be as it was before he had interfered. I dwelt upon the possibilities of the judge not following orders to the letter and the minute, but he only smiled and answered: "Leave all that to us; if we don't make good as agreed, we get no pay." He was fully alive to the dangers of the game, and he impressed upon me he would take nobody's word for anything. With him and Foster nothing but money talked, and it must not be of the marked-bill kind either, meaning he would not take anything which could be tied up by injunctions and lawsuits after the receiver had been dismissed. However, he would play fair. He would not ask us to pay on anything but the actual delivery of the goods. He also frankly told me that he had named the very low figure, $150,000, because he expected to invest what he received in Bay State Gas stock at $3 and, upon its jumping to $10 or $20, to make half a million.
But this is outrageous, you say. You call the performance I have described by hard names! Surely our courts are not also the creatures of "frenzied finance"? you ask. I warn my readers that this narrative is no more than a record of events occurring within my own knowledge, and that dark and vicious as the pictures seem they are photographs of actual happenings. Nor should the public conclude that the dishonor and dishonesty revealed in connection with Bay State Gas are exceptional. On the contrary, such doings are the rule in the affairs of great financial corporations. Into the rigging and launching of almost every big financial operation in the United States during the last twenty years, double-dealing, sharp practice, and jobbery have entered; and, what is more, the men interested have participated in and profited thereby. To correct a popular fallacy I want to say that I am not referring here simply to moral derelictions but to actual legal crimes. If the details of the great reorganization and trustification deals put through since 1885 could be laid bare, eight out of ten of our most successful stock-jobbing financiers would be in a fair way to get into State or federal prisons. They do such things better in England. During the past ten years three "frenzied financiers" have practised their legerdemain in London—Ernest Hooley,