PART 1: THE WAR PLOTTERS OF WALL ST.

 THE WAR PLOTTERS OF WALL ST.
BY CHARLES A COLLMAN

PREFACE 

These stories were written under fire, at a time when treason stalked through the land. They are human records of the amazing acts of men who schemed and strove and plotted to blind ninety million people. 

Then these men, with immense cunning, set themselves to work at a game that is old as history. They coined great fortunes for themselves from the mad passions and blind hatreds they had instilled into their fellow-men. 

We, who tried to expose these conspirators, were vilified, threatened, hounded by the most powerful and unscrupulous band that ever organized itself to ruin a country and its people in the interest of a foreign race. 

Even tonight, as I write these lines, the plots proceed apace (October 22, 1915) . Wall Street millionaires are calling on Congress to expend a billion and a quarter dollars in the coming year, most of it on armament. They have sent the war stocks skyward. Bethlehem Steel the leader, with a gain of 59 points in a single afternoon, for they expect huge dividends to be paid on the hundreds of millions that will flow into their pockets from the ''National Defense." They have announced that they shall elect Elihu Root, the Wall Street corporation lawyer, as their President. England has deserted her ally, the Serb. The Germans are marching on Constantinople. 

Some plots have miscarried. Other war plots are brewing for the further enrichment of financiers. Shall we let them succeed, these fearful crimes planned by the men who, for a long year, have hoodwinked us, used us as their pawns THE WAR PLOTTERS OF WALL STREET ? 

CHARLES A. COLLMAN

1 

YOUNG MORGAN, 

BRITAIN'S MUNITIONS AGENT 

One autumn day as I was passing the corner of Wall and Broad Streets, where the new but rather unsightly home of J. P. Morgan & Co. had just been erected, a friend, one of the leading financial writers of the Street, seized me by the arm, and pointing across the way, he exclaimed: "Do you see that stone there, streaked with red in the front wall of Morgan's building? That's the blood of the New Haven." 

We laughed. It was jestingly said, but in it was the tragedy that lurks behind most jests. The leading men of New England, trusting in the integrity of the Elder Morgan, had invested their family fortunes in New Haven stock. And when the great blow fell, no men knew better than we in Wall Street of the many women, the widows of those men, who had come to interview their bankers on the wrecking of their all. Those strained, tear-stained faces of the New England widows haunted the Street for weeks. It was the bitter story of lost homes, of sons taken from college,, sent to work in the factories their fathers had once owned. 

The Elder Morgan inflated the costly bubble that disintegrated the New Haven. Throughout his career he had trusted confidently in the future. And she was kind to him. He died before she could confront him with an accusing finger. 

The Elder Morgan died and we saw his son step into his place,, into his fortune and the seat in the banking house that heads the Money Trust and controls the finances of our country. Wall Street was breathlessly curious to learn what manner of man was this who now headed the banking world. 

Young Morgan, as he is still known, bears the same name as his father and possesses the same facial characteristics. He is tall, with a strong, athletic frame, a firm step and a pleasant face.

He is popular among his friends, and no whisper of scandal has been breathed against his moral life. 

The Elder Morgan had a genius for great financial operations, he built immense corporations, and was an art collector without being a connoisseur. He diverted himself by buying known works of art at the highest possible prices. There was a sort of bluff heartiness about the Elder Morgan even in his despotism. He once scandalized Wall Street by slapping his chief partner in the face. They called him a pirate, and the old joker dubbed his yacht the Corsair. When he died, I wrote his four-page obituary in the Herald. In order to get my material, I read about everything that had ever been written about Morgan, I questioned his friends and associates and consulted my personal experiences with the banker. 

When I had completed that obituary, I was struck by a most remarkable fact. Not once by a gratuitous and kindly act, in no incident of his long career had he displayed the slightest sympathy for his human kind. 

No wonder we in Wall Street were curious to learn the manner of man Young Morgan should prove to be. 

I think the first revelation came to us all as a shock. On February 21st of this year Young Morgan testified before the United States Industrial Relations Committee. Chairman Walsh asked him what he considered the proper length of a working day for his employees. 

"I haven't any opinion on that subject," replied Young Morgan. 

"What do you regard as the proper income for an unskilled workman?''  

"There again I have no opinion.'' 

''Do you consider $10 a week sufficient to support a longshoreman ? '' 

"I don't know. If that is all he can get and he takes it, I suppose it is enough, '' and Morgan laughed. 

''At what age do you think children should go to work ?'' 

"I haven't any opinion." The spectators at the hearing began to regard the witness with curious interest.  

"How far do you think stockholders are responsible for labor conditions?" continued the Chairman.  

"I don't think stockholders have any responsibility in that matter,'' was the reply. 

"How about directors?" 

"None at all."

The witness was so indifferent and unresponsive to questions affecting laboring men and the causes of industrial unrest that the members of the Committee gladly let him depart with the remark: "You are permanently excused, Mr. Morgan." 

Now Young Morgan would tell you that he is a private banker. He has resigned from most directorates of the banks and corporations with which he is connected. Yet he still owns and controls those banks and corporations, steamship lines, steel and iron plants, and the great world-wide financial machinery that his father raised, and for which his father's father laid the foundations. 

Young Morgan as a result of all this has immense power. It seems to me that there lies a source of uneasiness, if not acute danger to us in that the head of all this industry and banking, which concerns the welfare and personal safety of many millions of our people, should openly profess such unconcern, such a total absence of sympathy with his fellow-men. Of course, a man may think as he likes. But in our day it has become a sort of unwritten duty that the man who makes a great and easy fortune from the labor of others, who controls the public 's money, and earns it from the public by the sale of large security issues, should exhibit some interest at least in those who work for him. I don 't recall a single instance in public life of another man confessing the sentiments that Young Morgan has avowed. We see that the laws of heredity have been observed, and that the son has inherited his father's indifference to his human kind. 

