loudly complained of it. These could have stood by their neighbor, the
"small dealer," if they had wanted to, and no underselling could, have
been done. When the trust lowered the price of its product they eagerly
took the advantage offered, then cursed the trust for ruining the small
dealer. When it raised the price they cursed it for ruining themselves. It
is not easy to see what the trust could have done that would have been
acceptable, nor is it surprising that it soon learned to ignore their
clamor altogether and impenitently plunder those whom it could not hope to
appease.

Another of the many sins justly charged against the "kings of finance" was
this: They would buy properties worth, say, ten millions of "dollars" (the
value of the dollar is now unknown) and issue stock upon it to the face
value of, say, fifty millions. This their clamorous critics called
"creating" for themselves forty millions of dollars. They created nothing;
the stock had no dishonest value unless sold, and even at the most corrupt
period of the government nobody was compelled by law to buy. In nine cases
in ten the person who bought did so in the hope and expectation of getting
much for little and something for nothing. The buyer was no better than
the seller. He was a gambler. He "played against the game of the man who
kept the table" (as the phrase went), and naturally he lost. Naturally,
too, he cried out, but his lamentations, though echoed shrilly by the
demagogues, seem to have been unavailing. Even the rudimentary
intelligence of that primitive people discerned the impracticability of
laws forbidding the seller to set his own price on the thing he would sell
and declare it worth that price. Then, as now, nobody had to believe him.
Of the few who bought these "watered" stocks in good faith as an
investment in the honest hope of dividends it seems sufficient to say, in
the words of an ancient Roman, "Against stupidity the gods themselves are
powerless." Laws that would adequately protect the foolish from the