gambling with stacked cards, Mr. Crozier presents in a pitilessly realistic and truthful

manner.

The author has made a painstaking and exhaustive study of Wall Street. He has taken his readers behind the scenes and revealed to them the secret machinery by which the people have for years been progressively despoiled while the government in city, state and nation has been corrupted for the evil ends and immense wealth of the few. His study of Wall Street has enabled him to discern the present plot of the conspirators in their desperate attempt to gain complete control of the currency of the nation, which would enable them to hold the business interests of America in the hollow of their hands and thus render it possible for them also completely to control government and shape its action to their lawless ends.

A signal service was recently rendered the cause of good government when at the meeting of the Civic Federation last December Mr. Crozier was able to checkmate a movement that bore every mark of being one of the many preconcerted plans of the conspirators to aid in the furtherance of the present plot against the nation's finance. All signs indicated that the Civic Federation was to be made to endorse the scheme for elastic currency, or some one of the three bills which Wall Street is trying to engineer through the present Congress, any one of which would give the spoilers a strangle-hold on the people's currency. The conspirators against the nation's prosperity are thoroughly alarmed at the awakening of the great American people to their peril. They know that unless they can get some cunningly-devised measure through Congress, which would give them the control of the nation's finance, while the Lodges and the Cranes, the Aldriches, Penroses, Depews, Platts and their ilk are standing guard in the Senate, the aroused electorate may drive the money-changers and their handy-men out of the temple of legislation and restore the government to the people. Hence their desperate effort at the present time to compass their deep-laid plan. Now at the meeting of the Civic Federation a number of smooth talkers, whose plausibility and sophistry are so admirably calculated to chloroform the nation, had been advocating Wall Street's plan for currency legislation. All was going well, when Mr. Crozier arose and uncovered the plot so clearly and con

vincingly as to spread consternation in the camp of the conspirators and prevent the work they had evidently expected to compass. The New York World declared that Mr. Crozier dropped a bomb "into the placid councils of the Civic Federation." Belmont, Banker Herrick of Ohio, Isaac N. Seligman, Henry Phipps and Mr. Speyer had everything going precisely to their liking, when Mr. Crozier's unmasking of the plot checkmated the game.

We cite this incident to indicate the kind of man who has written this most important politico-economic novel of the year, a novel that is at once as historically faithful as it is graphic and attention-arresting in character.

Mr. Lawson in his vivid unmasking of Wall Street gave the world a story of infamy of which he was particularly well qualified to speak, having long been one of the active participators in the gambling deals; but his picture of the panic-makers was no more powerful or vivid than is Mr. Crozier's, while the latter has an incomparably clearer grasp of the fundamentals of finance than Mr. Lawson.

The Magnet is a book that should be bought, read and circulated by every patriotic American between now and the coming election. This we say in spite of the author's amazing protection views and in spite of his failure to realize that the more the government seeks to regulate criminal corporations, the more those corporations will debauch politics for the sake of the enormous revenue that can be wrested from the people so long as they control the regulating force of government and are able to continue their career of lawlessness.

II.

Most social and economic or political romances have little more than the skeleton of a story on which to hang the message and arguments of the author, who, as a rule, is so absorbed in his serious discussion that the romance as such is wooden and of little interest. Such, however, is not the case with The Magnet. True, there are long discussions devoted chiefly to Wall Street and swift finance, to the present plot to get control of the currency through the passage of one of the three bills now before Congress. and also to specific phases of the warfare of the master rogues against the government's effort to secure justice for the people in

regard to railway traffic. But apart from these discussions there is a strong and highly interesting love romance that will hold the interest of the general reader, even though he may know little and care less about the great vital politico-economic problems that should be of most serious concern to every worthy

citizen.

The novel opens with the discussion by certain great high financiers of a plan for further acquiring the wealth of the people through seductive schemes so long practiced by Wall Street. The two high financiers in question, however, have found the public rather slow of late to enter their traps, and they are perplexed as to just how to proceed to inflame the cupidity and the gambling spirit of the nation. They believe that if they can succeed in getting the American people to believe that they can get something for nothing, a fortune for a pittance, they can soon lure millions and hundreds of millions of dollars into Wall Street; and knowing as they do that they can so frame the game that little of the money will go back to the people, they are ready to resort to almost any expediency to educate the gambling instincts of the nation until the millions are ready to become their victims. They have been discussing the situation in a secluded spot in a park, but it happens that an impecunious professional gambler, who has beaten a hasty retreat from a western mining camp because his partner had been caught and killed in an attempt to get the money of the innocents by virtue of a wheel worked by secret springs, is within hearing distance of the Wall-Street financiers. He is a past master at playing with loaded dice and stacked cards. He has long been engaged in exciting the cupidity of the people in different sections with alluring tales of easy wealth, until the hypnotized victims came under the gambler's spell, and he now offers to show these two high financiers how they can easily acquire millions upon millions, playing a "sure thing" game in Wall Street. In unfolding his ideas of how the masters of the machine can make the wealth-creators of the land a nation of gamblers and in so doing relieve them of their millions, without the slightest risk of losing in the game, this western professional crook, Barney by name, says:

