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Show Gambling Financiers. The country is treated to a contin-' uous vaudeville in finance these days. A man in Boston is charging the whole herd of bulls in Wall street, and both sides of the golden way is strewn with gored bullocks. Copper. Standard Oil, Steel and other stocks are flying in the air like leaves in Valambrosa, and none knows just when the flurry will be over. A woman down in Cleveland has the staid bankers of the east down on their knees praying against the flod that is coming down the very tall mountains of financial stability in Dol-' Dol-' lardom. They have the cause of all their woe in jail in Cleveland, and the Wall street magnates are consulting how they can get the trouble of their Jtsaitazzar reast Behind the bars. Word comes as we go to press that the bond kings are ready to purchase peace; and the dupes of our American Mrs. Humbert Hum-bert are going "to pay up and shut up." This is proof positive, if proof were needed, that our financial system and our banking methods are rotten to the core. Our stock and bond markets are gambling hells, and our giant financiers are all sharks with insatiable maws, in whose eyes the misery of a whole people peo-ple and the ruin of a nation are only incidents of the play. Our great banks are little better than get-rich-quick concerns, and their methods just as despicable as those that have landed so inaiiv iikiiis oi ine tape anu iciepnone in the penitentiary. The three great elements of speculative wealth in this country are wind, water and prophecy. Secret Information is the current that sets all the-tickers gtvng.. Gamblers are. the most superstitious people alive. They can be made to believe anything I and anybody. Mrs. Chadwick had her secret. She was the natural daughter of the steel king. Hence all those stocks and bonds. Hence the tangled net of financial transactions that always had one mesh big enough to hold another skulpin. They pitied the poor child of sin, and they plucked her while they pitied. It will be found that the officers offi-cers of the shaken banks were the chief beneficiaries of all her fraudulent practices. prac-tices. , They helped her to rob their own banks, and they robbed her. If they cashed a forged check of 1200.00 they managed to get back into their I own pockets at least half the amount. The "lawyers" got half of what was-left, was-left, and the paltry amount remaining to her barely sufficed to maintain the semi-regal court of the "king's daughter" daugh-ter" until another raid was made on the public's strong box. The reason why Mrs. Chadwick will not be prosecuted, prose-cuted, and the reason ' why the bankers bank-ers will assume all her liabilities is that a trial would showvall her accomplices, and demonstrate that she was the victim vic-tim of the men who drove her into a felon's cell. We are a people without a public conscience, and individually we have little regard for the abstract laws of justice and morality. Pleasure runs along the lines of least resistance: passion pas-sion challenges the rugged heights. Men now- live for money: that means that money is more precious than life.x Everything is sacrificed to it. Weighed against money, soul and eternity do not count the worth of a cancelled note. In the present frenzy to get rich at any cost, it is not safe to trust your brother. The only man who can be trusted is the man who is not ambitious of wealth. Only the man who does not want to i get rich himself will be found willing to allow you to get rich. The need of , the w-orW today is a race of financiers who will make a vow of holy poverty and keep it'. I |