that he had news of the impending decision, news that he, most careful and deliberate of men, felt that he could not doubt; and thus secure in his ability, energy, and foresight, he bought more and more of the stock, standing to make enormous profits on the advance that was to be.

But when the decision came out, lo, it was against him! That Burke and his companions had looted the Columbus, Hocking Valley & Toledo of $8,000,000 of bonds the decision clearly admitted; but it held that since Belden had bought his bonds with a full knowledge of all the facts, and subsequent thereto, and had bought them for the sole purpose of bringing the suit, he was not entitled to recover. Somebody else might be so entitled, but not Belden.

Something about the decision always seemed baffling and unsatisfactory. It was not signed by all the judges and a story was circulated and eventually printed that the judgment handed down was not the judgment of the majority, that the advance report that Mr. Ryan received of the decision was at the time well-founded, and that the opinion rendered was really the opinion of a dissenting minority of the court.

All this helped Mr. Ryan nothing. His ability,

energy, and foresight had gone astray: there was no rise of Columbus, Hocking Valley & Toledo stock, no magnificent coup, no millions seized in a day. On the contrary, he saw the ship of his fortunes driving toward a lee shore, and it was only by a changing wind that he could claw off.

As to the plundered Columbus, Hocking Valley & Toledo, according to all precedent and all the logic of the situation, that, being a poor staggering concern overloaded with loot bonds and such things, should have gone to the junk heap. But in the course of time there came a business revival through the country resulting in an increased demand for coal, and the wretched thing managed by sheer good fortune to sustain itself. Years afterward Mr. Ryan hooked to it some more railroads similarly broken-backed, blanketed these (if you will believe me) with more of the handy mortgage, and in the end sold the whole curio collection at a profit-a consummation characteristic of the other side of fortune-making, which consists of mere luck.

But as to the light in which the courts view these performances, which was the moral we started with, I cite these condensations from the scalding opinion of the General Term, reviewing the methods of

Burke and his associates. The court found that these methods were chiefly as follows:

1. Purchasing stocks of other railroads and getting bankers to advance money on them by which the control of the roads was secured without further expenditure. In other words, the Formula.

2. Buying contiguous coal and other lands at less than their actual value and selling them to the company at a large advance.

3. Issuing the $14,500,000 of bonds for a specified purpose and then using $8,000,000 of the bonds for another purpose, namely, to redeem the notes given to Winslow, Lanier & Co., for the benefit of Burke and his associates.

4. Causing the company to mortgage all its property to support these bonds.

5. Concealing the use really intended to be made of these bonds and misrepresenting it in the covenant declarations of the mortgage.

All these actions the court held to be utterly wrong. How they could be wrong in this instance and right in the hundreds of other instances in which they have been used (to the decoration of upper Fifth Avenue), will puzzle the ungifted mind to discern. But anyway the gentlemen had got It and continued to possess It.

CHAPTER VII

THE STORY OF THE TWO VIRGINIANS

A THIRD instructive and moral tale might be used to illustrate the romance of modern business as well as the easy road to great wealth as pursued by the devotees of the Formula.

Here are two Virginians, two men of the good old Scotch-Irish strain, and they meet in a long, resolute, fiercely fought duel for a prize of property, one fighting with old-fashioned ideas of business integrity, the other with all the resources of the New Finance. What do you think? That ought to be worth while, ought it not? for it will show something about our new ways as compared with the old, and will reveal still further to the flat-dweller the paths that lead from his $1,639 perch to the high places of prosperity.

The financial agent of the Confederacy in the Civil War was a Richmond banking house of which an active member was Mr. John L. Williams,

greatly esteemed through the South for his stainless reputation and his good works. He had six sons, whom he trained to his own stern code of integrity and personal honor, and of whom those that did not choose professional careers entered successively into partnership with their father. The eldest of these, John Skelton Williams, developed unusual capacity in revitalizing broken-down properties and in endowing them with both honesty and success. He did this for a piece of railroad flotsam that his firm had almost by accident become interested in. He put the thing together and made it go,. and using it for a nucleus, began to add other bits of distressed railroad. He had energy and enthusiasm and profound faith in the future of the South. Thus he prospered with the South, and so did the banking firm of John L. Williams & Sons, Richmond.

This was in the early nineties. In the eastern part of the Southern country were then many independent short railroad lines, mostly indifferent and unprofitable. John Skelton Williams pulled together three or four of these, organizing therefrom the Georgia & Alabama Railroad with 460 miles of track, of which he was elected president. He added, in the next three or four years, other