"It strikes me that you have a machine which can be made to induce everybody in America to gamble to their finish, once you

get them going. Why, gents," he cried, waxing enthusiastic as the certainty of it dawned upon him, "It beats faro, monte, the shell game and the wheel-of-fortune to a standstill! Sometimes a player will watch you so close in them that you have to let him win or risk gunplay. Then again, the brake may go back on you, and you stop the machine on the wrong number so the player rakes in your coin. But in your game you can't be beat. You don't even let him see the cards or the machine he plays with, and he wouldn't understand it if he did He must always take your word that the play was fair and that you won his money honorably."

Moved to action by the force of his own perceptions, Barney was now striding back and forth before the bench, frowning over a puzzling point, and breaking into broad smiles as it cleared before his mental vision.

"We used to be satisfied to run our game for nothing, so long as we won the stakes," he continued. "But you charge for running him through your own amalgamating machine when you know that the best fire-assay will fail to show any value left in the tailings."

Sterling, to whom mining parlance was not new, laughed heartily at this. King joined him a trifle vaguely. But Barney was too intent on his subject to be diverted.

"Your graft is all right and your deck is a cinch. What you want is a way to interest the people in it. Do it this way, gents-"

"Frame up things folks are interested in and think they know all about. Advertise these things in the papers. Bait your hook with 'em, and your haul will beat that of a sucker-net dipped below the dam in the first spring freshet. String together a lot of railroads under some big name, then ‘list the stock' as you call it. Folks are riding on the railroads and shipping over them. They kick about the high freights, so they'll want to play even by getting in on your side to rake in part of the dividends. Then, bunch a lot of factories that have been chasing each other with scalping knives. Show 'em it'll pay better to stand together and scalp the people, and you get a good rake-off for teaching these industries to play the game. Then list their combination in your machine and get them playing. You'll soon have all the money, own the properties, and have them all running for your benefit. Whenever you discover a new lot of people with money, find

out what they are most interested in, capitalize and list it, print quotations so that they can watch the fluctuations each day, and it's dollars to doughnuts that their wings will be singed with the heat from the hotboxes of your mill within a month."

The love romance with which the book is largely concerned begins with the second chapter. Indeed, Chapter One should have been published as a prologue to the tale, for the characters with which it is concerned have disappeared when the romance of Helen Morton commences. Here we are introduced to the son of the man who was the master of the Street, the great gambling king and head of high finance in the opening chapter.

Young Morley Sterling since the death of his father has been the new Wall-Street master. He is fabulously rich, but the gambler's madness, the insanity of avarice, has possessed his soul. He has one ambition, and that is to be the richest man in the world and through wealth to become the most powerful of human beings. It is the old, old lust of the materialist, who, misled by the seeming, imagines that power, place, pleasure and the possession of wealth, even though unblessed by moral idealism, can yield happiness, peace or true greatness.

Now Morley Sterling has been engaged to Helen Morton, the beautiful and gifted daughter of one of the greatest and bravest clergymen of New York City, and at the outset we meet these young persons engaged in an intimate conversation such as lovers wrapped up in each other are wont to enjoy. Soon the conversation turns on a subject that for days has been uppermost in Morley Stirling's mind. He has been preparing for the greatest "killing," to use the term of Wall Street, that the gambling world has ever known. He has succeeded in deceiving every one, so that when he speaks the word the bottom will fall out of the market and millions upon millions of dollars will be diverted into his pocket from thousands of ruined men. He knows that banks will be broken, that a trail of suicides will follow; but what is that to him? He will be the richest man in America and in a position to become the richest man in the world. Believing that Helen will be interested in his success, and with his mind calloused by a life marked by moral obliquity that passes for virtue with the great Wall-Street gamesters,

he unfolds his plan to his fiancée. She is amazed and shows her interest and credulity. These only serve to lead to him to a full and explicit description of Wall Street and how its masters play the game with loaded dice. The following extract from this conversation furnishes some vivid glimpses of America's great Monte Carlo, the most demoralizing center of moral death in the New World. Mr. Crozier has made a careful study of the subject he discusses and his writing is that of an expert.

