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 consequence of their folly would put an end to all commerce.  The sin of “over-capitalization” differed in magnitude only, not in kind, from the daily practice of every salesman in every shop.  Nevertheless, the popular fury that it aroused must be reckoned among the main causes contributory to the savage insurrections that accomplished the downfall of the republic.

With the formation of powerful and unscrupulous trusts of both labor and capital to subdue each other the possibilities of combination were not exhausted; there remained the daring plan of combining the two belligerents!  And this was actually effected.  The laborer’s demand for an increased wage was always based upon an increased cost of living, which was itself chiefly due to increased cost of production from reluctant concessions of his former demands.  But in the first years of the twentieth century observers noticed on the part of capital a lessening reluctance.  More frequent and more extortionate and reasonless demands encountered a less bitter and stubborn resistance; capital was apparently weakening just at the time when, with its strong organizations of trained and willing strike-breakers, it was most secure.  Not so; an ingenious malefactor, whose name has perished from history, had thought out a plan for bringing the belligerent forces together to plunder the rest of the population.  In the accounts that have come down to us details are wanting, but we know that, little by little, this amazing project was accomplished.  Wages rose to incredible rates.  The cost of living rose with them, for employers—­their new allies wielding in their service the weapons previously used against them, intimidation, the boycott, and so forth—­more than recouped themselves from the general public.  Their employees got rebates on the prices of products, but for consumers who were neither laborers nor capitalists there was no mercy.  Strikes were a thing of the past; strike-breakers threw themselves gratefully into the arms of the unions; “industrial discontent” vanished, in the words of a contemporary poet, “as by the stroke of an enchanter’s wand.”  All was peace, tranquillity and order!  Then the storm broke.