would have
dragged laboriously through an entire century." Permit us to say that
it would have been better that such "actual developments" should have
dragged through _two_ centuries than that the United States of America
should have been stocked and mortgaged and bonded and enslaved, under
the tyrannous lash of debt, by such a master as Wall Street.

Mr. Clews next comes to the subject of corners. On this topic we doubt
not that he speaks as one having authority. He tells us quite
complacently that there was "an epoch in the Wall Street of the past
when the gigantic and deeply considered combinations were set in
motion entitled 'corners.'" Then he goes on to explain what corners
are. He does so without the slightest expression of criticism or
aversion. He tells us of the bulls and the bears by whose agency a
corner is conducted as though they were the friendly competitors in
some great philanthropy! Instead of describing corners as so many
carefully contrived schemes to rob the people of the proceeds of their
labor by putting the prices of their commodities and securities down
until such commodities and securities are taken from their hands, and
then putting the prices _up_ in order that