the sharks of
brokers whom I dealt with. The rest is the old story. My
wife and children are disgraced and oppressed with poverty,
and I am serving a five years' sentence in this institution,
buoyed up only with the hope that I may live to face you and
your kind, that you may have the pleasure of seeing the
wreck you have wrought--in the hope that I may satisfy a
desire which night and day gnaws at my very soul, a desire
to say to you, face to face: "Look upon a man who, although
a branded criminal, is as much better than you and your
associates as it is possible for one to be," and to ask you
how your wife and your children enjoy the luxuries they have
when they know at what price they were secured, for I shall
surely, if I live, insist upon your wife and children
hearing from my lips what agonies a wife and children, who
are as dear to me as yours are to you, have suffered because
of your baseness.

CHAPTER XIII

THE "SYSTEM" VERSUS WESTINGHOUSE

In 1894 I had just wound up one of the most strenuous and successful
financial campaigns I ever engaged in. This was the Westinghouse deal,
of which the papers were full at the time. George Westinghouse, to whom
the world owes the air-brake and countless improvements in electrical
machinery, having surmounted the difficulties that clog the early steps
of the inventor who would be his own master, had taken rank, some years
before, among the prominent public figures of the day. The various
corporations in America bearing his name had prospered amazingly; his
ingenious appliances had displaced home products in the European market;
and titles and decorations had been conferred on the inventor, though
these last, like the sturdy American he is, Westinghouse had put aside.

This great success was wholly the fruit of George Westinghouse's
personal endeavor. It owed nothing to extraneous influences. It had been
accomplished along those manly, independent, Yankee lines which have
made that name synonymous with hustle and success in every part of the
civilized world. Above all, the man had organized and developed his
companies without the aid of the "System" or without truckling to its
votaries. In consequence he had incurred the deadly hatred of some of
its lords paramount.

In the business world Westinghouse's great rival was the General Electric
Company. To mention "Westinghouse" and "Gen