in any case be, the promoter is seldom lost in his firm.

Again, as already remarked, the promoter may or may not be an inventor; and if he is an inventor, it is not in his character as an inventor that he acts as a promoter. Most commonly the man who markets an invention is not the inventor himself, but a professional promoter who may know only the general principles which the invention involves.

In like manner the promoter may not be an expert at the business he is seeking to launch. If he happens to be, all the better, probably; yet many of the most successful promoters have become such without expert knowledge of their own, depending for this upon engineers and other trained agents whose skill and services they could command for money.

The promoter as such is not and cannot be any one's agent. He acts on his own. hook. Himself is the interested party to all he does as promoter. Till launched, his scheme is his and his alone. Agents and em

ployes, armies of them, may work for the promoter, many of them knowing details and depths of his undertaking better than he does, making him, it may be, very dependent on them. None the less, both in law and in customary speech, the party fundamentally interested is the promoter, not any one or ones among his working staff or any of these combined. The law is very insistent on this point, always singling out some one man or firm as the responsible promoter of any novel enterprise, to reap the profit of it if such emerges, or to bear the blame if it fails.*

The underwriter or group of underwriters advancing cash for the proposed undertaking and expecting recoupment by selling the new corporation's securities, is another entity never to be confused with the promoter. Underwriting is usually indispensable to a conversion of any magnitude. In many a deal the underwriters are far the most prominent factors, their profits fabulous and their names heard and published

* Alger, "The Law of Promoters”, etc.

though the promoter's remains unknown. Still, their office and even their service is wholly secondary; and they would never have been called in or thought of had not the promoter pioneered the way and made the dry bones live.

The view is nearly as common as it is erroneous, that promoting is inseparably connected with the trusts, as if promoters had never existed before trusts came to be. This is an entire mistake, as pointed out in great detail by Mr. W. G. Langworthy Taylor in the Journal of Political Economy for June, 1904.

Oakes Ames was a promoter, if ever there was one. Commodore Vanderbilt was a promoter. Our earlier railways and railway combinations no less than our more recent colossal railway systems, were born of promoters' efforts. The years after 1870, before any trust had appeared, bristled with promoters' schemes-in Europe as in America-the storm being central in Austria and Germany, where a good part of the billiondollar French war indemnity fund sought

investment.

New railways were built, banks started, mines and furnaces opened, and factories erected. But in each case, or at least as a rule, the project was wholly individual, involving new large often fraudulent

organization, capitalization,

fake dividends, and the other features which American experience has made so familiar, but not embracing any combination of plants or of corporations. It is safe to say that the proportion of promoting to total business was as great in Germany and Austria, 1870-75-no trusts yet existing-as in the United States, 1899-1903—the golden age of trusts and that it was far more reckless and disastrous in those countries then than it has been in our own country during the trust years just past.

It is now in order to raise the inquiry whether the promoter, whose portrait we have tried to outline, is a producer or a parasite, a boon or a burden. Does he contribute to the social pile or simply help pull it down after we of the sweaty brows and the horny hands have heaped it up? Are not dead

promoters the only good kind, as General Sherman said of Indians? Is the promoter a worthy member of the body politic or a grafter? Would his annihilation be a benediction, to be hailed with hallelujahs as making the majority of us better off, or a calamity tending to impoverishment?

In the answer to this question will lie that to the kindred one, whether the promoter function is destined to be permanent in industry; for, if it is a healthy force, it will continue; while if its net tendency is disadvantageous, we shall probably find some means of getting rid of it and administering all industry on some other plan. I am going to face those questions and answer them the best I can. Meantime a few remarks which may serve to pave the way.

Current rage against promoters is, in great measure, simply part and parcel of the popular hostility felt against all the wealthy. This hatred I deem the most dangerous sign of our times. If the mob alone felt it, this antipathy would be less appalling; but it has sympathy and support