"What do they mean by 'Wall Street,' Morley ?" asked Helen Morton of her lover, and he replied:

"Wall Street, my dear Helen, is a name used indiscriminately both to designate the game of swift finance and the machine with which it is played."

"Swift finance? Machine? I fear I am dull, Morley. I don't understand." And her expressive face confirmed her puzzlement. Sterling smiled, and set himself to the pleasant task of enlightening her.

"The Wall-Street machine is the embodiment of that inscrutable and mysterious power which executes the financial will of its invisible master, undetected, with predetermination and with infallible accuracy. The essence of this power is associated mental affinities bound together by the common desire to get rich quickly-at the expense of others if they can, but of each other if they must."

"Do you mean only a few men?" she queried. "I should think they would quickly exhaust each other's resources.'

Sterling laughed. "Oh, the desire to get rich quickly pervades the whole country. Everybody wants to do so easily. But only a few who are really on the inside understand just what is to happen. Many who consider themselves a part of the machine discover too late that they are only within it and enmeshed by its rapacious organs of digestion. In fact, the greed of its organized appetite is such that it often feeds upon itself; and most of its other organs and members are ultimately swallowed up in its all-devouring maw. But, strange as it may seem, no sooner is one swallowed than two immediately spring in his place, until its innumerable and itching tentacles stretch out and into banks, trust and insurance institutions, public offices and private homes, throughout the country, enticing thousands

from the path of sound business, honor and happiness into the quicksands of speculation, ending almost invariably in utter ruin and frequently in despair and death."

"O Morley, that is awful!" exclaimed Helen. "Are you sure it is so bad?"

"Now don't think I am preaching a sermon or overdrawing the thing, my dear girl," he said, answering her words and look of horror. "I am simply giving cold facts known by every man in the profession. Finance is a profession, you know, like surgery or engineering. And streamlets of wealth cannot be diverted into one great river without injury to their natural channels. Such disagreeable things will happen. Men will sometimes lose their money in a bad investment, or their lives in a railroad wreck. Men are free moral agents. And if they will gamble for excitement and the hope of profit, Wall Street simply affords them the easiest opportunity and takes their losses as profits for its pains. It usually applies a speedy cure for the mania by depriving the gamblers of their means for keeping up the hallucination that they have any chance to finally win."

"Why don't the people let Wall Street alone? What makes them gamble in its securities ?"

"Because Wall Street has its commercial drummers the same as other business organizations, only we call them tips. Tips get the business. They are the closers. And those paid to circulate market tips are the cappers, the bunco steerers, who round up the purchasers. Speculation would be cut in half, but for these irresponsible, indefinite, unreliable, yet all-persuasive tips. A man getting a tip, even from a stranger, will hug it passionately as he dives into his jeans for his money. He invests as promptly on this waif 'hunch' as though betting on the sure thing at three-card monte, when he supposes the dealer does not see the confederate (posing as another innocent player) mark the winning card by slyly turning up its corner and then win several bets. The attention of the excited victim is diverted by this success, and he fails to see the dealer, as he leap-frogs the cards back and forth, deftly turn down the corner of the marked card and turn up the corner of a blank. The victim bets and loses. But, he thinks he has been careless or made some mistake, so he bets again with like results. And when

the dealer, and his co-conspirators, think the man's pile exhausted, they decamp before the other realizes that he simply has bought a little knowledge of the other fellow's game. Just so with the man who yields to the seductive tip, always put into circulation to induce the public to take the losing side of the trade. A stray tip covertly launched (which may have come through many mouths, changed in form and substance each time repeated) will so stimulate a man's imagination and excite his cupidity that, even after he has lost his money on it, he will hunt out and thank the one who gave it, begging for another 'straight tip.""

.

Quite unconsciously, Sterling with his last words strengthened Miss Morton's resolve to hold her judgment of him in abeyance. Certainly she would never give him cause to think her a "trifling maiden" deliberately making a "durn fool" of him. But this did not divert her attention from his absorbing exposition of Wall Street, as he continued. Many effective means are used to accomplish what the boys call a 'killing' in stocks, quite aside from passing dividends and defaulting interest and circulating tips. Tales of impending disaster are printed in the papers as news, though often paid for at so much per line. Or sometimes the independent and patriotic owners of these molders of public sentiment are let in on the 'short side of the market just before the inevitable drop which such articles are sure to cause. But by far the most powerful and dominating means of dropping quotation prices on a given stock is to withdraw the pool support of it."

