subscribers to these bonds, you will note that the largest purchases have been made for the great insurance corporations and the banks and trust companies owned or controlled by them and "The System." If, in the instance I am using for illustration, a president or vice-president of one of the great insurance companies is known to be willing to subscribe for, say, $10,000,000 for his insurance company; $5,000,000 for his principal trust company, which is owned by the insurance company; $1,000,000 apiece for five other banks and trust companies, also owned or controlled by the insurance company; and can influence five other affiliated institutions to subscribe for $1,000,000 apiece, he controls, as will readily be seen, a purchasing power of $25,000,000, and is sought for as an underwriter, if he is not already an owner. For this $25,000,000 which his institutions buy he "draws down," as his personal profit, 33-1/3 per cent. "underwriters'" commission, or over eight millions of dollars.
In taking this amount, he is not robbing his insurance company, in the common acceptance of the term in this era of "frenzied finance," though he has absolutely appropriated to himself a profit which belongs to it and not to him.
It must not be supposed that such transactions as this I have outlined are conducted in the simple ABC fashion I have set down here for purpose of illustration. No "one man" appears through any deal. The purchases and sales are usually made through dummies, and the final recipient of the "made millions" carefully conceals all the phases of his participation.
Let us take another type of transaction. An insurance company owns two adjoining pieces of unimproved city real estate, for which it paid $250,000 apiece, but which are now worth $500,000 each. The directors of