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Show THOSE INVESTIGATIONS. The investigations of the Shipping Trust and the Steel Trust, while humiliating for an American Ameri-can to read, are, nevertheless, profitable reading. So-called greatfinanclal magnates are shown up as mere procurers; willing for a price to lend their names to enterprises, to see them watered thirteen times above the actual and nominal capital capi-tal put in, then to endorse the scheme in interviews inter-views and through owl-like forecasts of the certain cer-tain prospects of unbounded prosperity for the concern, though it is but wallowing on stormy seas, water-logged through every rotten timber. Then when the suckers began to bite, for their part they drew down six times as much as the whole capital paid in and of course leave but a hideous hid-eous derelict afloat on the dead sea of bankruptcy. It is profitable reading, because it makes clear how much of character there is left among the gilded thieves, how much a forecast from one of them on the prospects of business Is worth; what their endorsement of an enterprise is worth; what kind of idols the great host of people has been falling down to worship. When a poor wretch without lineage or name, as destitute of learning as of character, a waif on the surging sea of humanity, to avoid earning honest bread, starts a thimble ring or a sure-thing sure-thing game of any kind, he at once becomes the scorn of decent men and the legitimate prey of the police. The filthiest cell in the jail is good enough for him and the chain gang and rock-pile are his certain goal. But he is but a petty thief at best. He never gets himself interviewed; he never feels called upon to prove that all the rules of the past have been swept away by a wave of prosperity so great that it is easy to show that one and two no longer make three, but rather forty-three, and that fin enterprise is entirely legitimate which holds out a promise of an annual Interest of 150 , fl per cent more than the entire capital invested. If fl Some of these men are close personal friends of 1 J Grover Cleveland. They were his close friends Ij jH when he and his Treasury Secretary negotiated jh B their last sales of United States bonds, and Mr. S Cleveland endorsed their methods, while at the M same time preaching "sound money" and holding M as "undesirable" certain states whose people were fl crying out against the sin and shame and rob- ! bery of destroying half the legitimate money of ' H the country and world at a time when the debts ! H of the country exceeded in amount all the money in the world. 'H It is not strange that we read how these men fl distrust Theodore Roosevelt, and how the organ ' H of the greatest thief of them all thinks the only fl safe thing to be done next year is to nominate fl Grover Cleveland and to try to elect him. fl The investigations carry some useful lessons fl with them. One is that under the rapture of the f fl steal and the strain of working his end of it, the L fl nerves of one of the very strongest gave way un ' fl til finally his chiefest anxiety is that now, long H before his time, while yet in the years which j H should bring him most influence, most power anJ ' fl most happiness, he feels his arms growing weak, j fl his brain unsteady under their unnatural burdens p fl and realizes that the horizon of his life is nar- fl rowing and darkening under clouds which cav fl never be lifted on this side of the sepulchre. ' H |