When the Elder Morgan died, his son at once sold the Chinese porcelains on which his father had spent vast sums gained from "financing" the Erie and New Haven. He sold his father's Fragonard panels. There had been some expectation that the son would bequeath to the public museums his father's art collections an act of expiation, one might say, for past plundering of the public. But Young Morgan cared nothing for the public's good wishes. He wanted the money. 

We read in Carl Hovey's life of the Elder Morgan that the banker gained his education at the University of Gottingen.

Those early associations in Germany maintained a warm spot in the old corsair's hardened heart. Now we see his son selling  bayonets and shrapnel that savage Sikhs and Senegal Negroes- may ravage the land where his father spent his youth. Young: Morgan has little sentiment for his father's memory. 

At the beginning of the European war, Young Morgan completed arrangements for making a loan to the Bank of France. This was on August 6, 1914. The Washington administration immediately asked American citizens to observe neutrality, and declared its opposition to the proposed French loan. Young Morgan then abandoned the French loan, to the great satisfaction of the people of this country. 

Months passed, demand sterling dropped, English credit was affected, and England owed Morgan money. Then one day Young Morgan left this country for England. He landed in London. When the American correspondents there questioned him about his errand, he refused to talk. Young Morgan rarely talks. He went into the country, where he sought security from observation, and remained there for several weeks. In the United States Mr. Morgan's visit to England at such a crucial time was -viewed with many misgivings. That the foremost American banker, noted for his British associations and sympathies, known, in fact, to be completely under the domination of this foreign influence, should be in England, secretly conferring with the heads of the British government, was sufficient to alarm every one of his countrymen. And Morgan was acting thus apparently against the expressed wishes of the Washington administration. 

What was being plotted in England between Morgan and the heads of the British government ? 

"The danger hid, breeds dreadful doubts.'' 

These dreadful doubts were soon to be verified. Young Morgan returned to this country and triumphantly announced that he had been appointed the official agent of the British government for the purchase of war munitions. 

An American multi-millionaire had again set himself above the law. He had committed an non neutral act, while his less wealthy fellow-countrymen were besought to remain neutral. 

It must be confessed that Mr. Morgan 's countrymen received this announcement that he had become a foreign government agent with feelings of grief and shame. It was incomprehensible to them that an American citizen, a man of enormous wealth driven by no necessity, should deliberately have gone into the business of buying shrapnel for the killing of his human kind. 

Hatred stalks wide through the land. Lifelong friendships have been disrupted. Wounds have been opened which may never heal again. And Morgan has brought all this upon his country the country which has showered upon him and his family all the opportunities, the ease and comfort that an enormous fortune brings. 

But Young Morgan cares nothing for all that. He wants the money. 

When recently charges were made in the British Parliament that Morgan was asking too high a price for his shrapnel, Lloyd George, Morgan's friend, defended him by saying that Morgan was making only two per cent. The trade in munitions is said to be approximating $2,000,000,000. Two per cent, of two billions is $40,000,000.* That a man, lured even by the spectra of this sum, should go into this bloody trade demands the possession of a- cold and hardened heart. Young Morgan has all that. 

*This sum represents only Mr. Morgan's commission as Britain's agent. Immense additional profits are also being made by him and his money trust associates from the companies engaged in the manufacture of munitions in which they are interested.

We remember that the grief and destitution of the widows and orphans of New England left the Elder Morgan as unmoved as the ash on the tip of one of those black cigars from his private Cuban plantation. 

I do not believe that any reproach or remonstrance would move Young Morgan to abandon his dreadful trade no, not even though the widows and orphans he has made should plead with him, because, you see, he has no sympathy with his human kind. 

If the general public was amazed by the act of Young Morgan in becoming the paid agent of a foreign government, what was the emotion of Wall Street? Bankers are the most conservative species of the money-making genera. A banker, as a rule, takes sides on public questions only in the most cautious and deliberate way. He wishes to get everybody's deposits, and sell his bonds and mortgages to the greatest number, as a baker sells his loaves of bread. He enters into no antagonisms, he challenges no enmities, since such courses are fatal to his trade.

To say that the banking element of Wall Street was thunderstruck would be to put it mildly. I have spoken with many bankers on this subject, and the general sentiment can be summed up in the words of an old and conservative member of the fraternity:   

"The Elder Morgan would never have done this thing. His son has left his father's ways. What the future will now have in store for him and the house his father left him no man may foretell." 

I have before me a copy of the London Daily Chronicle of June 24, 1915, containing the speech of Lloyd George, Morgan's friend, before the House of Commons :  "In consequence of the great importance of the American and Canadian markets, I have asked Mr. D. A. Thomas (cheers) to go over and assist in developing that side of the work. He will exercise control over the production of munitions in Canada and the States, and will be given the fullest authority. Mr. Thomas will act in co-operation with the representatives of the government in the States and in Canada. There is not the slightest idea of superseding the existing agencies there. These agencies have worked admirably, and, I believe, have saved this country millions of money. He will co-operate with Messrs. Morgan & Co., the accredited agents of the British government." 

Can this boast of the British politician possibly be true ? Has our country reached so low a pass that the representative of the British government exercises control over American industries, acting in co-operation with America's leading banker, the agent of the British government ? 

Not long ago a demented man went to Young Morgan's home and shot at him. The crack of a pistol smoked out the fact that the British Ambassador was present in Morgan 's home. 

That the British Ambassador was a visitor at the home of a pro-British banker would not be noteworthy. But what are we to suspect when the British Ambassador is secretly found in conference with the agent of the British government ? What was he doing there ? ''The danger hid, breeds dreadful doubts.'' 

If Young Morgan still retains his American citizenship, if he has not abandoned it as a result of his contract with the British government, as so many of his pro-British friends have done Waldorf Astor and Sir ( ?) Thomas G. Shaughnessy, who spat upon republican principles and renounced his American citizenship to swear allegiance to the English throne if, I say, Mr. Morgan is still one of us, he owes it to his countrymen to take them into his confidence before a Congressional inquiry is made into these grave affairs. 

