loited by the big bandits who controlled it and all industry, was
to draw into a mass the money of the country that they might use it to
manipulate the markets, to wreck and reorganize industries and wreck them
again, to work off inflated bonds and stocks upon the public at inflated
prices, to fight among themselves for rights to despoil, making the people
pay the war budgets--in a word, to finance the thousand and one schemes
whereby they and their friends and relatives, who neither produce nor help
to produce, appropriate the bulk of all that is produced.

And before I finished with the National Industrial Bank, I had shown that
it and several similar institutions in the big cities throughout the
country were, in fact, so many dens to which rich and poor were lured for
spoliation. I then took up the Universal Life, as a type. I showed how
insuring was, with the companies controlled by the bandits, simply the
decoy; that the real object was the same as the real object of the big
bandit banks. When I had finished my series on the Universal Life I had
named and pilloried Roebuck, Langdon, Melville, Wainwright, Updegraff, Van
Steen, Epstein--the seven men of enormous wealth, leaders of the seven
cliques that had the political and industrial United States at their mercy,
and were plucking the people through an ever-increasing army of agents.
The agents kept some of the feathers--"The Seven" could afford to pay
liberally. But the bulk of the feather crop was passed on to "The Seven."

I shall answer in a paragraph the principal charges that were made against
me. They say I bribed employees on the telegraph companies, and so got
possession of incriminating telegrams that had been sent by "The Seven" in
the course of their worst campaigns. I admit the charge. They say I bribed
some of their confidential men to give me transcripts and photographs
of secret ledgers and reports. I admit the charge. They say I bought
translations of stenographic notes taken by eavesdroppers on certain
important secret meetings. I admit the charge. But what was the chief
element in my success in thus getting proofs of their crimes? Not the
bribery, but the hatred that all the servants of such men have for them. I
tempted no one to betray them. _Every item, of information I got was
offered to me_. And I shall add these facts:

First, in not a single case did they suspect and discharge the "guilty"
persons.

Second, I have to-day as good means of