New York Life have an opportunity to decide whether the "one man" who runs the great institution in which their savings are invested is honest. In making up their minds, I implore them not at the present time, or at least until the question has been more fully ventilated, to allow their policies to lapse. Under any and all circumstances they should keep up the payment of their premiums, for the one thing especially desired and schemed for by some of the "frenzied finance" insurance companies is a wholesale lapse of policies.
Some few years ago the financial world learned with great interest of a new and very useful invention in finance. A group of individuals who had been buying large quantities of a certain stock at a low price, found they could not, on account of the fact of its overcapitalization having become known to the public, resell it; and they were, to use the stock-gambling term, "hung up" with it because it was too water-logged to float. It became necessary to disguise its identity. Here's how they did it: They formed a "syndicate," to which they "turned over" their stock at a good profit; the "syndicate" in its turn put it "in trust" by simply depositing the stock certificate with a trust company, which in its turn issued against the stocks thus held a new security, which it called a "bond." For these a ready market was found, for the word "bond" is still a term to conjure with in the world of finance.
This seemed such a serviceable arrangement that the originators soon had many imitators. Many "syndicates" were formed, and many so-called "bonds" were put on the market. In most cases the stocks were purchased at a low price, turned into "trusts" at