Young Morgan should tell the American people with whose consent he became the accredited agent of the British government, and whether he first consulted the Washington, authorities before he compromised his country in this wise. He should tell us whether, as Lloyd George says, he really is co-operating with Mr. Thomas in supervising American industries, and how far the financial resources of our people are being used in this contraband trade with England. 

Young Morgan should tell us why, after abandoning his loan to France in the summer of 1914, he now makes a French loan in the summer of 1915 ; why he makes a $45,000,000 loan to Canada and is contemplating a loan to the British government of $500,000,000 of the American people 's money, after the Administration in Washington made him abandon these loans twelve months ago. 

Clear explanation should allay the dreadful fears that a British plot exists to make this country fight England's war in Europe as the price of $40,000,000 in commissions for the purchase of $2,000,000,000 worth of war material. 

I am sure that the entire country sympathized with Mr. Morgan when a crack-brained fool tried to strike him down. It sympathized also with his mother and his wife who were prostrated when they learned of the dreadful attempt. One can almost hear the two women pleading with the son and husband :  "Jack, give up this dreadful business. You see what it is leading to." 

And the man remains unmoved. 

About the time that deed occurred, there was in one of the Sunday newspapers a halftone picture taken from a Galician battlefield. It was not a pleasant picture. It showed a group of Galician peasant women assembled about a wooden shack, waiting patiently for a dole of black bread and salt. They were barefooted, and some of them, had beast like faces, torn with suffering and grief. I fear that our women also would be barefooted and show beast like faces, if ever our homes were ravaged by Russian Cossack's. In the same paper Lloyd George was boasting that Britain would win the war, not by the valor of British arms, but by starving women such as these. These ragged Galician peasant women knew that an Austro-German regiment had captured on that spot, from the Russians, boxes of ammunition "Made in America." They knew who had sold these arms to the Russians via Archangel. Oh, it is known by this time over the world. They had come from Britain's munitions agent, who thereby was earning his two per cent. 

But these ragged, wretched Galician peasant women WERE ALSO WIVES AND MOTHERS. THEY ALSO HAD SEEN THEIR SONS AND HUSBANDS STRICKEN DOWN. And these women were primitive natures. They knew how to curse and wail. 

The old Assyrian kings were conspicuous for a peculiar streak of cruelty. When they captured a town, they proudly record making mounds outside of the city gates of the hands and ears of their captives. "Those whom I spared, I put out their eyes and cut off their noses.'' Modern historians explain this peculiar trait of the Assyrians by stating that these people lacked imagination that is, they could not conceive suffering in others as applied to themselves. 

I think this rule applies to Young Morgan. I fear he fails in imagination. 

I confess that if I were Britain's munitions agent, I would wake o' nights sweating with fright, my ears ringing with those shrieks and wails from the Galician battle-fields: 

"Cold fearful drops stand on my trembling flesh. What do I fear ? Myself ? there 's none else by : There is no creature loves me ; 

And if I die, no soul will pity me : 

Nay, wherefore should they ? Since that I myself 

Find in myself no pity to myself. 

Me thought the souls of all that 

I had murder 'd Came to my tent." 

I have never before written a word in criticism of Young Morgan, and what I add now I write with reluctance and regret. But this pro-British banker, this handsome, stalwart man, with his satiate eye, with his lack of human sympathy, with absence of sentiment and imagination, walking to and from his banking house in Wall Street to earn his bloody two per cent., I regard today as the man most dangerous to the peace of his country.

2 

THE WAR STOCK GAMBLERS 

Wall Street has many moods and guises. It dresses them in externals, as an actor does his parts. 

The other day I strolled into the entrance of the Stock Exchange, and my eyes met the large placard posted there : 

"Gallery Closed for Repairs." 

No repairs are ever needed for the gallery of the Stock Exchange. I knew the portents of that sign. I have seen it there before, and know the reason why. It meant that the public had been excluded from the observation stand where it is permitted to watch the brokers' hubbub about the trading posts in the country's greatest money market. It meant FEAR. 

So I went around to the Wall Street entrance, where I satisfied the uniformed watchers stationed there as to my good intentions. For all entrances to the Stock Exchange are guarded, as are many Wall Street banking houses now, whose partners are kept under secret protection when they go about. 

I went to the fifth floor of the building to the "Library," where the financial writers congregate. One of them came up to me and whispered: "Collman, do you know they've just put a new steel wire netting over the roof of the Exchange"? 

We interchanged significant glances.  "Why," I asked, ''have they been getting letters again ?'' 

"Yes," he answered, in a lowered tone, "but they asked us not to mention it in the newspapers." 

In order to verify my friend's statement, I later ascended to the sixteenth floor of the Commercial Cable Building and looked down upon the shaft which opens on the great glass dome over the floor of the Exchange. My friend had not been mistaken. There it spread, a new, glittering steel wire netting, strong and durable, protecting the men, who, far below, were buying and selling war stocks, to the accompaniment of a clamorous din. 

And I could not refrain from asking myself, Why should men be working way down there in secret, screened from the public eye? 

Now in all this fair land of ours, those who are engaged in honest work do not hide behind steel screens, surrounded by guardsmen to protect them from the public gaze. When we go to see other men at business, who are  are accustomed to a bright American smile, a hearty handclasp and a cheery response that times are good and trade is booming. 

When men work in secret hiding places, we are accustomed to associate them with those wretches who make explosives for the slaying of their fellows, or hatch some plot to strip them of their coin. 

Is it possible that Wall Street can be engaged upon the commission of a crime ? 

Let us see. 

On the New York Stock Exchange there are 1,100 memberships. These brokers, as a rule, are handsome, hearty fellows, generous and good natured as are most men who make easy money. They do not produce, but absorb from the surplus provided by those who do the work of the land. Wall Street men know this so well that many of them engage in public movements and philanthropies. Wall Street must be made respectable. Mr. Henry Clews, for instance, who may be termed the Nestor of the brokerage world, is head of the American Peace and Arbitration League. To some it might appear an inconsistency that war stocks should be permitted to be posted on the quotation board in his brokerage office. But then that is business. Since the great war started, however, Mr. Clews, both as a publicist and a public speaker, has seen fit to single out for attack one of the many nationalities that go to make up the population of our country, and that is not so well. People who live in glass houses, you know. 

