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The country had gone mad, the stock-market trembled, the cry of "corporation control" resounded everywhere, and everywhere demagogues arose to inaugurate "reform campaigns," in an abortive attempt to "clean up politics." Down with the bosses, who were the tools of the corporations!

"Would you mind picking out one spot and staying on it?" asked the skipper, at which the torpedo man took his camp-stool, picked out his one spot, and planted himself on it, and piously read the stock-market quotations of a week-old newspaper for the rest of the run. While this hour run full speed, submerged was in progress, a tickling in our throats set most of us to coughing.

They will hold on to anything by one nail, and the first thing you know they are on their feet again all right. As soon as Wildmere makes a lucky strike in the stock-market he will extricate himself and his daughter at the same time. Of course these things are not formulated in words, in a cold-blooded way, I suppose. Arnault has long been a suitor that would take no rebuff.

The country had gone mad, the stock-market trembled, the cry of "corporation control" resounded everywhere, and everywhere demagogues arose to inaugurate "reform campaigns," in an abortive attempt to "clean up politics." Down with the bosses, who were the tools of the corporations!

Then the stock-market may fluctuate, riches go or come, men praise or hate, nought will affect our peace, any more than the tumults of a continental city, in which we are spending a night in transit, can cause us serious disturbance. Supreme love. "I love the Father."

"Well, the king might have gone on, still happy and unsuspecting, to the end of his days, but for one of your modern improvements the stock-board. When you left, three miles of the London, Canterbury and Dover were ready for the rails, and also ready and ripe for manipulation in the stock-market. It was wildcat, and everybody knew it. The stock was for sale at a give-away.

Whether it was one of those extraordinary fevers which attacked Californian speculation in the early days, or whether Enriquez Saltillo had infected the stock-market with his own extravagance, I never knew; but plans as wild, inventions as fantastic, and arguments as illogical as ever emanated from his own brain, were set forth "on 'Change" with a gravity equal to his own.

Jay Gould was now becoming a dominating factor and in October of 1868 was chosen president. The various stock-market struggles that ensued from the ascendency of Jay Gould to the receivership of the Erie in 1875 is a long and intricate tale.

The capital which has been hitherto absorbed in stock-market loans for speculative purposes is now returning to the normal channels of business. There has been no inflation in the prices of commodities; there has been no undue accumulation of goods, and foreign trade has expanded to a magnitude which exerts a steadying influence upon activity in industry and employment.

"I see what you mean," said I. "Isn't the same difficulty often experienced by after-dinner speakers and lecturers, and speculators on the stock-market, and moral reformers, and academic co-ordinators of the social system of the universe?" "It is," he answered. "They can sail the sea of theory splendidly, but they don't know how to make a landing.