“Fisk was told that Corbin had enlisted the interests of persons high in authority, that the President, Mrs. Grant, General Porter, and General Butterfield were corruptly interested in the movement, and that the Secretary of the Treasury had been forbidden to sell gold. Though these declarations were wickedly false, as the evidence abundantly shows, yet the compounded villainy presented by Gould and Corbin was too tempting a bait for Fisk to resist. He joined the movement at once, and brought to its aid all the force of his magnetic and infectious enthusiasm. The malign influence which Catiline wielded over the reckless and abandoned youth of Rome, finds a fitting parallel in the power which Fisk carried into Wall Street, when, followed by the thugs of Erie and the debauchees of the Opera House, he swept into the gold-room and defied both the Street and the Treasury. Indeed, the whole gold movement is not an unworthy copy of that great conspiracy to lay Rome in ashes and deluge its streets in blood, for the purpose of enriching those who were to apply the torch and wield the dagger. “With the great revenue of the Erie Railway Company at their command, and having converted the Tenth National Bank into a manufactory of certified checks to be used as cash at their pleasure, they terrified all opponents by the gigantic power of their combination, and amazed and dazzled the dissolute gamblers of Wall Street by declaring that they had in league with them the chief officers of the National Government. “They gradually pushed the price of gold from one hundred and thirty-five and one-half, where it stood on the morning of the thirteenth of September, until, on the evening of Wednesday, the twenty-second, they held it firm at one hundred and forty and one-half. “The conspirators had bought sixty millions of gold up to that date. Every thing depended on Grant’s preventing the sale of gold by the Treasury. Brother-in-law Corbin was to manage that. Every cent advance in gold added $15,000 to Corbin’s profit. On the 17th, it was determined to have Corbin write a long letter to the President. “The letter contained no reference to the private speculation of Corbin, but urged the President not to interfere in the fight then going on between the bulls and bears, nor to allow the Secretary of the Treasury to do so by any sales of gold. The letter also repeated the old arguments in regard to transportation of the crops.