Mr. Clews and I have known each other for a great many years, and we have always been good friends, although, if he will permit me to say so, he is a foreigner and I am an American. 

Mr. Clews was born in England and came to this country a poor boy, for his native land had nothing to offer him. We, in our country, have welcomed Mr. Clews, have given him the privilege of making a large fortune and enjoying an easy life. I think we all have rejoiced in seeing Mr. Clews prosper. So far as I know, nobody has ever attacked Mr. Clews because he is of English birth, so it does not seem quite just that he should assail another race. Coming from a man of his age and standing, such words as he has uttered are calculated to awaken hatreds and dissensions that might tend to plunge our country into war. I think it is regretful that he should have brought over to us his old-world hatreds. I could probably say to him: "Mr. Clews, if you don't like the views of my country and the people of my country, you had better return to your own." But that is not the American way. I should not like to see Mr. Clews returned to his country. I like him too well. I admire him for his many gifts which have been useful to our people. Besides, I think he has a kindly heart, and is merely subject to an English fault. 

I mention this attitude of Mr. Clews because I am convinced that it has a direct bearing on the fact that Wall Street today conducts its work in secret. This is an admission of the Money Trust that in backing the Allies it is wronging other races in this country, and that it works in guilty fear of them. How much better would it be for Mr. Clews to prove his loyalty to his adopted country by advocating an embargo on the shipment of arms and ammunition to the warring nations, thus putting to shame his next door neighbor, Mr. J. Pierpont Morgan, American by birth, but official agent for Great Britain, who, for the sake of the money he makes, brings upon his country crisis after crisis because of his traffic in war material. 

Throughout the United States millions of men are looking upon Wall Street and its Stock Exchange with eyes red in hatred. They see there disloyalty on every hand, bankers making themselves agents for foreign governments, naturalized citizens eager for war in the interest of the land from which they came, and which they seem to love better than their own. And among such are the War Stock Gamblers. 

Mr. Noble, you are the President of the New York Stock Exchange, which is the medium through which the Money Trust unloads upon the public the stocks in its war enterprises. 

You will recall that several years ago, after the public had been lured into Wall Street, plundered and stripped, a great outcry arose to incorporate the Stock Exchange. 

As at present constituted, the Exchange is a private club. Its members do as they like, subject only to the club's restrictions. 

"In case of the insolvency of a member, his obligations to other members take precedence over even the claims of a customer who has been defrauded" 

The proposal to incorporate the Exchange was greeted with fury by your members. Your predecessor, Mr. Mabon, pronounced it a monstrous injustice, and at a dinner members hissed the name of New York's governor and threatened to remove their organization from the state. 

But when the Pujo" Committee recommended that Congress prohibit the use of the mails, telegraph and telephone to your association, the Exchange promised to reform. It appointed a press agent, Mr. William C. Van Antwerp, at a salary of $15,000 a year or is it $25,000? whose duty it was to make the Exchange popular again. I received some of these reform promises from the hands of Mr. Van Antwerp, and as I thought they were earnestly meant, I published them. 

In view of that fact, Mr. Noble, I am entitled to ask you, How have those promises been kept? 

Today on the Stock Exchange the old game of swindling the public is in full blast again, but in a form crueler, meaner and more contemptible than ever. 

You know to what I am referring the War Stocks. 

What are war stocks? 

Since Mr. Morgan the Younger made himself Britain's munitions agent, the pro-British Money Trust has jumped in to manufacture arms and shrapnel for the Allies. They think they will make "fat money" by selling this material for the purpose of arming savage mercenaries, through whom England hopes to wipe out the Germanic races of Central Europe, from which more than one-half of our people have sprung. Well and good. But the Money Trust hopes also to make money in another way, namely by foisting upon the public" at high prices, the stocks issued on its war plants. 

Among these war stocks I shall pick out a few conspicuous examples. They are Bethlehem Steel, Crucible Steel, Westinghouse, American Coal Products and Pressed Steel Car. There are also many others. 

As I write this, Pressed Steel Car has been manipulated from $25 to $59:75 a share: Crucible, from $18.25 to $92.34; Westinghouse, from $64 to $115 ; Coal Products, from $82 to $170.25 and Bethlehem, from $29.50 to $311.

Those are huge advances. On what are they supposed to be based ? Large cash dividends looming in sight ? Mr. Noble, you know as well as I do that the members of the Money Trust never share their profits with the people. They will put such profits as they make into plants, and issue more stock against the latter, unloading it at still higher prices through the members of the Stock Exchange upon the public, which is to be neatly fleeced again. 

Mr. Noble, did not the Exchange promise us that such reprehensible manipulations would be prohibited? 

You know far better than I how the hidden machinery of the stock boomers is being used to stimulate the public appetite for speculation in war stocks. Paid tipsters float about uptown hotels ; marvelous stories appear in venal newspapers of fortunes coined by lucky gamblers. Stories of phenomenal war orders from Russia or Great Britain are impudently invented, such as a $90,000,000 war contract by American Can, or the 400,000,000 cigarettes supposed to have been ordered from the P. Lorillard Tobacco Company. In these two instances, well-meaning directors denied the lying stories. But the rumors augment daily, the faked contracts grow in number and volume, and the gambling fever is whetted sharper by the harpies who prey upon the savings of the foolish and credulous. 

Now and then a high official of one of the war stock companies has the courage to step out to try to stem the rising tide of gambling which always leads to ruin. A member of the Crucible Company warned the public the other day that the stock was not worth its selling price. He said that there was outstanding in unpaid scrip and accumulated dividends on preferred stock $7,300,000, that the company is guaranteeing $7,- 800,000 of bonds, and has $2,500,000 to $3,000,000 of bonds out- standing on its subsidiary companies. He pointed out that, with these obligations in sight, and with the large expenditures necessary to finish its new plants, the common stock could not be expected to pay dividends for years to come. The shares of the company at once dropped five points, but impudent price boosters took up the song of "huge profits" again next day, and the market plungers soon forgot a warning sincerely meant. 

