f $22,500,000. In the
process there was an injection of about $60,600,000 of 'water'
into the stock held by the four, some of which was sold to the
Union Pacific, of which Mr. Harriman was president, and more
was 'unloaded' upon the Rock Island. Mr. Harriman refused to
tell how much he made out of that operation.

"It shows how some of our enormous fortunes are made, as well
as what motives and purposes sometimes prevail in the use of
the power entrusted to the directors and officers of
corporations. It is a simple and elementary principle that all
values are created by the productive activity of capital,
labour and ability in industrial operations of one kind and
another. No wealth comes out of nothing, but all must be
produced and distributed, and what one gets by indirection
another loses or fails to get. The personal profit of these
speculative operations in which the capital, credit and power
of corporations are used by those entrusted with their
direction come out of the general body of stockholders whose
interests are sacrificed, or out of the public investors who
are lured and deceived, or out of shippers who are overtaxed
for the service for which railroads are chartered, or out of
all these in varying proportions. In other words they are the
fruits of robbery."

So that you see it is not only untrue that Socialism would rob a poor
man of his virtuously acquired "bit of property," but the direct
contrary is the truth, that the present system, non-Socialism, is now
constantly _butchering thrift_! Simple people believe the great
financiers win and lose money to each other. They are not--to put it
plainly--such fools. They use the public, and the public goes on being
used, as a perpetual source of freshly accumulated wealth. I know one
case of a man of fifty who serves in a shop, a most industrious,
competent man, who has been saving and investing money all his life in
what he had every reason to believe were safe and sober businesses; he
has been denying himself pleasures, cramping his life to put by about
a third of his wages every year since he was two-and-twenty, and
to-day he has not got his keep for a couple of years, and his only
security against disablement and old age is his subscription to a
Friendly Society, a society which I have a very strong suspicion is no
better off than most other Friendly Societies--and tha