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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Firm of Nucingen by Honore de Balzac: not pledge themselves not to put their own shares upon the market;
they kept no deposit with the Bank of France; they guaranteed nothing.
They did not even condescend to explain to shareholders the exact
limits of their liabilities when they informed them that the directors
in their goodness, refrained from asking any more than a thousand, or
five hundred, or even two hundred and fifty francs. It was not given
out that the experiment in aere publico was not meant to last for more
than seven, five, or even three years, so that shareholders would not
have long to wait for the catastrophe. It was in the childhood of the
art. Promoters did not even publish the gigantic prospectuses with
which they stimulate the imagination, and at the same time make
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