Friday, the Thirteenth: A Novel
a great Stock Exchange may at any time do what I have done to-day. Weigh
well what I am about to say to you. During the last quarter of a century
there has grown up in this free and fair land of ours a system by which
the few take from the many the results of their labours. The men who take
have no more license, from God or man, to take, than have those from whom
they filch. They are not endowed by God with superior wisdom, nor have
they performed for their fellow-men any labour or given to them anything
of value that entitles them to what they take. Their only license to
plunder is their knowledge of the system of trickery and fraud that they
themselves have created. No man can gainsay this, for on every side is the
evidence. Men come into Wall Street at sunrise without dollars; before
that same sun sets they depart with millions. So all-powerful has grown
the system of oppression that single men take in a single lifetime all the
savings of a million of their fellows. To-day the people, eighty millions
strong, are slaving for the few, and their pay is their board and keep. I
saw this robbery. I felt the robbers’ scourge. I sought the secret. I
found it here, here in this gambling-hell. I found that the stocks we
bought and sold were mere gambling chips; that the man who had the
biggest stack could beat his opponent off the board; that his opponent was
the world, because all men directly or indirectly played the
stock-gambling game. To win, it was but necessary to have unlimited chips.
If chips were bought and sold, on equal terms, by all, no one could buy
more than he could pay for, and the game, although still a gambling one,
would be fair. A few master tricksters, dollar magicians, long ago seeing
this condition, invented the system by which the people are ruthlessly
plundered. The system they invented was simple, so simple that for a
quarter of a century it has remained undiscovered by the world at
large—and even by you, who profess to be experts. No man thought that a
free people who had intended to allow all the equal use of every avenue
for the attainment of wealth, and who intended to provide for the
safeguarding of wealth after it was secured, could be such dolts as to
allow themselves to be robbed of all their accumulated wealth by a device
as simple as that by which children play at blindman’s buff. The process
was no more complex than that employed by the robber of old, who took the
pebbles from the beach, marked them money, and with the money bought the
labour of his fellows, and by the manipulation of that labour and by
turning pebbles into money he took away from the labourer the money which
he had paid them for the labour until all in the land were slaves of the
moneymaker. These few tricksters said: We will arbitrarily manufacture
these chips—stocks. After we have manufactured them, we will sell the
world what the world can pay for, and then by the use of the unlimited
supply we still have we will win away from the world what it has bought,
and repeat the operation, until we have all the wealth, and the people are
enslaved. To do this there was one thing besides the manufacturing of the
chips—stocks—that was absolutely necessary—a gambling-hell, the working
of whose machinery would place a selling value upon such chips; a hell
where, after selling the chips, they could be won back. I saw that if
these tricksters were to be routed and their ‘System’ was to be destroyed,
it must be through the machinery of this Stock Exchange. I studied the
machinery, and presently I marvelled that men could for so long have been
asses.
“From the very nature of stock-gambling it is necessary, absolutely
necessary, that it be conducted under certain rules, unchangeable,
unbreakable rules, to attempt to change or break which would destroy
stock-gambling. The foundation rule, the rule absolutely necessary for the
existence of stock-gambling is: Any member of the Stock Exchange can buy,
or sell, between the opening and the closing of the Exchange as many
shares of stock as he cares to. With this rule in force his buying and
selling cannot be restricted to the amount he can take and pay for, or
deliver and receive pay for, because there is not money enough in the
world to pay for what under this same rule can be bought and sold in a
single session. This is because there have been arbitrarily created by
these few tricksters many times more stocks than there is money in
existence. The amount of stock that any man can sell in one session of the
Exchange is limited only by the amount that he can offer for sale, and he
can offer any amount his tongue can utter; and he is not compelled and
cannot be compelled to show his ability to deliver what he has offered for
sale until after he has finished selling, which is the following day. You
will ask as I did: Can this be possible? You will find the answer I
found. It is so, and must continue to be so, or there will be no
stock-gambling. Mark me, for this statement is weighted with the greatest
import to you all. A member of this Exchange can sell as many shares of
stock at one session as he cares to offer. If any attempt is made at the
session he sells at to compel him either before or after he offers to sell
to show his ability to deliver, away goes the stock-gambling structure,
because from the very nature of the whole structure of stock-gambling the
same shares are sold and resold many times in each session and the seller
cannot know, much less show, that he can deliver until he first adjusts
with the buyer and the buyer cannot adjust until after he has become such
by buying. If a rule were made compelling a seller to show his
responsibility before selling, every member would have every other member
at his mercy and there could be no stock-gambling. When I had worked this
out, I saw that while the few tricksters of the ‘System’ had a perfect
device for taking from the people their wealth, I had discovered as
perfect a means of taking away from the few the wealth they had secured
from the many. With this knowledge came a conviction that my way was as
honest as the ‘System’s,’ in fact more honest than theirs. They took from
the innocent, I took from the guilty what had already been dishonestly
secured. I determined to put my discovery into practice.
