It is true that these are not normal types of modern business; they
are commonly designated gambling companies, some of them actually
criminal in their methods. But they only differ in degree, not in
kind, from a large body of modern businesses, whose operations are so
highly speculative, their risks so little understood by the investing
public, and their profits apportioned with so little regard to the
body of shareholders, as fairly to bring them under the same category.
In a word, secret gambling with other people's money, on the general
line of "heads I win, tails you lose," is so largely prevalent
in modern commerce as perceptibly to taint the whole commercial
atmosphere. Most of these larger gambling operations are either
not illegal or cannot easily be reached by law, whereas the minor
delinquencies of fraudulent clerks and other employes are more easily
detected and punished.
But living in an atmosphere where secret speculation with other
people's money is so rife, where deceit or force plays so large a
part in determining profitable coups, it is easy to understand how an
employe, whose conduct in most matters is determined by imitation,
falls into lax ways of regarding other people's money and comes in an
hour of emergency to "borrow" the firm's money. This does not excuse
his crime, but it does throw light upon its natural history.