THE COMMUNISM OF CAPITAL. 461 



haps,) their power would not have been exercised a day too 

 soon. If existing State Legislatures and the Forty-third 

 Congress can not see their way clear to a retrenchment in 

 governmental expenses, and to the casting out of corrupt 

 officials, they will assuredly find themselves relegated to 

 deserved obscurity, and their places will be supplied by 

 men who realize the fact that there is something pertaining 

 to the office of legislator besides looking sharp after &quot; num 

 ber one.&quot; 



THS COMMUNISM OF CAPITAL. 



The facility with which, here and there, an unscrupulous 

 man piles up fortune after fojctune upon the financial ruin 

 of his fellows, seems inevitably to demoralize every business 

 in a country. It is notorious that the stock operations of 

 Wall Street are based largely upon fictitious values, and 

 that the class of operators who control them are intensely 

 selfish, guilty of the meanest subterfuges, often lacking 

 education, successful by dint of cunning, and unscrupulous 

 to the last degree. They lead astray those who have not 

 inflexible honesty inherent in their natures. By arousing 

 their cupidity and corrupting their morals, they work their 

 ruin, and turn them into pliant tools of their devilish arts. 



The daily peculations, defalcations, and outright thefts, 

 that are making the business of the country more a game 

 of chance than legitimate enterprise, nearly all have their 

 beginning in this Gomorrah of vice speculation in stock. 



The clerk who, perhaps, may have saved up a thousand, 

 becomes acquainted with one of the stool-pigeons of the 

 sweat-cloth of the stock market ; for this class, in common 

 with other gamblers, use all the nefarious schemes of their 

 brethren of the other more vulgar sweat-cloth of the gam 

 bling-houses, to &quot; rope in &quot; the unwary. The clerk, therefore, 



