but
at this time the city of Philadelphia was still hobbling along under
perhaps as evil a financial system, or lack of it, as any city ever
endured--the assessor and the treasurer being allowed to collect and
hold moneys belonging to the city, outside of the city's private vaults,
and that without any demand on the part of anybody that the same be
invested by them at interest for the city's benefit. Rather, all they
were expected to do, apparently, was to restore the principal and
that which was with them when they entered or left office. It was not
understood or publicly demanded that the moneys so collected, or
drawn from any source, be maintained intact in the vaults of the city
treasury. They could be loaned out, deposited in banks or used to
further private interests of any one, so long as the principal was
returned, and no one was the wiser. Of course, this theory of
finance was not publicly sanctioned, but it was known politically and
journalistically, and in high finance. How were you to stop it?

Cowperwood, in approaching Edward Malia Butler, had been unconsciously
let in on this atmosphere of erratic and unsatisfactory speculation
without really knowing it. When he had left the office of Tighe & Co.,
seven years before, it was with the idea that henceforth and forever he
would have nothing to do with the stock-brokerage proposition; but now
behold him back in it again, with more vim than he had ever displayed,
for now he was working for himself, the firm of Cowperwood & Co., and
he was eager to satisfy the world of new and powerful individuals who by
degrees were drifting to him. All had a little money. All had tips,
and they wanted him to carry certain lines of stock on margin for them,
because he was known to other political men, and because he was safe.
And this was true. He was not, or at least up to this time had not been,
a speculator or a gambler on his own account. In fact he often soothed
himself with the thought that in all these years he had never gambled
for himself, but had always acted strictly for others instead. But now
here was George W. Stener with a proposition which was not quite the
same thing as stock-gambling, and yet it was.

During a long period of years preceding the Civil War, and through it,
let it here be explained and remembered, the city of Philadelphia had
been in the habit, as a corporation, when there were no available funds
in the treasury, of issuing what were known as c