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.
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