Let me give you an example from my personal observation, of how the public "makes money" out of war stocks. I met in the office of one of the members of your Exchange, a trader who, several days before, had bought 100 shares of Crucible Steel. It went up three points, and he took on 200 shares more. I was talking with him on the morning of Thursday, July 29. Crucible had opened with a gain of nearly five points, and this trader had again plunged to the extent of 500 shares. The stock still advanced. Flushed with the sense of coming riches, he turned to me and said: "I've already made $3,000 in Crucible, and that'll pay for the killing of 1,000 Germans. What do I care. Business is biz. I would like to see us get into the war. Crucible would extend its plants and get still bigger war contracts from the government. Why, you'd see it jump to $1,000 a share. " 

Crucible went to 79 that day. My acquaintance, the trader, became delirious with speculative fever. You know the symptoms, Mr. Noble. You are a broker, and make your commission out of such men. When Crucible went to 79, this man bought 500 additional shares. It went to 83, and he bought 1,000. This was at about two o'clock in the afternoon, if my memory serves me right. Then from one of those corrupt sources, which the Exchange manipulators know so well to use, there came a story that Bethlehem had bought the Crucible company. Traders reasoned that, since the news was out, they had better sell. Crucible began to melt until it declined to 66, only a fraction above the price at which it had closed the day before. 

I met my trader a few days later. In the decline he had lost more than $20,000 and was in debt even to his broker. He was wandering about like a stricken thing. 

He had thought to make money by following the war stock gamblers. Poor fool ! The Money Trust had made short shrift of him. 

Do you ever stop to think, Mr. Noble, what a cruel business your members are engaged in? Do you not think that at least it ought to be played fair? 

Let me call something to your attention. 

In the last five weeks, as I write this, 130,540 shares of Bethlehem were traded in upon the Exchange, or nearly as much as the entire outstanding stock in the hands of the public ; in Coal Products, 109,898 shares were traded in, or more than all the outstanding stock ; in Westinghouse, 1,445,490 shares were traded in, or four times the amount of the outstanding stock; in the instance of Crucible, 1,135,400 shares were traded in, or five times the amount of the outstanding stock, which aggregates only 245,784 shares. 

This undoubtedly indicates that these stocks are "cornered." The war stock gamblers do not sell the stock itself, of which the floating supply is small, but sell contracts to receive and deliver it. 

Mr. Noble, was not one of the reforms promised us, a prohibition of the ''cornering'' of stocks ? Is stock "cornering'' permitted under the law ? 

Into what deep waters have thy rowers led thee ? 

The old argument that the Exchange has nothing to buy and nothing to sell, and is only a meeting place for its members, will no longer hold. The representatives of the Exchange did not make that plea in Albany, three or four years ago, when they pleaded against incorporation, and promised honest trading methods for the future. 

One of the members of your Exchange recently said to me : "We may not be doing the right thing, but we hope to get away with it, anyhow.'' He is mistaken. This time you will not get away with it. There is an old saying in the financial district : "The men who drop their money in Wall Street are good losers. They never squeal." That is true. The man who has been trimmed in the Street slinks away from the district. He has been carefully educated to the fact that it is considered bad form to blow one's brains out in a broker's office. 

Already the financial district is filling with the stories of the heart-breaks of ruined men, of suicides, of families left penniless through the work of the war stock gamblers. The public is in an ugly temper. It is not the same public that rose against the Stock Exchange in 1912-13. This time you have aroused the anger of a great people. It is an undemonstrative, conservative and industrious race, that forms the bone and sinew of our nation, and when it is deeply wronged, IT NEVER FORGIVES, AND IT NEVER FORGETS. 

Have you read the official organ of Wall Street ( Commercial and Financial Chronicle, July 31), and the warning it has addressed to you ? It says : 

''The war order business will in any event be of short duration. There may be large immediate profits (waiving altogether the question of risks) , but these large profits cannot in any event last very long. But the prospect of these large profits, albeit of a very risky nature, is being dangled before the eyes of the public and a gigantic speculation is being carried on, evidently by powerful cliques, with the view of utilizing the situation. 

"Similar schemes have been worked in the past, but never has the transparent character of the undertaking been so manifest as on the present occasion. It is the duty of all who are in position to influence popular sentiment or who have access to the popular thought, to warn the innocent public against allowing themselves to become the prey of the designing band of manipulators." 

Has not the Stock Exchange a duty in the premises which it should not neglect to perform? 

"The Stock Exchange authorities must proceed as the District Attorney would in ferreting out crime. And after the offending parties have been discovered, further dealings with them or for them must be prohibited." 

These are pretty strong words, Mr. Noble, but do you know why they have been uttered? All over the country people are withdrawing their money from banks of deposit and demanding gold. They have learned that the Money Trust, which is selling war munitions to the Allies, cannot get gold from the latter, and is now using the people's money to reimburse itself. French, Russian and British securities, received by the Trust from those countries, are being planted in all the banking institutions, which are loaning the public's money upon them. 

If you do not believe what I say, send to me and I will show you the written admissions of banking officials to that effect. 

Russia is bankrupt, one-fourth of France is in ruins, and Great Britain has scaled down the principal on the premier security of the British Empire, Consols, which it redeems at only two-thirds of the par value in new securities. These countries will not hesitate to make a partial default on the securities planted by the Money Trust in American banks, on which it has borrowed the people's money. When that day comes, the Wall Street banks will have to call in the loans they are making on the inflated war stocks. And the war stock gamblers will have made another panic. 

Do you remember the panic of 1907, which was precipitated by the Wall Street stock gamblers ? Do you recall how the streets in the financial district were filled with the mob, and the steps of the Sub-Treasury were black with them? Don't provoke them to come like that again, for in the year 1915 the results will be different. 

