engaged in exchanging that stock for the securities of the people in the form of banks and trust companies, railroads, and other assets of definite value. So completely has "Standard Oil" pulled the wool over the eyes of the votaries of finance that there cannot be found in or out of Wall Street a single great financier who would not laugh to scorn the suggestion that "Standard Oil" is engaged in a campaign for the distribution of its Standard Oil stock to the public. Yet pin your great financier down to the facts, and he'll admit that he himself has quite a block of the stock, and that institutions of which he is a director include among their assets in one form or another good-sized parcels of the inestimable security. But so completely are these very wise men held by the spells woven over them when for this or that special reason they were allowed as a favor to acquire their holdings, and so impressively have they been shown that their ownership in Standard Oil stock must be kept secret, that no suspicion has ever entered their minds that they were playing the part of lambs in its purchase.
Nor was the episode I have described