A broken, white-haired old man staggered into the Chicago federal courtroom the other day to take his stand in defense of charges to use the mails to defraud in the $100,000,000 sale of stocks of the Corporation Securities Company of Chicago. Mr. Insull's excuse for the greatest of all exploitations of the American people is that he was following the "general attitude" of big business in 1930, backed by the statement of President Hoover that business in America was on a sound and prosperous basis. He further explains that he was doing no more in expanding than were all businesses at the time, urged by Mr. Hoover's proposal that business proceed with its usual extension plans as though nothing had happened. This extension, he claimed, involved an expenditure of $200,000,000 in his various properties, and eventually ended in the financial catastrophe of 1932. In short, Mr. Insull regards himself as a victim of circumstances.

All sham and melodrama should be disregarded by the Court in the examination of the facts that caused the spectacular rise in Insull common stock to $55 a share. That Insull carried on expansion of his companies at the beginning of the depression in proportion to that of many other large industries--automobile, oil, transportation, etc.--can not be denied. But Mr. Insull's expansion was of an entirely different type. Whereas the Rockefeller, Ford, and Sloan interests were expanding by a normal increase in the demand for their products, Insull Utilities rose in value chiefly by an elaborate system of pyramiding stocks in the organization of new companies and by clever propaganda which created an unwarranted demand for common stock. By an ingenious series of maneuvers in buying and selling their own stocks, Insull Utilities eased into position to raise the price of their common stock almost at will, although realizing that such action was on very shaky financial and legal ground.

These facts alone should be sufficient to make Mr. Insull's position uncomfortable in any court of law. When the additional evidence that Insull took $300,000 of capital stock to put into speculative stocks on the open market is considered, there can hardly appear rcom for doubt about his guilt. Both Kruger's suicide and Stavinsky's mysterious death have prevented the law from making its claim on the great European embezzlers. Legal red-tape and the customary American ennui in dispensing justice should not be allowed to hinder a more satisfactory conclusion to matters on this side of the Atlantic.