In 1907 you relied upon the Elder Morgan to save the district. But now the Elder Morgan is dead, and can no longer lend Wall Street the millions he obtained from the United States Treasury, and- you have only Britain 's munitions agent to depend upon. 

The other day, Mr. Noble, you issued a defense of the Stock Exchange. Sleek, smug and smiling, you leaned back and blamed the "speculative excitement," and said that ''human nature" could not be curbed. Caveat emptor, eh? Let the buyer beware.

But you well know that you can regulate the transactions on the Exchange. Does not the Constitution of the State prohibit horse racing and gambling? Did not the Hughes Committee, which investigated the practices of your association, say : "In its nature it is in the same class with gambling upon the race track or at the roulette table, but is practiced on a vastly larger scale. It involves a practical certainty of loss to those who engage in it." 

If you do not wish a Federal regulation of the Exchange, which will permit an inspection of the methods used in the manipulation of the war orders, then call a meeting of your Board of Governors and proceed against the war stock gamblers, and strike all the manipulated stocks from the Stock Exchange list. Abolish your useless publicity bureau, and devote the large sums thus needlessly spent toward reimbursing in some measure the miserable victims of the Stock Exchange gamble. 

You are the responsible head. 

I urge you most earnestly to take this step. 

You and I know why you have excluded the public from the gallery of the Stock Exchange, why you have installed your wire netting and posted your guards. You fear that some poor wretch who has lost his all in the war stocks swindle may try to hurl a bomb at the men whom he blames for having despoiled him. Or that some crack brained foreigner may attempt the act, because his brother was killed abroad by the Money Trust shrapnel.

In that you may be right or wrong. I have no opinion in the matter. 

But if you do not act quickly, I fear that you are threatened with a much greater danger, from which wire nets and armed guards will fail to save you and your members, and that is the condemnation of the GREAT SILENT MAJORITY.

3 

THE CURTAIN RAISED 

ON WALL STREET'S UNDERWORLD 

It was high noon in Wall Street on August the eleventh, of the Christian year nineteen hundred and fifteen. The Sub Treasury stretched its gloomy length along the east side of Nassau Street, all the way from Pine to Wall. But at this hour the financial district wears its cheeriest smile. 

Little typists strolled along, arm in arm, chatting and flirting; messenger boys whistled; brokers' clerks, accountants, bank runners, bond men, all the rout that makes up the workers of the Street, were pouring from their haunts into the thoroughfares of the money market. 

Then a change flashed over the scene. There was a rush of many feet westward along Wall Street. A body of mounted police, with stern faces, pistols in their holsters, galloped up. 

From around the Wall Street corner there came slowly up Nassau Street a long parade of motor trucks, its mounted guards on either side. The crowds, that quickly gathered, looked on these guards who had driven them from the eastern sidewalk, with curious and somber faces. They seemed to view a funeral cortege. And, indeed, something in our public life, something that was very dear to us, was buried there that day. 

There were twenty-five trucks. The rear end of each was closed with a thick steel wiring. From behind each of these gratings one could distinguish the grim forms and faces of four men, with rifles and automatic pistols in their hands. 

It was in this wise that King George of England sent to J. Pierpont Morgan, his accredited agent, the gold in payment for bayonets and shrapnel. 

And as I stood there on the sidewalk the blood welled to my face and rage surged through my heart. 

For I asked myself, whom do armed men threaten on the open street? At whom do they aim those loaded rifles? 

Brothers, they were meant for you and me. 

It was the defiance of Morgan and his Money Trust to the silent wrath of honest men. He said : ''Bow to my will, or I shall shoot you down." The pleasing masks these bankers wear had dropped, and there were revealed the hideous males, the primal brutes, cowering over the gold they had earned by the mangling of human flesh, gnashing their tusks in rage at the people whose sympathies they had thwarted, whose ideals they had crushed, by the shameful trade in war munitions. 

To those who dwell in the vast stretches of our country that spread far west of the Hudson River, the doings of Wall Street are an unsolved mystery. They suspect and fear. They do not know. 

I shall draw back a corner of this mysterious curtain and disclose the workings of Wall Street's underworld. You shall read here something incredible, unbelievable, of men who have duped, deceived, dishonored you, and are now bent on plundering you on a scale vaster than has ever before been attempted in the history of our time. 

Colonel Robert M. Thompson, a high-minded American patriot, inaugurated on June 6th the organization of the Navy League of the United States. He advocated an immediate issue by the government of $500,000,000, to be devoted to the construction of a greater army and navy. He then invited a large number of citizens, supposedly imbued with similarly patriotic sentiments, to attend a luncheon and conference on this important subject. 

But hold, one moment, Colonel. Why, when you issued those invitations, did you not address them to public-spirited and disinterested men, who have the peace and welfare of our country at heart? Why, on the contrary, did you invite the members of J. P. Morgan & Co., official agents of the British government in the purchase of war munitions, and financial backers of the Steel Trust, whose products are being turned into bayonets and shrapnel for the Allies ? Why did you invite to your patriotic luncheon the directors of companies making millions in the manufacture of war material, and bankers who make further millions- from such concerns by selling their securities and acting as their transfer agents? 

Why, when you purposed to spend $500,000,000 of the public money, without consulting the people who earn it, did you confer with the members of Wall Street's Money Trust, into whose pockets those $500,000,000 would flow 1 Here are some of the gentlemen to whom that ardent patriot, Colonel Thompson, addressed himself : 

J. Pierpont Morgan 
S. H. P. Pell 
Thomas W. Lamont 
Cornelius Vanderbilt 
William H. Porter 
Ogden L. Mills 
Henry P. Davison 
Frederic R. Coudert 
Charles Steele 
Francis L. Hine 
Paul D. Cravath 
Edmund C. Converse 
Elbert H. Gary  
Daniel G. Reid 
Harry Payne Whitney  
Percy Rockefeller 
Seward Prosser . 
Frank A. Vanderlip 
L.L. Clarke* [part of the pond scum hall of fame D.C]
*This story has been republished throughout this country and Europe. It has put Colonel Thompson on the defensive. He pleads that some of these men did not attend his luncheon. He does not deny having invited them. He does not deny that he read, at his luncheon, the receipt of money subscriptions from them. He does not deny that Morgan sent him money, and that Morgan is the leading member of his Navy League.
The luncheon was held. The innocent Colonel, addressing his distinguished and ''disinterested" guests, broached his pet plan of distributing $500,000,000 of American money to America's armament manufacturers. To his gratification, the issue was "enthusiastically advocated," as promptly recorded in the Money Trust's organ, the New York Times. 

