Thomas William Lawson

“ On earth there is no more pitiable sight than the panic of a herd of novice stock-speculators suddenly awakened to a realization of their ruin. The ticker clicks a sort of death-watch as the merciless tape, without hitch or let up, reels off destruction. To such desperate beings the stock operator—the market-maker—is the straw to save them from drowning, and to him they turn as the one possible source of aid and hope. ”

“ But tell me, Jim, tell me, what can it buy in this world that I have not got? I had health and happiness, perfect health, pure happiness, when I did not have a thousand all told. Now I have fifty millions, and I know how to get fifty or five hundred and fifty more any time I care to take them, and I have only physical and mental hell. No beggar in all the world is so poor in happiness as I. Tell me, tell me, Jim, in the name of God, if there is one—for already the game of gold is robbing me of my faith in God—where can I buy a little, just a little happiness with all this cursed yellow dirt? ”

“ Do you believe that there is one man in all this wide world to-day who honestly believes one single statement that you have made, or who believes that you have ever turned your hand to, or aided in the slightest degree in, any honest enterprise? You criticise the copper corporations who have placed their stock before the public as a legitimate investment. Can you point to one single instance in which a misrepresentation of fact or figure has ever been made in anything connected with the Amalgamated Company? ”

“ If I did not have her, perhaps in time I could forget; perhaps I might lay out some scheme to help poor devils whose poverty makes life unendurable, and with the millions I have taken from that main shaft of hell I might do things that would at least bring quiet to my soul; but it is impossible with the living corpse of Beulah Sands before me every minute and that devil machinery whirling in my brain all the time the song, ‘Revenge her and her father, revenge yourself.’ It is impossible to give it up, Jim. ”

“ There are in every American community honest, sturdy souls who can be depended on to come forward in emergencies and cry out aloud against a threatened political crime. Above the brute hubbub of a city's roar their voices are heard like the voice of conscience, and the hurrying throng pauses a second in its mad rush after dollars to listen to their tale of the Commonwealth's wrong. ”

“ Because the wise men of the "System" know human nature, know that most men and women accept unquestioningly the conditions they find surrounding them. Each day it is pounded into the heads of the people through a hundred agencies that it is the greatest and most flourishing of peoples and that the laws and customs which regulate its lives and rights are the best in all the world. How shall the people know that these glowing rumors, these propitious tidings, are but the siren songs of the "System" under the spell of which it is despoiled of its savings? ”

“ I must stop this machinery that is smashing up more American hearts and souls each year than all the rest of earth’s grinders combined. Every day I delay I become more fiendish in my desires. Jim, don’t think I do not know that I have literally turned into a fiend. Whenever of late I see myself in the mirror, I shudder. When I think of what I was when your father stood us up in his office and started us in this heart-shrivelling, soul-callousing business, and what I am now, I cannot keep the madness down except with rum. ”

“ No man or woman in distress ever left his house or office without relief, and he gave as generously of his time and advice as of his money. Amid the jagged rocks and treacherous cross currents of Wall Street Leonard Lewisohn stood as a beacon lighting the way to better things, and men pointed at him and said, "There is still hope." Amalgamated may not have broken this man's heart as it did others, but I can imagine the bitterness and distress it caused him, whose proud boast it was that he had never gone back on his word. ”

“ Some seek the quiet of the woods, the soothing rustle of the leaves, the peaceful ripple of the brook when battling for their soul, but Bob’s woods appeared to be the shadowy places of misery, his rustling leaves the hoarse din of the multitude, and his brook’s ripple the tears and tales of the man-damned of the great city, for he stopped and conversed with many human derelicts that he met on his course. ”

“ Although I sat in the room with him almost from the time that the stock-market opened until long after it closed, not once did Mr. Lawson show the slightest sign of excitement over market affairs. Strong as an ox, clear-eyed, tranquil, smiling, the man who had moved the financial market downward against the will of the greatest combination of capital the world has ever seen, bore himself like one absolutely confident of success. ”

“ To make my invention useless it must be made impossible to buy or sell the same share of stock more than once at one session, and short selling, which is now, as you know, the foundation of the modern stock-gambling structure, must likewise be made impossible. If this could be done the $95,000,000 worth of seats in the Exchange would be worth less than five millions, and, what is of far greater import to all the people, the financial world would be revolutionised. Men of Wall Street, do not fool yourselves. My invention is a sure destroyer of the greatest curse in the world, stock-gambling. ”

“ Greed crystallized into a practice, dignified into a principle, consecrated into a religion and become a fanaticism. But, mind you, not the dross, but the rule; not profit, but precedent. Money no object, but our laws must be kept. Shylock's god is "Standard Oil's." The ravenous lust for gold that possesses these men is not an appetite, but a fever. In them it is the craving of the tiger for blood. Gorged and glutted with riches, their millions piled into the hundreds, masters of the revenues of empires, still they are as the daughters of the horse-leech. ”

“ But so hopeless have I become of late, so much am I reliant upon you, my dear child, and eternal hope so springs in all of us when confronted with great necessities, that I have hoped and still hope that you are to be the saviour of your family; that you, only a frail child, are through God’s marvellous workings to be the one to save the honour of that name we both love more than life; the one to keep the wolf of poverty from that door through which so far has come nothing but the sunshine of prosperity and happiness ”

