ECONOMICS OF COPPER
A thorough familiarity with the facts and conditions set forth in the preceding chapters will help my readers to an understanding of the series of complicated transactions through which the snaky course of Amalgamated must be pursued. Its flotation was the most tremendous and public ever even attempted, much less successfully carried out, and in its market career the full resources of stock jugglery were exercised on its behalf. The crimes of Amalgamated are to the delinquencies of Bay State Gas as the screaming of eagles to the chirping of crickets. From its birth this great enterprise went hand-in-hand with fraud and financial dishonor, and the facts I shall proceed to reveal are so formidable in their indictment as to startle even those calloused to the trickery of modern stock deals.
An armistice followed that last desperate battle of the gas fight in the Delaware court-house, and gave me time to turn my whole attention to the plans I had long been maturing in my mind in connection with quite another project—"Coppers."
For sixty years past Boston had been the home of the copper industry. From it great fortunes had been derived, and there was in course of development a copper aristocracy which threatened the supremacy of the East India aristocracy that had so long lorded it in Boston society. Indeed, so far had the rival contingents progressed that there was a serious searching of the pretensions of any new-comer whose origin had to do with other enterprises. "Coppers" were respectable, were genteel, and, above all, were not "trade," for the average old-time Bostonian affects the Anglo-Saxon contempt for the traffickings of retail commerce.