But there is still another yawning chasm in the history of “Wall Street, Past,” and that is Mr. Clews’s failure to discuss the transfer of the Treasury of the United States to the custody of the Street, and the consequent reduction of the Secretary of the Treasury to the rank of a clerk. This very thing has been most successfully accomplished. I believe that the Secretary still has an office at Washington, but that should be closed in the interest of economy and reform. To do so, we doubt not, would be a strong factor in the restoration of confidence. Perhaps the Washington office might be left in charge of a janitor, for it is understood that some official correspondence is still directed to the old address! The presence of the Secretary in New York, however, has become so essential to the proper discharge of his duties that the removal of his residence thither can only be deferred by an absurd deference to public opinion!
The results of the transfer of this vital function of the national government have, in the meantime, been so salutary as fully to vindicate the change. This was shown in 1893-94 when the Street, with a strong repugnance to investing money in useful enterprises, and having a prodigious accumulation of funds on hand, concluded that a sale of Government bonds was necessary for the “national honor.” To this end the managers began to pull the treasury. In that institution a large sum of gold was stored, wholly without warrant of law. The people needed the gold beyond measure—that is, they needed the money; and gold is one form of money. The industries of the people had been prostrated by an international conspiracy, and the nation was quivering on the verge of apprehended ruin.
In this crisis the patriotic Street devised the bucket-chain, the crank of which was in the hand of the Street, while the “chain” ran through the Treasury of the United States. Every bucket came out filled with gold. Lazard Frères emptied out the gold and shipped it abroad to their confederates. This created the necessity for buying it back with bonds. The people were stunned with the audacity of the thing—just as the unfortunate owners of a house in flames are stunned to see gentlemen of the profession rush in and empty the safe. Wall Street danced and shouted while the work was done. The bonds were “popular,” and the Street got them—got them for one price and sold them for another.
By this beautiful process the great American nation was literally held up and robbed of more than nineteen million dollars! No highwayman ever more successfully clutched the wizen of his victim than did the Street with its supple fingers around the white larynx of Columbia. The wheezing of the strangulated Republic could be heard from the St. Lawrence to the Rio Grande. The nation was thus “saved,” and the robbers took the money and went sailing away on summer cruises to Norway and Venice and the Cyclades. The “national credit” was preserved; Wall Street “rescued” us from dishonor! That part of the proceeds not consumed in yacht races, pyrotechnics, and balls was passed to the credit of the reform fund, needed for the restoration of prosperity in the fall of 1896! Certainly a history of “Wall Street, Past,” ought to contain some reference to these crimes.
Mr. Clews, turning to “Wall Street, Present,” tells the nation that now “the great banks have a superabundance of gold to lend on solid and readily salable collateral at low rates of interest, approximating the prevalent rates in London and Paris, where similar accumulations of idle capital exist.” This is a true statement of the facts. Mr. Clews has here spoken by the books. What he says signifies that Wall Street is now ready to go ahead and issue new mortgages on the American people. It is now ready to offer inducements to our fourteen millions of voters to sell themselves into another twenty-year cycle of bondage. If they will only be gentle and not interrupt us; if they will give us a true death-grip on themselves, on all they possess, and all they ever hope to possess, we will lend back to them a part of the very money which we have sucked up from their wheat fields and pastures, from their barns and potato patches, from their humble stores and markets, from their mills and their mines, and we will thus expedite them on the way to serfdom. Meanwhile we will continue to bankrupt their railways, to snatch their local stocks, to convert all shares in all enterprises into bonds, and to put the bonds into our safes to the end—that confidence may be restored and prosperity come back like the flowers that bloom in the spring.
For the time being we, the Street, are able to toss “two hundred thousand shares a day” on the horns of our bull, and to put the same amount of securities under the custody of our bear. “This conclusion takes it for granted that the profits should be equally divided among the membership.” Such are Mr. Clews’s very words. By the bond of my faith! there is nothing else so beautiful and magnificent as this among the arts invented by mankind! As for the people, one of your own kings, Messieurs of the Street, has very properly indicated your wish and purpose with regard to them.
Mr. Clews tells us that the “Future” of Wall Street is a sealed book; and yet we may allow that “there is such a thing as an accurate prevision of events.” Of this kind are eclipses, occultations, and tides of the sea. If the capital of Wall Street has, since the institution was founded, increased more than sixtyfold, as Mr. Clews declares, then we may expect it, according to his philosophy, to increase full sixty times sixty, until the world shall be swallowed up. Then, when Threadneedle and Lombard Streets shall have lost their sceptre; then, when Seneca’s forecast of the time to come shall have been fulfilled; then, when Macaulay’s New Zealander shall have made his sketch, not only of St. Paul’s, but also of the bank of England; then, when all the wealth, and all the power, and all the functions of civil society in the United States shall have been transferred to Wall Street; then, when nothing shall remain to the American people except their squalid huts and the sorrowful reminiscences of a great republic; then, when Wall Street in very truth shall have possessed itself of the earth and consumed mankind,—I suppose that the benevolent owners of the world will found a few libraries, build a few marble mausoleums for themselves, and sally forth to establish a stock exchange in Mars! That done, interplanetary wars may be engendered, bonds on the solar system may be issued and bought at half price, a gold standard of values may be fixed on the basis of the pound sterling good from the sun out to Neptune, and the inhabitants of the worlds, either by arms or by journalism, may become the helots of consolidated wealth enthroned as the governing power of the universe.