Edward E. Brown, vice president of Chicago's First National Bank, has very touchingly complained that he and his brethren were unable to find a receiver for the Insull properties who could dominate Mr. Insull. All of the rugged, forceful men owed so much to Chicago banks that they were ineligible; those whose hands were untied could not be trusted to curb Mr. Insull's ambitious vigor; and no one, it developed, knew quite enough about the Insull properties to undertake their management without Mr. Insull's assistance. What Mr. Brown did not say, and what is highly relevant to his difficulty, is that Mr. Insull's chief danger consisted in his ability to borrow more money than he could handle; like Mr. Krueger, he suffered from a continual embarras de richesses, and was, in boom times, hard put to it in his effort to use the money which flowed into his hands. To this difficulty Mr. Insull was, however, equal; there was the Colorado River Dam, and the pyrrhic battle with Cyrus Eaton: The difficulty to which he was unequal was that of liquidation. As an expert in money and banking, Mr. Insull knew that liquidation, on a large scale, is a witless feat which no one who lends money has a right to expect, and, if the demand had not been made upon him he was experienced and able enough to have managed the Insull machine through a period of reduced income.

But, in the unsophisticated state of our finances, the supposition is always made, if it is not consciously formulated, that a slack period is an ideal time in which to force liquidation on borrowers. There has been a failure to distinguish between the character of debt which should be permanent, such debt which a popcorn vendor runs up at the local hofbrau. Debts on such enterprises as the Middle West Utilities, whether they are notes or bonds, should be freed from the liquidating impulse of the business cycle. If it be objected that this would mean a fundamental change in the credit mechanism, one can only reply that it is aimed at a fundamental rupture in that mechanism. It is so fundamental that only Russia has solved it.

The bankers, if they are to finance huge private enterprises, will have to make up their minds sooner or later to accept interest on a permanent debt, which Mr. Insull could have paid, and to give up their custom of demanding the principal of that debt at a time when Mr. Insull or no one else can pay it. The effort to put teeth into their demand has the predictable result: enterprises which they do not know how to manage are dumped into their hands. This has happened, in its most concentrated form, to the most concentrated of our financial operators, the house of Morgan. In "Other People's Money," Mr. Brandeis pointed out that during the panic of 1907 J. P. Morgan and Company demanded themselves into control of a company list which included several hundred different types of management. The second stage sets in when the money lenders, having put the borrowers into bankruptey, ask them to come back and run their businesses, Mr. Iusull's Middle West, although it has holding company variations of its own, is only another and larger example.

No one else can run the Insull properties; no one else was able to run them at the time when Mr. Insull was forced out. The Attempt to liquidate the Insull debt has been a very, very expensive digression. It has resulted in a tremendous and unnecessary loss to stockholders and ironically enough, the large Insull lenders were also Insull owners. It has blasted public confidence in investment through a vast and wealthy region. And now everyone wants Mr. Insull to come back and see what he can do with Middle West; they are willing to admit that the man who is supposed to have lost their money for them is the only man who has much prospect of getting it back again. Samuel Insull did not pervert the systems of capitalistic finance, and he is not a big had wolf. Only in the crescendo does the theme become manifest, and only in a simon-pure capitalist like Mr. Insull do the real implications of capitalism become obvious and legible.