Mountain Home maverick. [volume] (Mountain Home, Idaho) 1906-1911, 1907-04-18
THE PIRATES OF FINANCE.

The editorial page of the New
York Press, republican, sounds
these days very like an 1896 demo-
cratic document. Indeed, 1t would
be difficult to fipdvin the history OF
the 1896 campaign denunciation
by democrats so severe as that
which appeared In the leading ed
itpfial prirted fn~ me New York
Press, republican. of March -,
1907. The editorial is entitled,
what Is Due the Railway High
Financiers is Not the Martyrs
Crown but Jail"
Extracts from that editorial fol-
low:
Years ago this paper predicted
shc very things that are now COM
ing to pass, and repeatedly, through
the wild debauch of the railway
1nanipulators, we have warned
them that they wcro Fastening the
day Of reckoning. The whole
trouble with their schemes, as we
have often pointed out, is not that
the public has started what they
are pleased to cali a prairie fire.
Ii is that they have simply been
carrying on green goods swindles
on colossal scale.
They have been taking the rail-
roads out of the hands OF cngi-
ncers and railway men and giving
them over to corporation lawyers
and stock market gamblers. In
stead of managing them to haul
great trafficrand to take care of the
future transportation needs of the
country, they have used them to
control the ticker tape quotations
and to perform speculative mir
;aclcs. They have stripped the
properties to make fraudu ent show
of earnings so that they might
double dividends over night after
they had ''gone long of stocks, -
and, selling the next day on the
rise, pat tens and hundreds of
millions of gambling profits into
their private pockets. They have
seized roads that were iogitimately
capitalized, multiplied their stocks
and bonds several tim IS, issu d the
bogus securities to themselves or
their syndicatcs at low price and
then unloadcd them on the publip
cat the top They have piled NC
earnings into huge surplus which
ught to have been used for buying
locomotives, cars and rails to handle
the growing traffic. but which they
have lent to themselves to buy other
stock low and sell them high, stuff
fling their wallets with the pro-
cceds.
These manipuiators of the rail-
ways Of the country have taken a
hundred million dollars of shares of
one road, added them to one hum
bred million dollars of shares of an
other and called them, by the
mere process Of merging, worth five
hund -cd millions. They have issued
securities to themselves insuring
their possession OF the actual worth
of the properties and printed coun-
terfeit securities representing the
water they have poured into the
merger. This stuff they have
palmed off on the public as the
original and increased value of the
roads and gathered in fabulous for
tunes by the operation. And be-
cause the railroads were being
handled by the lawyers and stock
market gamblers to make a satur-
MALTA of speculation; because IT
was of more Importance to them to
take from fifty to one hundreds
points of profit on margined ac-
counts in the Stock Exchange than
to convey the traffic of the country
in hand and to provide for that in
prospect, the railroads themselves
have been going to the dogs. For
lack of proper equipmenet, track
inspection, labor, ETC., they have
been numbering passengers and
blocking freight to a degree unap-
preached anywhere else in the
world and never before parallelcd
even. in the United States. We
know a, case of railroad paying 8
per cent dividends, declared to
mark up the price of the stock SO
that the gamblers could unload at
a tremendous profit) which had a
lever break in switch tower and
the whole system was tied ap be-
cause there was not an extra lever
ready to be put in. To make a
bookkeeping showing which would
induce the public to take the stock
at more than 200, the road was not