“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 the robbers may reap the harvest, he speaks of corners as offering “brilliant illustrations of genius and strategic skill in financial warfare!”

The fact is that the men who are reared in Wall Street, who from their youth are familiarized with its processes, and who are well set in the plastic age to consider human life as an auspicious opportunity for getting possession of something that does not belong to them, are fatally blunted in their sensibilities; the ethical quality in them is battered out—or at least battered; they come to regard the human race as an enormous ranch of sheep to be shorn at the pleasure of the shearers; they even grow to consider each other as so much mutton to be butchered and roasted by whoever is able to do it.

I notice with surprise that Mr. Clews in his sketch of Wall Street dwells not at all upon the benevolent agency of that power during the Civil War. This is an oversight which I beg leave to supply. There has never perhaps been an instance in human history in which a great power has so ardently devoted itself “to the preservation of free institutions” as did Wall Street in that epoch of mortal agony. Then it was that Wall Street engaged in the patriotic work, first of destroying the national credit, then of buying it up at half price, then of converting it into a bonded debt to be perpetuated for a full generation, and finally of compelling the people to pay it in a dollar worth four times as much as the dollar with which it was purchased. It was a beautiful scheme of devotion and self-sacrifice the like of which history has never before recorded. It was a speculation which involved the life of the American Republic. The Union was on trial. All nerves were strained, and all hearts were torn. The nation was bleeding at every pore. Every freight-train that came from the front brought back its loaded boxes of dead. Fathers and mothers gathered at the station, and each received his own. The rough coffin containing the body of the patriot boy who had given his life for the flag was taken by the silent father and mother to its resting-place under the apple trees. All true men had tearful faces, and a stern resolve in the heart. And while this was the condition of the nation and the people, the high-toned Wall Street was speculating on the life of the Republic. It bought and sold blood. It was a bull on disaster and a bear on victory. It established bureaus through which to falsify intelligence and to bring the nation to the verge of ruin. It had no compunction. It regarded the gore of battlefields as the rich rain and mould out of which its own harvest was to grow. The more blood the merrier. The more tears the richer the yield. The more war the more debt. The more depression of the national credit the more cheaply we shall be able to gather it up! The more grape-vine despatches the more distraction and the better opportunity for us. The more death the more millions. The more horror and devastation the heavier will be our coffers. The more the people groan the more we will shout. The more they die the more we will live. The more the flag is torn the more our damask curtains will flutter. The more liberty perishes and withers from the earth the more we shall plant ourselves and flourish and rule and reign over a nation that we have destroyed and a people whom we have enslaved. If Mr. Clews wishes any further outline of the history of Wall Street during our Civil War we shall be glad to contribute such a sketch as a reminiscence of a great fact which appears to be dim in his memory.

There is another almost fatal omission in Mr. Clews’s article. He says but little about the principal work in which Wall Street, historically considered, has been engaged during the last thirty years. I do not like the way in which this great section of the “Past” of Wall Street is glossed over. During the period referred to, that institution has had one bottom purpose and one reason of action from which it has never deviated. This purpose, this reason of action, has been the perpetuation of the national debt and the increase of its value by bulling the unit of money in which the debt is payable. Wall Street knows that the bonded debt of the United States is the basis, or central fact, in the whole system of bonds and stocks. Wall Street knows that the dollar is the central fact in the bond. It knows that if the bond can be made everlasting and the dollar can be increased in value until a single unit of it shall be equivalent to an acre of farming land, then the Street can own the United States in fee simple, and can presently annex the rest of the world.

I acknowledge a certain admiration when I consider this stupendous scheme. It is more than Napoleonic; it is continental, interplanetary, sidereal! I cannot recall another conspiracy in the history of mankind quite equal in colossal and criminal splendor to the profound and universal plot of Wall Street to make perpetual the national debt, to keep that debt the bottom fact in the banking system of the United States, and to bull the unit of money and account until it shall be worth four times as much, or perhaps ten times as much, as it was when the bulk of the debt was contracted.

The history of this scheme in its true inwardness is the history of Wall Street for the past thirty years. The details of the history relate to such small circumstances as the transfer of the government of the great Republic from the hands and control of the people to the hands and control of the Street. Of course no such scheme as that referred to could be carried into successful operation unless the national government could be delivered over to the keeping of the Street and be locked up, as it were, in the same vault where the national debt is deposited.

This feat, however, was easily accomplished. Wall Street reached out its hand and plucked down the American eagle from his perch. Wall Street got possession of the government. The coup was accomplished while the nation was asleep—else it never could have been accomplished. Wall Street climbed the Tarpeian rock in the night, and no goose cackled to give the alarm. Columbia had gone to bed. The keeper of her treasure-house had already given the key to the enemy. The keeper of the treasury was a part of the enemy. He gave up both citadel and