real purpose; that they are feints or manœuvres in his campaign. So when I declared that I was working out plans for the consolidation of all good Boston "Coppers," and that associated with me were the strongest capitalists in the world, a laugh went up from a goodly portion of "the Street." The hireling news bureaus shrieked at my presumption and the absurdity of my combination, and when after a hot day's operations I was quoted in the financial press as telling my followers that it was "Standard Oil" money which was to back "Coppers," Barron, whose News Bureau moulded opinion for the opposing copper magnates, came out with a statement:
"Lawson is spreading in his peculiar underground ways that the Standard Oil crowd is looking into Coppers. Just enough countrymen swallowed his yarns to enable him to boost prices over six points to-day, but by to-morrow, when the Rockefellers or Rogers of Standard Oil put their foot down on his transparent lies, those who were foolish enough to listen to his ridiculous fakes will find they must sell at a loss. We can say, on a high authority in Standard Oil, that they have never bought nor contemplate buying a share of any copper stock."
My enemies were numerous and powerful, and there were many other announcements of the same character as Barron's tending to cast ridicule on my movement and expose me as a falsifier. Indeed, notwithstanding the merits of the plan and the benefit it must confer on all copper properties, I was assailed as fiercely as though I had advocated anarchy or had prepared a scheme of wholesale plundering. In stock affairs innovations are resented and resisted even more fiercely than in other walks of life, and the Boston money crowd fought me tooth and nail. The titles I acquired in those days were varied and startling. For one set I was a "charlatan," "wizard," "fakir," an "unprincipled manipulator"; in another I was a "copper king" or a "prince of plungers." Feeling ran high, and prices rose and fell in the most erratic and extravagant fashion. Certain stocks advanced or receded from five to ten points in as many