double their cost, and then paid for by means of these certificates, dubbed "bonds." As one stock after another was converted into syndicate certificates—"bonds"—the familiarity of the procedure robbed it of its novelty and these "bonds" were quoted and dealt in much as other and more tangible securities bearing the same name. Perhaps this is why the startling announcement of the New York Life Insurance Company made about this time, that it proposed to sell all its stocks and thereafter hold nothing but bonds, created so much less of a sensation than was anticipated. The term "bond" had become vulgarized.
This excellent example would undoubtedly have had many followers but for the humor of the Tobacco Trust. This robust institution, with an immense amount of watered stock, audaciously poured it all but a small amount into bonds, $157,000,000 of them, and with a fine trumpet-blast proclaimed these "bonds" safe investments for widows, orphans, and insurance companies. Even Wall Street, with its frenzied votaries and its frenzied environment, was staggered. The culmination of these conversion performances was the brilliant plan evolved by George W. Perkins, the junior partner in the firm of J. Pierpont Morgan & Co., vice-president of the New York Life Insurance Company and expert investor of its vast surplus, to have the United States Steel Trust purchase some $200,000,000 worth of its own water-logged stock and convert the same into more "absolutely safe bonds"; for its most valuable services in the turning-over process the Morgan firm was to have a commission of some forty millions of dollars. At this juncture "frenzied finance" became gagged with its own froth, and I have not space here to go further into the subject.
The New York Life Insurance Company declares to its agents, policy-holders, and prospective policy-holders that