Suddenly a project of reorganization was announced, and stock amounting to five times the value of the property was placed upon the market.  It was eagerly taken, for the reputation of the company was very high.  With the proceeds of this sale of securities the managers made themselves very rich men.  It was not necessary for them to do business any longer.  Indeed, they could not have continued to pay dividends on the amount of stock which they had sold; they had never expected to do any such thing.  What they did was promptly to close the business.  The price of the stock dropped immediately to the neighborhood of zero, millions of values were canceled, and thousands of investors were made to suffer loss.  But the direct consequences were seen in the village whose prosperity was suddenly destroyed.  Fifteen hundred men and women were deprived, at a stroke, of employment and livelihood.  In many homes there was destitution and hunger; hundreds of men were compelled to seek employment elsewhere, sacrificing the homes whose value had been greatly reduced; businesses that depended on the patronage of the mill hands were ruined; churches were paralyzed; families were scattered; discouraged men fell into ways of dissipation; young women were led into the paths of shame.

All this was done under the forms of law, and yet it would be hard to find in the annals of crime an instance more flagitious.  And the men who did this thing were church members—­members in good standing, leading members of an evangelical church.  Nor does it appear that they suffered any discredit in the church to which they belonged, and to whose revenues they continued to contribute out of the plunder by which they had impoverished and ruined so many.  The church had not sufficient moral sense to reprove and denounce this iniquity.  What is worse, the church had not had enough moral sense to make these men see beforehand that such an act was infamous.

Undoubtedly they would have promptly justified themselves.  “Such transactions,” they would have said, “are occurring every day; what the law does not forbid, and what everybody else does, cannot be wrong.  The property was ours, and we had a right to put our own price on it, and sell it for what it would bring.  The business was ours, and we had a right to do what we pleased with it, to keep it running or shut it down when we got ready:  it is a free country:  do you think you can compel a man to go on doing business when he prefers to quit?  We never guaranteed permanent employment to these people:  we paid them their wages while they worked for us, and that is the end of our obligation to them.”

Some such answer they would, no doubt, have made to any one who called in question their conduct; and by such an answer they would have revealed the failure of the church to which they belonged to bring home to them their social obligations.