“I might never have done so but for that Sugar panic in which I was robbed
of millions by the ‘System’ through Barry Conant. In that panic the
‘System,’ with its unlimited resources, filched from the people by the
arbitrary manufacture of stocks, and by their manipulation did to me what
I afterward discovered I could do to them, without any resources other
than my right to do business on the floor of this Exchange. You saw the
outcome, in the second Sugar panic, of my first experiment. In a few
minutes I cleared a profit of ten million dollars. I could have made it
fifty millions, or one hundred and fifty, but I was not then on familiar
terms with my new robber-robbing device, and I had yet a heart. To make
this ten millions of money, all that was necessary for me to do was to
sell more Sugar than Barry Conant could buy. This was easy, because Barry
Conant, not knowing of my newly invented trick, could buy only what he
could pay for on the morrow, or, at least, what he believed his clients
could pay for; while I, not intending to deliver what I sold—unless by
smashing the price to a point where I could compel those who had bought to
resell to me at millions less than I sold at—could sell unlimited
amounts—literally unlimited amounts. When Barry Conant had bought all
that he thought he could pay for, he was obliged to beat a retreat in
front of my offerings, and I was able to smash, and smash, until the price
was so low that he could not by the use of what he had bought, as
collateral, borrow sufficient to pay me for what I had sold him. Then he
was compelled to turn about and sell what he had bought from me, and when
I had rebought it, for ten millions less than I had sold it for, the trick
had been turned. I had sold him 100,000 shares say at 220. He had sold
them back to me say at 120, and he stood where he had stood at the
beginning. He had none of the 100,000 shares. Both of us stood, so far as
stock was concerned, where we had stood at the beginning, but as to
profits and losses there was this difference: I had ten millions of
dollars profits, while Barry Conant’s clients, the ‘System,’ were ten
millions losers—and all by a trick. The trick did not differ in
principle from the one in constant practice by the ‘System.’ When the
‘System,’ after manufacturing Sugar stock, sell 100,000 shares to the
people for $10,000,000, they so manipulate the market by the use of the
$10,000,000 that they have taken from the people as to scare them into
selling the 100,000 shares back to them for $5,000,000. After they have
bought they again manipulate the market until the people buy back for
$10,000,000 what they sold for $5,000,000. 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.
“What do you intelligent men think of this situation? You know, because
you know the stock-gambling game, that the American people, with their
boasted brains and courage, come year after year with their bags of gold,
the result of their prosperous labours, and dump them, hundreds of
millions, into this gambling-inferno of yours. You know that they are
fools, these silly millions of people whom you term lambs and suckers. You
chuckle as, year after year, having been sent away shorn, they return for
new shearing. You marvel that the merchants, manufacturers, miners,
lawyers, farmers, who have sufficient intelligence to gather such surplus
legitimately, would bring it to our gambling-hell, where upon all sides is
plain proof that we who conduct the gambling, and who produce nothing, are
obliged to take from those who do produce, hundreds of millions each year
for expenses, and hundreds of millions each year for profits—for you know
that we have nothing to give them in return for what they bring to us. You
know that every dollar of the billions lost in Wall Street means higher
prices for steel rails, for lumber and cars, and that this means higher
passenger and freight rates to the people. You know that when the
manufacturer brings his wealth to Wall Street and is robbed of it, he
will add something to the price of boots and shoes, cotton and woollen
clothes, and other necessities that he makes and that he sells to the
people. You know that when the copper, lead, tin, and iron miners part
with their surplus to the ‘System,’ it means higher prices to the people
for their copper pots and gutters, for the water that comes through lead
pipes, for their tin dippers and wash boilers, and for their rents, and
all those necessities into which machinery, lumber, and other raw and
finished material enters. You know that every hundred millions dropped by
real producers to the brigands of our world means lower wages or less of
the necessities and luxuries for all the people, and especially for the
farmer. You know that it is habit with us of Wall Street to gloat over the
doctrine of the ‘System,’ which the people parrot among themselves, the
doctrine that the people at large are not affected by our gambling,
because they, the people, having no surplus to gamble with, never come