them by the National City Bank, and the proof is to be found in the books of said National City Bank. My readers may say here that this constitutes a fortunate condition rather than a crime to be punished, for the less Amalgamated a man had, the better he was off, as the stock afterward declined. This conclusion is a false one, however.
Here, in simple terms, is an illustration of what was done in Amalgamated and of what the wrong was.
B had a valuable race-horse and decided to dispose of him in five shares. He offered these five shares for public subscription and advertised that if over five were subscribed for he would split up the shares and allot them pro rata. There were on the final day seven subscriptions. Instead of turning over the horse to the seven subscribers to own and race in their own way, B notified them that twenty-one subscriptions had been received, and that for their seven he had allotted them a one-third ownership, while the other subscribers would retain two-thirds. In the two-thirds resided the right to manage and race the horse, and the seven had no say whatever in this direction. The seven honest subscribers, not suspecting that B had simply sold them one-third of his horse for nearly his whole cost, and that he still retained a two-thirds ownership in him, supposed that fourteen others had subscribed on the same terms as themselves. If the horse were really able to race and thereby earn large sums of money, it was by this fraud in B's power to make him appear so worthless that the seven bona-fide subscribers would be inclined to turn over their ownerships to B at his own figure. Contrariwise, B could so dose the horse as to make him appear more valuable than he really was, and use the advantage to dispose of his fourteen shares for fictitiously high prices.
The world assumes an attitude of horror and amazement at the mention of crime, and thousands of words are written to describe what led up to and away from any given overt deed; but the deed itself, however grave,