"This week's work is only the beginning of a demonstration that the secrecy of the frenzied finance system—under the cover of which the savings of the people gathered into banks, trust institutions, and insurance companies, have been used by the Standard Oil crowd to rob the people through the stock-market—cannot succeed against publicity. The people only need light to save themselves.
"At the beginning of the week I advised the people of the United States to sell Amalgamated Copper and the other pool stocks. It was the first step in the final realization of plans I had been maturing for ten years. Since then, against the whole force of the billions and billions commanded by the Standard Oil system, Amalgamated has dropped from 82 into the 60's. I give the people my word, which I have never yet broken, that not once in that time have I sold a share of Amalgamated stock. Not only that, but I have actually bought large blocks of Amalgamated in order to steady the market and prevent too great and too sudden a panic, so that my friends everywhere might be able to get out without complete ruin. But for that I believe we would have had a panic greater than the Northern Pacific crash.
"I simply went out into the public square and told the people the truth. I was in a position to tell the truth. I knew the methods by which they had been robbed. I knew that ruin was staring them in the face unless they acted quickly.
SPENT $92,000 ADVERTISING
"I advertised the fact over my signature in the newspapers of New York, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles. I cabled the advertisement to London. All this cost, with incidental expenses, something like $92,000.
"The frightened leaders and agents of the 'System' spread reports that I was in league with the leading plungers and manipulators of Wall Street, that I was making a mere stock raid, that I was trying to 'shake down' Mr. Rogers. The truth is that I have no partners. Not a soul knew my plans until my first advertisement appeared. I have no price, for there can be no peace now until the whole rotten scheme of frenzied finance is smashed and things are brought back to their natural honest level. I am in deadly earnest. No man knows better than I do how great a service I am rendering to the American people."
Mr. Lawson stood squarely upon his heels, the incarnation of strength and courage. The square head, high and wide at the top, the long line of the jaw and broad, fighting chin, big, blue-gray eyes, the big, flat teeth, the strong nose, large firm mouth, sinewy neck, hairy hands, broad, deep chest, powerfully curved thighs, and the steady voice—these were eloquent of strength, determination, and concentration.
There was a black pearl in his cravat and an almost priceless canary-colored diamond sparkling on his little finger. He wore gray, striped trousers and a black coat and vest, across which was a beaded gold watch-chain. Everywhere in his room were flowers, roses, lilies, and bunches of the famous Lawson Pink, the flower for which he once paid $30,000.
The man whom I had expected to find haggard, pale, wild-eyed, and excited, in the centre of a nervous hurricane, was rosy-cheeked, cheerful, and apparently as free from care as though he had never heard of Wall Street. He spoke rapidly but in an even voice, occasionally pacing the floor and sometimes gesturing or setting his hands firmly on his hips. He answered questions promptly and with an almost boyish appearance of frankness. It would be hard to imagine a more masculine, compact, and concentrated personality.
This is the man who left school in Cambridge at the age of twelve, walked into Boston with his books under his arm, and secured a three-dollar-a-week position as an office-boy almost on the very spot where, after thirty-six years, he has worked himself up into a position from which he feels able to captain the fight against Standard Oil and its allies. He owns a palace in Boston filled with works of art; he has a six-hundred acre farm on Cape Cod, with seven miles of fences, three hundred horses, each one of whom he can call by name; a hundred and fifty dogs, and a building for training his animals larger than Madison Square Garden. Some of his horses are worth many thousands of dollars apiece. Even the experts of the German Government who examined Dreamwold the other day were amazed at its costliness and perfection. Within forty-eight hours Mr. Lawson wrote and published a large illustrated book analyzing his farm and gave it to his German visitors as a souvenir, after organizing for them a horse show that overwhelmed them with surprise.