stock had no dishonest value unless sold, and even at the most corrupt
period of the government nobody was compelled by law to buy. In nine cases
in ten the person who bought did so in the hope and expectation of getting
much for little and something for nothing. The buyer was no better than
the seller. He was a gambler. He "played against the game of the man who
kept the table" (as the phrase went), and naturally he lost. Naturally,
too, he cried out, but his lamentations, though echoed shrilly by the
demagogues, seem to have been unavailing. Even the rudimentary
intelligence of that primitive people discerned the impracticability of
laws forbidding the seller to set his own price on the thing he would sell
and declare it worth that price. Then, as now, nobody had to believe him.
Of the few who bought these "watered" stocks in good faith as an
investment in the honest hope of dividends it seems sufficient to say, in
the words of an ancient Roman, "Against stupidity the gods themselves are
powerless." Laws that would adequately protect the foolish from the
consequence of their folly would put an end to all commerce. The sin of
"over-capitalization" differed in magnitude only, not in kind, from the
daily practice of every salesman in every shop. Nevertheless, the popular
fury that it aroused must be reckoned among the main causes contributory
to the savage insurrections that accomplished the downfall of the
republic.

With the formation of powerful and unscrupulous trusts of both labor and
capital to subdue each other the possibilities of combination were not
exhausted; there remained the daring plan of combining the two
belligerents! And this was actually effected. The laborer's demand for an
increased wage was always based upon an increased cost of living, which
was itself chiefly due to increased cost of production from reluctant
concessions of his former demands. But in the first years of the twentieth
century observers noticed on the part of capital a lessening reluctance.
More frequent and more extortionate and reasonless demands encountered a
less bitter and stubborn resistance; capital was apparently weakening just
at the time when, with its strong organizations of trained and willing
strike-breakers, it was most secure. Not so; an ingenious malefactor,
whose name has perished from history, had thought out a plan for bringing
the belligerent forces together to plunder the rest of the population. In
the accounts th