soon due. Suddenly the financial sky became overcast. The stock-market grew panicky and money as scare in Wall Street as rain in Arizona in May. It was just such a situation as the "System" might have brought about to accomplish its fell designs had it possessed the power to work miracles.
And the "System" took care of its advantage. At a tense moment in that soul and nerve trying period, with Wall and State streets full of talk about General Electric's probable absorption of Westinghouse, General Electric being then at its highest price, $119 per share, the Westinghouse companies held their annual meetings and the big inventor, confidently facing his stockholders, quite regardless of conditions which he thought could have no possible bearing on his concern's splendid prospects, came forward with his demand for the millions required to complete the projects already under way. This was the signal. From all the stock-market sub-cellars and rat-holes of State, Broad, and Wall streets crept those wriggling, slimy snakes of bastard rumors which, seemingly fatherless and motherless, have in reality multi-parents who beget them with a deviltry of intention: "George Westinghouse had mismanaged his companies"; "George Westinghouse, because of gross extravagance, had spread himself and his companies until they were involved beyond extrication unless by consolidation with General Electric"; these and many more seeped through the financial haunts of Boston, Philadelphia, and New York, and kept hot the wires into every financial centre in America and Europe, where aid must be sought to relieve the crisis. There came a crash in Westinghouse stocks, and their price melted. From amidst the thunder and lowering clouds emerged the "System." "Notwithstanding the black eye the name of everything Westinghouse had received, it would stand by and consolidate and save the day!" But the "System" and its everything-gauged-by-machinery votaries had reckoned without their host. George Westinghouse was too strong a man to be thus easily shaken down. He threw back his mighty shoulders, shook his big head, and flung his great private fortune into the market to