institution; the men who commit the theft or their hirelings sit in
high places, and pass laws surrounding the proceeds of that theft
with impregnable fortifications of statutes; should any poor devil,
goaded on by the exasperations of poverty, venture to help himself to
even the tiniest part of that property, the severest penalty, enacted
by those same plunderers, is mercilessly visited upon him.

After having bribed legislatures to legalize his enormous issue of
watered stock, what was Vanderbilt's next move? The usual fraudulent
one of securing exemption from taxation. He and other railroad owners
sneaked through law after law by which many of their issues of stock
were made non-taxable.

So now old shaggy Vanderbilt loomed up the richest magnate in the
United States. His ambition was consummated; what mattered it to him
that his fortune was begot in blackmail and extortion, bribery and
theft? Now that he had his hundred millions he had the means to
demand adulation and the semblance of respect, if not respect itself.
The commercial world admired, even while it opposed, him; in his
methods it saw at bottom the abler application and extension of its
own, and while it felt aggrieved at its own declining importance and
power, it rendered homage in the awed, reverential manner in which it
viewed his huge fortune.

Over and over again, even to the point of wearisome repetition, must
it be shown, both for the sake of true historical understanding and
in justice to the founders of the great fortunes, that all mercantile
society was permeated with fraud and subsisted by fraud. But the
prevalence of this fraud did not argue its practitioners to be
inherently evil. They were victims of a system inexorably certain to