his, the exposed rascalities of swindling
corporations have shown how full the world still is of sheep eager to
be fleeced, of geese to be plucked. Government officers prey on the
people; the people, on each other; the giant plunderer is the stock
company, to whose vast gobblings the pilfering of a Tweed or Winslow is
a mere sugar-plum. The individual swindler feels himself a rogue,
whereas the chartered thief holds a high head, builds him a palace from
the spoils of his victims, and curses their impudence when they
complain. They are legion, these mismanaged or fraudulent mining
companies, land improvement companies, artificial light companies,
normal food companies (for introducing camel-hump steaks to the
American breakfast-table), and, above all, railroad companies, savings
funds, and life insurance companies.

Satirists lash the sham enterprises--"Universal Association for Squaring
the Circle," "American and Asiatic Consolidated Perpetual Motion
Society," and what not; nowadays the main mischief is done not by these
transparent humbugs, but by the genuine companies, that fairly invite
trust and then betray it. Salted mines, watered stocks, lying
prospectuses, bribed experts, bought legislatures, packed meetings,
borrowed dividends, thimble-rig reports--we all know the tricks of
"substantial" enterprises. It is not the seedy adventurers, the Jeremy
Diddlers and Montague Tiggs of our day, that entrap the thrifty and ruin
the intelligent, but the high-toned trust and commercial companies,
seeming to be solid. These have wheels within wheels, rings within the
ring, whereby many shareholders can be tricked by few; for, as the
shellfish has foes that bore through his tough house and suck out the
unfortunate tenant within, so credit mobiliers, fast freight lines,
super-salaried officers, contractors for supplies, construction agents,
and the like, suck out the value of a stock company, and leave the
shareholders the shells. Let not a posterity of _laudatores temporis
acti_ sigh over ours as the Golden Age of commercial honesty. It is
only the Greenback Age. It is not even the Silver Age, unless, haply,
the German Silver--that is to say, the Plated or Pinchbeck Age. We might
perhaps style it the Brazen Age, in view of the all-pervading brass of
corporation claqueurs and drummers; or we might very well call it the
Shoddy or the Peter Funk Jewelry Age.

Still, our ancestry were worse beset with quack corporations. Mackay
m