Now let us analyze some of the activities of this assemblage of American patriots : 

Messrs. Morgan, Lament, Porter, Davison, and Steele are members of the banking house of J. P. Morgan & Co., agents of the British, French, and Russian governments for the purchase of war material, and interested in huge corporations making huger profits from the manufacture of war supplies.[Now keep in mind we are neutral in the war effort,this was straight out treason,and the government did nothing DC] 

The Wall Street Journal on May 6th said that "the United States Steel Corporation has been getting and will get orders for steel from concerns in this country, which have taken orders for shrapnel and other war munitions." And it added on August 3rd that "the United States Steel Corporation has obtained a Russian rail order amounting to $25,000,000." Now Messrs. Morgan, Gary and Converse are members of the Steel Trust board.

The Wall Street Journal added that "the Lackawanna Steel Company has been helped in, war orders to the extent of $7,000,000 for rails and steel." Two of the invited patriots, Messrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt and Ogden L. Mills, are directors of this company. 

The Wall Street Journal further related on May 4th: "The President of the National Surety Company estimates that $1,500,000,000 in war material has been contracted for. The estimate is based on the applications for surety bonds which his company has received." Strange to relate, we find among the directors of the National Surety Company the name of Mr. Frederic R. Coudert who, in the public prints, so bitterly denounces Germany every time a delicate diplomatic crisis occurs between that country and our own. Surely, Mr. Coudert does not desire to see this country go to war on behalf of his beloved France, that the National may underwrite more surety bonds? 

THE COLONEL UNMASKED 

Again we find that on May 4th the Wall Street Journal informs the Street that "the International Nickel Company is enjoying an improvement in its business because of the increase in the consumption of nickel brought about by the war." And what do we find here? Oh, shame to tell it ! Ohy Colonel, Colonel, is it thus you dupe your countrymen ? Colonel Robert M. Thompson is chairman of the board of the International Nickel Company, and among the directors are Messrs. Edmund C. Converse, S. H. P. Pell, and Seward Prosser. 

The Wall Street Journal further chronicles that "the American Locomotive Company's order for shrapnel amounts to approximately $65,000,000," which must be of specific interest to Mr. L. L. Clarke, one of the directors. 

Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing is one of the deadliest of the "war stocks" on the Stock Exchange, and Mr. Paul D. Cravath is a member of its board. 

Another "war stock" is General Electric, one of whose directing geniuses is Mr. Charles Steele, of J. P. Morgan & Co. 

The Farmers' Loan & Trust Company is transfer agent for the General Electric Company, and on the trust company board we locate Messrs. Percy Rockefeller and Frank A. Vanderlip. The Guaranty Trust Company is the transfer agent for the Westinghouse, American Car & Foundry, Atlas Powder Company, Hercules Powder Company, and other war munitions concerns. Messrs. Daniel G. Reid, Harry Payne Whitney, and Thomas W. Lamont are its directors. 

The Bankers Trust Company is transfer agent for the Baldwin Locomotive Works, and among the directors of this concern are Messrs. Reid, Hine, Davison, and Converse. 

So there, all the disinterested patriots are accounted for, yea, even the founder of the Navy League. 

Why then, I ask, should not Colonel Thompson's scheme to spend $500,000,000 of government money have been ''enthusiastically advocated" by gentlemen so closely affiliated with the war munitions factories ? Why should they not have leaned back in their chairs at the obliging Colonel's luncheon, clinked their glasses and cheered, laughing in their sleeves over the jest they were having at the expense of their simple-minded countrymen, while they slapped their capacious pockets in the hope of soon secreting there the $500,000,000 to be spent on armament. 

For, you see, the war in Europe some time will be ended, and the Money Trust's war munitions plants must not be idle. No, it is the duty of Wall Street patriots to organize Navy Leagues and National Security Leagues and the like, that the government may be urged by the great patriotic clamor to spend vast sums on war material. 

Colonel, I have a further word to say to you. You are a personal friend, I believe, of Mr. James Gordon Bennett,* owner of the Herald, who, I see, subscribed several thousand dollars to your singular scheme. Mr. Bennett is an expatriate, who is cabling frantically to this side of the water that the United States must join the war to rescue his adopted country, France. 
* They are cronies. Both have broken their country's laws. James Gordon Bennett was fined $30,000 in the Federal Court for sending obscene matter through the mails. Colonel Robert M. Thompson was fined $4,000 by Judge Holt in the Federal Court, August 4, 1910, for violating the Sherman Law in cornering cotton.
Colonel, if the people of this country wish to have a larger army and navy, they will not consult the chairman of the International Nickel Company, nor Bennett, the Franco-American, nor your friends, the makers of shrapnel. Their representatives in Congress will attend to that. And the government will build its own armament plants. It will not buy the idle ones of the Money Trust when the war has ended. 

So much for the Navy League. 

STILL DRAWING BACK THE CURTAIN 

Let me draw back this mysterious curtain further and disclose to view the great spider 's web that has been spun in Wall Street : 

On the first chart you may see a list of names of forty Wall Street men, who are identified with the war munitions concerns, or with companies that profit from their work, or with banking houses engaged in contraband traffic, or with bonding concerns that insure the war contracts, or with banks and trust companies that act as fiscal or transfer agents for the munitions companies. 

