e board; that his opponent was
the world, because all men directly or indirectly played the
stock-gambling game. To win, it was but necessary to have unlimited chips.
If chips were bought and sold, on equal terms, by all, no one could buy
more than he could pay for, and the game, although still a gambling one,
would be fair. A few master tricksters, dollar magicians, long ago seeing
this condition, invented the system by which the people are ruthlessly
plundered. The system they invented was simple, so simple that for a
quarter of a century it has remained undiscovered by the world at
large--and even by you, who profess to be experts. No man thought that a
free people who had intended to allow all the equal use of every avenue
for the attainment of wealth, and who intended to provide for the
safeguarding of wealth after it was secured, could be such dolts as to
allow themselves to be robbed of all their accumulated wealth by a device
as simple as that by which children play at blindman's buff. The process
was no more complex than that employed by the robber of old, who took the
pebbles from the beach, marked them money, and with the money bought the
labour of his fellows, and by the manipulation of that labour and by
turning pebbles into money he took away from the labourer the money which
he had paid them for the labour until all in the land were slaves of the
moneymaker. These few tricksters said: We will arbitrarily manufacture
these chips--stocks. After we have manufactured them, we will sell the
world what the world can pay for, and then by the use of the unlimited
supply we still have we will win away from the world what it has bought,
and repeat the operation, until we have all the wealth, and the people are
enslaved. To do this there was one thing besides the manufacturing of the
chips--stocks--that was absolutely necessary--a gambling-hell, the working
of whose machinery would place a selling value upon such chips; a hell
where, after selling the chips, they could be won back. I saw that if
these tricksters were to be routed and their 'System' was to be destroyed,
it must be through the machinery of this Stock Exchange. I studied the
machinery, and presently I marvelled that men could for so long have been
asses.

"From the very nature of stock-gambling it is necessary, absolutely
necessary, that it be conducted under certain rules, unchangeable,
unbreakable rules, to attempt to change or break which would destr