to have unlimited chips.  If chips were bought and sold, on equal terms, by all, no one could buy more than he could pay for, and the game, although still a gambling one, would be fair.  A few master tricksters, dollar magicians, long ago seeing this condition, invented the system by which the people are ruthlessly plundered.  The system they invented was simple, so simple that for a quarter of a century it has remained undiscovered by the world at large—­and even by you, who profess to be experts.  No man thought that a free people who had intended to allow all the equal use of every avenue for the attainment of wealth, and who intended to provide for the safeguarding of wealth after it was secured, could be such dolts as to allow themselves to be robbed of all their accumulated wealth by a device as simple as that by which children play at blindman’s buff.  The process was no more complex than that employed by the robber of old, who took the pebbles from the beach, marked them money, and with the money bought the labour of his fellows, and by the manipulation of that labour and by turning pebbles into money he took away from the labourer the money which he had paid them for the labour until all in the land were slaves of the moneymaker.  These few tricksters said:  We will arbitrarily manufacture these chips—­stocks.  After we have manufactured them, we will sell the world what the world can pay for, and then by the use of the unlimited supply we still have we will win away from the world what it has bought, and repeat the operation, until we have all the wealth, and the people are enslaved.  To do this there was one thing besides the manufacturing of the chips—­stocks—­that was absolutely necessary—­a gambling-hell, the working of whose machinery would place a selling value upon such chips; a hell where, after selling the chips, they could be won back.  I saw that if these tricksters were to be routed and their ‘System’ was to be destroyed, it must be through the machinery of this Stock Exchange.  I studied the machinery, and presently I marvelled that men could for so long have been asses.

“From the very nature of stock-gambling it is necessary, absolutely necessary, that it be conducted under certain rules, unchangeable, unbreakable rules, to attempt to change or break which would destroy stock-gambling.  The foundation rule, the rule absolutely necessary for the existence of stock-gambling is:  Any member of the Stock Exchange can buy, or sell, between the opening and the closing of the Exchange as many shares of stock as he cares to.  With this rule in force his buying and selling cannot be restricted to the amount he can take and pay for, or deliver and receive pay for, because there is not money enough in the world to pay for what under this same rule can be bought and sold in a single session.  This is because there have been arbitrarily created by these few tricksters many times more stocks than there is money in existence.  The amount of stock