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 stocks “with a proviso of mutual help.”

The organization thus created has existed for one hundred and five years. It has made a history. It has become ever greater and more firmly fixed in and on American society. It has made itself to be the foundation of all things financial and political in the United States. The story of the process by which this prodigious result has been reached is narrated by Mr. Clews in the manner of one who gives an account of the formation of a temperance society or a Sunday school! In the whole article there does not appear a symptom of a suspicion that the thing of which he gives the history is the most dangerous and abusive fact that ever threatened the integrity of a nation. The argument is that if twenty-seven gentlemen thus met and created Wall Street, then the result, being a natural product, is good and wholesome. But the inquiry at once arises whether it is valid logic to suppose that what men do is right, simply because they do it. The affirmative of such a proposition would make Aristotle stagger. It amounts to this, that whatever is is right; therefore, let it alone.

By this argument of Mr. Clews all the tyrannies of the past, all the horrors that have afflicted the human race, all the sufferings which men have endured from sword and pestilence, from servitude, from the butchery of war and the cruelty of the Inquisition, have been right merely because they have been natural. Under this rule every monster that has tormented society from the first day until now can find full justification for itself on the simple ground that it exists! Under such an argument a howitzer is as good as a plough, a sword is as good as a sickle, a pillory is as good as a baby-wagon. By such reasoning a shark is as useful as a horse. By this logic a boa-constrictor is as good as a reindeer, a tiger is as useful and salutary in his office as an ox or a St. Bernard, and a cancer is as beautiful as a blush. That is, everything is good, not because it is useful and just, but because it is.

Or again, Mr. Clews’s argument is this: that the men who created Wall Street were gentlemen; therefore their work was salutary. Just as though respectable people could not engage in a nefarious business. Just as though gentlemen could not, and would not, make a conspiracy to enslave the human race. The “gentleman” is a very uncertain factor in civilization; his devotion to right and truth requires always to be tested with a chemical and to be taken with the usual combination of chlorine and sodium.

Mr. Clews explains that the stocks underlying our old railroad properties in the United States were aforetime “held locally,” and that they were transferred “more frequently by executors than by brokers on the stock exchange”—as though that were an evil. Then “there were but few opportunities for dealing in shares”—as though that were an evil! It thus became necessary for Wall Street to get the old stocks belonging to the people out of the people’s hands and into the hands of the Street—as though that were a good. Our public improvements were in the first place made by the people, but the people were not fit to own them. Our railways were constructed with capital subscribed by the people, generally by those through whose country the given improvement was extended. The people themselves then owned their own, and controlled it. Until Wall Street reached out and clutched such properties—first putting down the prices of the shares to nothing and then pulling the given stocks to par—the people were able to protect themselves; but never afterwards.

The same was true of all other securities, whether public or private. Nearly all bonded debts were at first local; but the holding of securities locally has always been a thing abhorrent to Wall Street. The idea of the Street is that all stocks and all securities belong, not to the public, but to itself. Of course the money capital of the country belongs to the Street. And if, with the consent of public authority, the stocks of the country also can be held by the Street, then a humble peasantry, paying perennial rents and compound interest, can be created and kept under forever throughout the domains of the great Republic. It may ultimately require arsenals to do it, but these we can supply.

The next stage in the game was the creation by Wall Street of fictitious enterprises for the distinct purpose of getting possession of the stocks on which such enterprises were based, and of speculating in the shares of such properties. When the existing stocks of railways were not sufficient—when the bonds of States and of the general government were insufficient in quantity to fill the maw of the benevolent being called Wall Street—then an artificial supply must be created; that is, some scheme of debts must be invented by which the people might be made to pay tribute to the good Wall 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