They filch away the earnings of the laboring classes. They
increase the cost of rent and transportation and all the necessaries
of life. They extort from the people contributions for which no
equivalent has been given, of commodity or service. Thus the burden of
toil is increased and the reward of industry is lessened for all who
work; the surplus out of which life would be replenished is consumed,
and the amount of life in the nation at large is lessened. Every one
of those schemes of frenzied finance about which we are reading
in these days is a gigantic bloodsucker, with ten million minute
tentacles which it stealthily fastens upon the people who do the
world's work, and each one of the victims must give up a little of his
life for the aggrandizement of our financial Titans. When such schemes
flourish, by which men's gains are suddenly swollen to enormous
proportions, somebody must be paying for it, and life is always the
final payment. It all comes out of the life of the people who are
producing the world's wealth. The plethora of the few is the depletion
of the millions.
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