Now Wall Street financiers are far-sighted men. From the very nature of their business they look ahead, yes, ever far ahead. These men, presiding at their board meetings, are authorizing vast extensions to their armament plants. What do they mean to do with these great new plants after Europe 's war is over ? 

Let us look into this phase of the question for a moment. "Bridgeport is making such strides in the manufacture of arms and munitions and war machinery, that predictions are freely heard on all sides that it will grow to a city of half a million population within the next few years. In the transformation of Bridgeport into the American Essen, the Remington Company and the Union Metallic Cartridge Company began to branch out and put up great buildings that dwarf those used in the past." (Sunday newspaper.) 

June 18th. Charles M. Schwab, of the Bethlehem Steel Company, will build the third factory for the manufacture of shrapnel. August 22nd. Following the recent trip here of Charles M. Schwab, with British and Russian army officers, it is announced that the Bethlehem Steel Company will build a large factory near its shell proving ground at Cape May Point, for the making of powder and shells. 

August 12th. The Dupont Powder Company has begun the work of staking out the buildings on the fourth addition to the Dupont plant at Carney's Point. The addition will be larger than any of the other three plants now in operation. When the war began, the company had only one plant, the others having been added in quick time as orders increased. 

August 20th. The Dupont Company is to distribute $58,000,000 in new stock in a new corporation. 

August 11th. The plant of the Smith & Wallace Company, manufacturers of electrical supplies, has been leased to an association of New York financiers and will immediately be converted into a war munitions factory. 

August 11th. The Bethlehem Steel Company has purchased the modern plant of the Detrick & Harvey Machine Company. The manufacture of munitions of war will be begun as soon as possible. 

May 29th. The Atlas Powder Company has secured control of various powder mills on the Pacific coast. Stockholders of the company have authorized $5,500,000 6% cumulative preferred stock for necessary financing. 

Here is a faint conception of the tremendous new enterprises of the Money Trust. Now I shall quote the Wall Street Journal of July 19th: 

"Will the demand for war material outlast the conflict? Will the great industry that has been established in so short a time end with the war? It is noticeable that those concerns that are erecting plant extensions or new plants to take care of the war business, are not providing temporary and inexpensive structures. They are building modern and permanent structures of brick or concrete and steel. 

MORE WARS TO COME 

"If the war continues or is followed by others, the munition makers would be in a position to reap enormous profits as a result of having the plants ready." 

Yes, our far-sighted financiers will see to it that this war "is followed by others" And they will "reap enormous profits." 

But who, at the dictum of the Money Trust, will toil to pay for those untold millions to be spent by our country on armament for the upkeep of the new war plants? Who, at the dictum of the Money Trust, must shed their blood in the wars that are "followed by others"? 

Brothers, you and I. 

Yes, and then we, too, shall echo the bitter groans we have heard emitted by despairing millions, staggering under the military burdens of Europe's monarchies. 

And now are we to be the dupes of Wall Street "patriots"? 

If we investigate the patriotism of the members of the Money Trust we shall find it to be thin-skinned, indeed. Their ambition is to amass great fortunes, and then to seek their homes abroad. They choose new homes in France and England for reasons such as to escape unpleasant public inquiries, or that they may lead lives that would not be approved by their fellow countrymen. 

I refer to expatriates such as James Stillman, one-time president of the National City Bank; James Hazen Hyde, of insurance scandal fame : William E. Corey, of the Steel Trust, and James Gordon Bennett, of unsavory name. I refer to men like Henry James, who renounced his country; to men like Sir Thomas Shaughnessy, who sold his American birthright for a foreign title.

But when the day of trouble comes, such fine gentry troop back home, as these have done. And then they read us a lesson in patriotism, and tell us that we must fight for the countries of their adoption. 

Yes, they say that to us ; we, the millions who stay here and toil and suffer for our country's good; we, who are descended from races other than the English we, whose fathers tilled the soil in pioneer days, and shed their blood in all our country's wars.

They tell us that we must fight for England, these expatriates, these lip-patriots, their pockets fat with British gold we must fight for England, the hereditary enemy of our land, for her against whom our fathers fought, for England, our worst enemy today. 

"If I am asked what I mean by a 'reasonably possible enemy,' I reply any power except Great Britain." Former Attorney General Charles J. Bonaparte, at a meeting of the National Security League in Carnegie Hall on June 15th. 

I say to you, you Forty Gentlemen of Wall Street's Spider's Web: 

Gentlemen, many of you were born of gentle blood. Most of you have all the money you require. 

Gentlemen, you are standing with foreigners against your own countrymen. You are defying the sentiments of millions; you are outraging their highest and holiest beliefs. 

I ask you to arise in your board meetings and protest against this bloody trade. I ask you to help us with your great influence to check this fury-mad pro-British crew that seeks to hurl our country into a foreign war in which it has no share. 

If men of your type remain quiescent in this hour of danger, then our country has sunk to a low pass indeed. Thousands of years ago men, such as we, founded republics very much like ours, in Greece and Rome. But they succumbed to plutocrats. 

Gentlemen, are there those among you who have courage and no fear? 

Some among you I know well. I can see them lean back and sneer: ''Oh, I don't care what is published about me in THE FATHERLAND. THE FATHERLAND is bought with German gold," and then they laugh and wink and jingle in their pockets their British gold made in a shameful trade. 

Do you know why this is published in THE FATHERLAND ? I shall tell you. I can point out among you and your Wall Street friends the names of men who are part owners of the great New York dailies, who finance them, and dominate them with their advertising. Small wonder that the Money Trust has poisoned the public mind with the tainted syndicate news services sent broadcast throughout our country. 

The New York newspapers know that what I write about the Money Trust is true, but they do not dare to print the truth. And that is why it is printed in THE FATHERLAND. 

Brothers, these men have wealth and power, but they are few. We are many, and as Edwin Lawrence Godkin truly said: "In the voice of the majority there is all the majesty of doom." 

You, who love your country, join us, work with us, for "the dark night cometh when no man can work."

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WALL STREET'S BRITISH GOLD PLOT S40