"A pool! What is a pool, Morley ?" was Helen's query. Most of the Wall-Street idioms were explained by their context, as Sterling used them. But this one puzzled her.

"Every large issue of securities is managed and controlled by a group of big financiers acting in concert," he answered. "And this is called a pool. One of their number is designated to manage the transaction, although he frequently consults the others. This leaves the others free to manage pools of other stocks. In what is called a 'blind pool' only the manager, to whose discretion the others trust, knows the manipulations to be practised with the money of pool. Of course pool arrangements are kept secret. Not even the brokers who execute the orders on the floor of the Exchange know whether

quotation prices on a given stock are that day to be boosted to the swallows' nests under the eaves, or dropped into the coal cellar. Nor do they know who shapes the game they work, nor who own the pools they serve and enrich, for they receive their orders by circuitous routes."

"Is not the natural law of supply and demand effective in Wall Street as elsewhere?" Helen interrupted. "As you tell it, the purchasers in this game of finance seem nothing but puppets."

"Yes," agreed Sterling, "supply and demand are supposed, the world over, to be the one infallible and omnipotent regulator of prices. But that is put in complete suspense by the power of these pools. So vast have their combined resources become, so perfect is the coöperating machinery for working their will, that it is believed in Wall Street that they could easily suspend the law of gravity. And they would do so, substituting their own will as the universal magnet, were they certain other worlds are peopled with beings willing to exchange their material possessions for the immaterial delights of watching the fluctuations of a celestial stock market. To capitalize Jupiter, Saturn and Venus, bind them together into a holding company or trust, and dilute them with the Milky Way, would be (with the aid of the incorporation laws of New Jersey) mere child's play for the financiers of the pools. And within a month they would so illuminate and glorify this phantom of their creative genius with the wonderful colors of the Aurora Borealis (incorporated) that all the departed souls since the dawn of man would be chasing it through space as the New Jerusalem."

This was too much for Helen Morton, shocked and pained though she was, and she burst into hearty laughter. Sterling joined her, pleased with his own wit and with her as an intelligent and absorbed auditor.

"Now, dearest Helen," he explained, "it is because I control the men who control all these pools, that I speak with such perfect confidence as to what will happen in the realm of rapid finance to-morrow. Therefore, although in your sweet presence I desire to appear with becoming modesty, I cannot tell you the whole truth, the essential facts about Wall Street as it is to-day, without adding one thing more: I am its master."

This conversation proves a rude awakening to the girl, who almost immediately after it occurs goes up the Hudson with her father

and mother for a few weeks' sojourn at a vacant cottage belonging to a friend. Here Helen is rescued from death during a runaway by a young man who proves to be the newly-appointed United States Senator from New York, John Hays. Hays is upright, incorruptible and a statesman with high ideals, even though at times his vision is not as acute as it should be. The acquaintance that results from this rescue of Helen by Senator Hays is followed by the great WallStreet "killing" that Morley Sterling had planned with such consummate skill. Numbers of men in trusted positions find themselves bankrupt and their banks and trust companies insolvent. Some of the bankrupt gamblers commit suicide, some flee, and some seek to lay the blame of their breach of trust on innocent shoulders. One of the victims of this last-named class is young Charles Morton, Helen's only brother. John Hays defends the boy and by the aid of a detective, who was an old childhood playmate of Hays, the accused youth escapes punishment when all hope seems vain.

Later a great battle opens in Washington. Morley Sterling wants to get hold of the nation's finance; an elastic currency is the cry. The publicity bureaus of the WallStreet gamblers, and the multitudinous mouthpieces of the "interests" throughout the country, have succeeded in deceiving the nation and making the people believe that their prosperity is dependent upon the banking bills introduced by henchmen of the gamblers who pose as champions of business interests and national prosperity.

The plot of the Wall-Street interests which Mr. Crozier so ably exposed in last month's ARENA, is dwelt upon at length in The Magnet, as well as a plot which the corporation chiefs try to engineer through Congress to increase their hold on the great arteries of trade. John Hays fights the conspirators, who in turn seek to make him the victim of a dastardly plot and later strive to bribe him. He becomes the double object of Morley Sterling's intense hate; for besides thwarting the financier in his plot to rob and wreck the government of the people, Hays wins Helen's heart and hand.

There is much action and interest in the romance, which is not devoid of highly dramatic scenes. As has before been pointed out, there are from time to time very able discussions on serious political and economic issues and vivid pictures of the doings of the