"They may drop still further," said the banker, smiling. "The fall in the rate of exchange would have been still worse had not our banks received a strict order not to turn over the deposited bonds to their owners during these days of convulsion." "How? I do not understand this. The issue of the deposited securities to their owners is delayed?" "Yes, my friend, that is being done. You again do me the honor to forget in my office that we are in Russia. Even worse things are done here. At the order of the minister of finance, the owners of the bonds who wish to withdraw their deposits are given only a few hundreds or thousands of rubles for the most pressing needs, but they do not get their bonds. This is in order to prevent, by all means, the bonds being thrown on the market and thus increasing the panic." "But that can be done only here. You have no such power abroad." "Well, the first alarm did cost a respectable sum. Then the foreign bondholders came to the rescue and intervened for their own interest. The price of the bonds was maintained, especially in Germany." "Why particularly in Germany?" "Because it fluctuates less in France. There it is in the hands of small investors who do not run to the treasury at the first opportunity. It is not as strongly intrenched in Germany, and must be supported there." "Very well, then, you support my reasoning, and you say that the bond values are maintained artificially alone. How can you say, then, that they may be augmented at will by new issues?" "I say that, because the buyers are an amorphous mass that crystallizes just as little as a combination of producers is met by a combination of consumers. The masses may be frightened for a while, but in the long run they are irresistibly led to spoliation by the great combinations of capital, and the act of creating current opinion is well known in high financial circles." "You forget the independent press." The banker made a very peculiar grimace. Then he said: "That is not nice of you. I am speaking to you as if to a member of the profession--like one augur to another. And when we come to speak of your own profession, you turn out to be a simpleton. How can you speak of an independent press, when under the pressure of the high finance of the Russian and German governments?" "You will pardon me. I honor your uprightness equally with that of the greatest of my profession. But I must stop at that. Newspapers are still guided by morality. And I am willing to bet anything that among our German papers only a vanishing fraction is susceptible to the arguments of Witte and his associates." "And what becomes, then, of the millions that our ministry of finance is spending to secure good will in the papers towards our finances?" "I do not want to suspect any one; but the German papers that I know well are incorruptible."