"FRIDAY, THE THIRTEENTH."

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLIV, Issue 13497, 25 May 1907, Page 5 (Supplement)

"FRIDAY, THE THIRTEENTH."

(NEW YORK STOCK GAMBLING AC-

CORDING TO MR. LAWSON. Mb, Thomas W. Lawsov, the American company-promoter, who is attacking his old associates by introducing the public behind the scenes at Wall-street, has followed up "Frenzied Finance," the book in which he claimed to give the actual facts of the "copper trust" business, by a realistic novel; in which he describes the bulling" and "bearing" of stock. This novel, - "Friday, the Thirteenth" (Heinemann, London), is attracting considerable attention in the United States. A Virginian girl, whose father has become involved by the operations of the unscrupulous financiers, goes to New York in the hope to recover his lost trust funds on the Stock Exchange. Brownley, a broker, falls in love with her, and would have recovered her fortune by legitimate" operations, hod not the financial "ring" intervened and crushed tham. The father j commits suicide, the girl goes mad, and Brownley marries her' to care for her, vowing vengeance, and making " Friday, the Thirteenth," the anniversary of the tragedy, the occasion of startling operations, that bring ruin and disaster in their train.

By a series of reckless coups, Brownley acquires a stupendous fortune, and finally initiates a series of stock movements that threaten every financial .institution in the country with ruin. Appealed to by an old friend he consents to restore con;fidence and prices, if the 'Stock Exchange Committee will allow him to address the brokers on the floor of the exchange during a suspension of business. After this, [he goes home to find his wife restored to 'sanity and dying; he dies too. In the address, for which the whole plot is a preparation, Mr.. Lavvson thus expounds his conclusions on the American stock-broking system, of which we have lately heard so much: —" During the last quarter of a century there has grown up in this free and fair land of ours a system by which the few take from the many the results of their labours. The men who take have no more license, from God or man, to take, than have those from whom they filch. They are "not endowed by God with superior Wisdom, nor have they per-' formed for their fellow-men any labour or given •to them anything of value that entitles them to what',. they take. Their only license to plunder is their knowledge of the system of trickery and fraud that they themselves have created. No man can gainsay this, for on every side is the evidence. Men come into Wall-street at sunrise without dollars; before that same sun . sets they depart with millions. So all-powerful has grown the system of oppression that - single men take in a single lifetime all the savings of a million of their fellows. To-day the people, eighty millions strong, are slaving for the few, and their pay is their board and keep. I saw this robbery. I felt* the robbers' scourge. I sought the secret. I found it here, here in this gamblinghell. I found that the stocks we bought and sold were mere gambling chips; that the man who had the biggest stack could beat his. opponent off the board; that his opponent was the world, because all men directly or indirectly played the stockgambling ' game.' To win, it was but necessary 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 :,] . . 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 repeal the 1 i operation, ' until we have all the wealth, and the 1 people are, enslaved.' ..... 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-gam- : bling it is neoessary, absolutely necessary, i that it be conducted under certain rules, unchangeable, unbreakable rules, to att tempt to change : or break which would destroy stock-gambling. The foundation rule, the rule absolutely necessary for the existence of stock-gambling is: Any mem- ' ber 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. ... From the very nature of the whole structure 1 of stock-gambling the same shares are sold and resold many times in each session and the seller cannot know, much less show, that he can deliver until he' first adjusts with the buyer, and the buyer cannot adjust until after he has become such by buying. If a rule were made ; compelling a seller to show his responsibility before selling, every member would have every other member at his mercy and there could be no stock-gamb-ling. When. I had worked this out, I saw that while the few tricksters of the ' ' System' had a perfect device for taking 1 from the people their wealth, I had discovered as perfect a means of taking away from the fe'w the wealth they had secured from the mamy. ' With this knowledge : came a conviction that my way was as honest as the System's,' in fact more 1 honest than theirs. They took from the [ innocent, I took from the guilty what had already been dishonestly secured. I determined to put my discovery into prac- ' tice. ■ .;

" I might never have done so but for that Sugar panic, in which I was robbed of millions by the ' System' through Barry Conant. "in that panic the ' System/with its unlimited resources, filched from the people by the arbitrary manufacture of stocks, and by their manipulation did to me what I afterward discovered I could do to them, without any resources other than my right to do "business on the floor of this Exchange. You saw the outcome, in the second Sugar panic, of my first experiment. In a few minutes I cleared a profit of ten million dollars. I could have made it fifty million, or one hundred and fifty, but I was not then on familiar terms with my new robber-robbing device, and I had yet a heart. To make this ten millions of money, all that was necessary for me to do was to sell more sugar than Barry Conant could buy. This was easy, because Barry Ccnant, not knowing of my newly-invented trie*, could buy only what he could pay for on the morrow, or at, least, what he believed his clients could pay for; while I, not intending to deliver what I sold—unless by smashing the price to a point wheve I could compel those who had bought to resell to' me at millions less than I sold at—could sell unlimited amounts — literally unlimited amounts. When Barry Conant had bought all that he thought he could pay for, he was obliged to beat a retreat in front of my offerings, and I was able to smash, and smash, until the price was so low that he could not by the use of what he had" bought, as collateral, borrow sufficient to pay me for what I had sold him. . Then he was compelled ; to turn about and sell what he had bought from me, and when I had rebought it, for ten millions less than I had sold it for, the trick had been turned. I had sold him 100,000 shares, say, at 220. He had sold them back to me, say, at 120, and he stood where he had stood at the beginning. - He had none of the 100,000 shares. Both of us 6tood, so far as stock was concerned, where we had stood at the beginning, but as to profits and losses there was this difference: I had ,ten: millions of dollars profits, while Barry Gonant's [clients, the ':.• System,' were ten millions

ilosers—and. all by * trick. The trick did not differ in,principle "from the one I in* constant practice by the ' System.' When the ' System," after manufacturing jSugar stock, sell 100,000 shares to the people for 10,000,000 dollars, they so manipulate the market by the use of the 10,000,000 dollars that they hate taken from the people as to scare them into selling the 100,000 shares back to them for 5,G00,0CC. After they have bought they again manipulate the market until the people buy back for 10.000,000 dollars what they Fold for 5,000,000 dollars. The 'System'commits no legal crime. I committed no legal crime. -1 had not even infringed any rale of the Exchange, any more than had the System'■;■ when they performed their„ trick.,. .. Since mv experimental panic I have repeatedly put the trick in operation, and each time I have taken millions, until to-day I have in my control, M absolutely as though I had -- honestly earned * them, % as the labourer earns his week's wages, or 'the! farmer vhe price of his crops, over! 1,000,000,000, or sufficient to keep en-! slaved the rest of their lives "a million people." I