I shall devote a chapter to the doings of certain financial reputation sandbaggers and blackmailers; show how through their agencies they hold up corporations and their managers for large sums, which upon being paid start into motion a perfected system for the false moulding of public opinion for the purpose of making more easy the plundering of the people. I shall photograph the men and draw accurate diagrams of the machinery through which their nefarious trade is carried on.
My story will carry me down Wall Street, into the Stock Exchange, through its hundred and one or million and one open and hidden passages, and into State Street, that ever-hung hammock of financial somnolence, and into the courts of justice of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Massachusetts, and Montana, and into many other interesting abodes of justice and injustice, of trickery, fraud, and simple, honest trustfulness.
When my story is ended and the great American people, whose simple but proud boast is that they cannot be fooled in the same place by the same methods and the same instruments twice, know as much as I now know of Amalgamated and its relation to the "System" which has for years as boldly, as coarsely, and as cruelly robbed them as the coolie slaves are robbed by their masters—it will be for them to decide whether my story has been, because of the facts which entered into it, so well told that they will not be satisfied with the restitution of the vast sums which the Amalgamated took from them, which United States Steel took from them, and which other financial enterprises took in lesser amounts but by equally flagrant methods; but will demand the overthrow of the "System" itself. It will be for them to decide; and if their decision should be for a conclusive revolt, I shall be amply repaid for the pains and the miseries which must necessarily follow in the wake of a task such as the one I undertook when I decided to tell the story of Amalgamated.