“ Did you ever see a copper mine? Did you ever put a pick into ore? Did you ever reduce one ton of metal so that it would yield up its wealth for the benefit of mankind. Have you ever done anything excepting to act as a parasite upon honest labor and, by chicanery and by misrepresentation, endeavor to rob the people of their hard earnings? I speak to you plainly, knowing you yourself for what you are. Can you show one man that can point to any honest industry in which you ever took part; to one single act of yourself that ever contributed to the welfare or the advancement of the working people? ”

“ Jim, we must be three millions losers, and the men who have our money have so many, many millions that they can’t live long enough even to thumb them over. Men who will use our money on the gambling-table, at the race-tracks, squander it on stage harlots, or in turning their wives and daughters or their neighbours’ wives and daughters into worse than stage harlots. Men, Jim, who are not fit, measured by any standard of decency, to walk the same earth as you and Judge Sands. Men whose painted pets pollute the very air that such as Beulah Sands must breathe. ”

“ A better, a higher, and a more expensive standard of living—that is all. That this prosperity which is our national boast will last forever is incredible. Sooner or later will come one of the times when Nature frowns and sends her floods, her droughts, and her epidemics of disease. Is the American people prepared by its long-sustained prosperity to bridge over that period of want and suffering?
The truth is that the mass of our population has not sufficient surplus laid by to last over thirty days of such a calamitous interval. ”

“ Nature, environment, the security of a perfect marriage have ever combined to constitute me loyal to my chosen one, yet as I stood silent, like one dumb, absorbing the details of the loveliness of this young stranger who had so suddenly swept into my office, it came over me that here was a woman intended to enlighten men who could not understand that shaft which in all ages has without warning pierced men’s hearts and souls—love at first sight. ”

“ What is your idea as to how we shall control the selling end?"
"I had given that little thought, Mr. Rogers," I replied. "I believe that easily takes care of itself. The demand is always greater than the supply. We shall have the metal to sell, the world will be more anxious to buy than we to sell: what more can be necessary?"
"Lawson," said the master brain of the greatest and most successful commercial enterprise in the world, "you know the stock-market, but you don't know the first principle of working to advantage a great business in which you absolutely control the production. ”

“ The ‘System’ commits no legal crime. I committed no legal crime. I had not even infringed any rule of the Exchange, any more than had the ‘System’ when they performed their trick. Since my experimental panic I have repeatedly put the trick in operation, and each time I have taken millions, until to-day I have in my control, as absolutely as though I had honestly earned them, as the labourer earns his week’s wages, or the farmer the price of his crops, over $1,000,000,000, or sufficient to keep enslaved the rest of their lives a million people. ”

“ On the surface there is nothing to suggest that a set of vampires have captured the high places of finance and are sucking away the life-blood of the nation. Our banks and trust companies all present a fair exterior and apparently are the same safe and honorable institutions they were before the canker fastened on them. Only its votaries know what the "System" is, and their way is the way of silence and darkness. A tie, stronger and more effective than the oath of the Mafia, binds them to its service, and woe be to him who dares divulge its methods. ”

“ Those who seek to depress the price of a stock are known as bears, and those who oppose them by trying to raise the price are bulls.
The great crowd was surging all over the room. Hats were smashed and coats were being stripped from their owners’ backs as though made of paper, and now and then a particularly frantic buyer or seller would be borne to the floor by the impetus of those who sought to fill his bid or grab his offer. Through all the wild whirl, straight and erect and commanding was the form of Bob, his face cold and expressionless as an iceberg. ”

“ The acute sensitiveness of a body of investors to extraneous influence, however slight, is familiar to any one who has had to do with market manipulation. In a theatre or church one strenuous spirit can quell a tumult with some ringing assurance, but long before the leader of a financial movement has got word to his following, wide-spread over the country, it has taken alarm, the rout has begun, and the field is strewn with corpses. A great financial excitement, like a rocket, should soar triumphantly into the air, leaving behind it a comet-like trail of glory, climaxing in a shower of gold ”

“ Not one man in a million, Lawson, will agree with you that you are justified in bringing about all this disaster simply because you think that we are taking too much of the cash that has been voluntarily paid in by people well able to attend to their own affairs. You must remember once this scandal and trouble are public they never can be smothered. There can be no more consolidation, no more copper boom in your lifetime and mine, and when the collapse comes every one will look for the victim, and that victim will be you. ”

“ I ask you whether, if an honest man knew how to beat Wall Street at its own game, he should hesitate to beat it—hesitate because of anything connected with conscience or morals? You saw what Barry Conant was able to do to us that day simply by standing on the floor of the Stock Exchange and outstaying me in opening and closing his mouth. You saw he was able to sell Sugar to a point so low that I was obliged to let go of our 150,000 shares at eight to ten million dollars less than we could have got for them if we could have held them until to-day. ”

“ Not only have the people been deprived of the profits of their labor, but this capitalized prosperity is the stern instrument by which new burdens are laid on their shoulders and new tithes are exacted from their wages. But for the plundering "System" the great mass of our people would be able to sit in their tents in the shade of their husbanded harvests and laugh to scorn the frowns of fortune. Now, I say, God help the nation when Nature, tired from her great work, rests, and the people, too, are compelled to rest—for then will come an awful awakening. ”

“ Any alliance between life insurance and this modern speculative frenzy cannot be too deeply deprecated, nor too strongly reprobated. Every true friend of honest life insurance among insurance journals will demand that this great business, of all businesses, must be kept free from the contagion of corruption that has shamed finance, is covering commerce with a blighting mildew, and threatens our whole land with disaster as well as dishonor. ”