CHAPTER V.
“The rich man’s joys increase the poor’s decay.”
“Forty-five years ago, doctor,” said Professor John Thornton to his friend, Dr. Eustace, “do you remember that, as barefooted boys, we fished for pickerel together in this very pond, and from this very spot?”
“And caught more fish with our bamboo poles and angleworm bait than we appear likely to capture to-day with this fancy tackle,” remarked the doctor.
“Everything about this lovely little lake seems unchanged,” resumed the professor, “but elsewhere the great world has indeed rolled on. Then there were less than one hundred millionaires in this republic—now, doctor, there are more than eight thousand.”
“And then,” said the doctor, “we came here in a rickety old stage wagon, and we were ten hours in making the same journey which to-day we achieved in an hour while seated in a parlor car. Then the telegraph was in its infancy, the electric light was unknown, the great manufacturing cities were unconstructed, the petroleum of Pennsylvania and the gold of California and Australia were undiscovered, the great Western railroad lines were unbuilt, and the web of complex industries with which the land is now laced was unspun. The victim of a raging tooth or a crushed limb was compelled to suffer without relief from chloroform or ether, and it was a crime punishable with social ostracism to question the righteousness of human slavery, the curative virtues of calomel, or the beneficence of infant damnation. I never could think, John, that the good old times, whose loss you are always bemoaning, were nearly so comfortable times to live in as those amid which we now dwell.”
“Dr. Eustace,” said the professor, “you attach undue importance to a few physical comforts and conveniences. If our fathers lacked the advantages of our later civilization, they were also without its vices. In the good old times which you deride, wrecking railroads, stealing railroads, and watering stocks were unknown. Senatorships and subsidies were not procured by bribery; the legislator who sold his vote made arrangements to leave the country, and bank burglars and bank defaulters kept, in the public estimation, the lock step of fellow-criminals.”
“And what, in your opinion was the cause of our descent from this high estate of public virtue and whale-oil lamps?”
“The main cause, Dr., of the corruption of the human race everywhere,—gold. It was the gold of California that revolutionized the finances, the business methods, and the morals of the nation. After the year 1849 the advance of values, the aggregation of wealth, the increase of population, and the magical growth of the West, made additional facilities for inland travel and transportation a necessity. This necessity caused the rapid construction of new lines of railroad. The differences and difficulties of local management suggested the advantages of consolidation—and then the reign of the centripetal forces commenced.”
“But all the millionaires of the country are not railroad men, John.”
“Concentration of capital began with them, doctor, and their example was soon followed by others. The Civil War broke down local prejudices, made East and West homogeneous, introduced communities to each other on the battle-field, obliterated State lines, and made individual effort in business, in finance, in manufactures, and even in politics, less advantageous to the individual than participation in aggregated effort, where his gains were increased, though his personality was submerged.”
“I have always thought that our civil war was a moral education to this people and to the world,” remarked the doctor.
“War was an educator,” conceded the professor, “yet the tree of knowledge with its crimson leaves yielded evil fruit as well as good. The moral nature of the American people has, I fear, reacted from the tension of generous and patriotic sacrifice which war evolved. Some of the very men who helped to strike shackles from black slaves have been busy ever since forging other shackles for white slaves, and in twenty-five years from the days when we freely paid lives and treasure to preserve the existence of the nation, and free it from the wrong of slavery and the rule of a slave-holding oligarchy, we have passed under the sway of other despots, more selfish, more sordid, more relentless, and more rapacious of dominion. The dusk-browed tyrant of Egypt has been overthrown, but in his place Plutus reigns.”
“I grant you,” interposed Dr. Eustace, “that the wealth owners are the rulers of our later civilization, but, so far as I have observed, instead of endeavoring to curb or overthrow them, we are all doing our best to join their ranks and participate in their power. You appear to be the only living millionaire who declaims against his class. I know of no other man who is brave enough to defy the power of money, great enough to ignore it, or strong enough to resist its influence, and I dare say you would change your views if you were to lose your millions. We all defer to the plutocrats. The Spanish nobleman who, for his ancestor’s services, was permitted to remain with his head covered in the presence of his sovereign, would have been sure to take off his hat if he had entered the office of the president of a country bank, with a view of negotiating a small loan on doubtful security. There was a great truth inadvertently given to the world in the programme of a Fourth of July procession, wherein it was announced that the line would end with bankers in carriages, followed by citizens on foot.”
“This subservience to King Gold, and pursuit of his favors, must cease, Dr. Eustace, or this republic will be lost. The people must be taught to assume a more independent and manly attitude toward the owners of money.”
“Ah, John, money is so necessary, and it is so hard to turn one’s back upon it! This way lies comfort, ease, luxury—that way deprivation and sacrifice. This way ‘the primrose path of dalliance trends’—that way ‘the steep and thorny road.’ This way the wife and children beckon and sue for safety and peace—that way only rocks, and bruises, and hunger, and loneliness summon. What wonder that the Christ, voicing the cry of the human to the infinite Father, placed as the central thought of the Lord’s prayer the words, ‘Lead us not into temptation’! But, John, honestly now, do you think the eight thousand millionaires you rave about are such an utterly bad lot as you make them out to be?”
“Individually I dare say they are good husbands, fathers, and neighbors,” replied the professor, “but they conceal their selfishness and rapacity, and exercise their despotism from behind the shields of corporations which they create and govern, and tyranny is none the less tyranny because it is decreed not by kings, but by entities which fear neither the assassination of man nor the judgment of God.”
“Professor, pardon me, but you generalize a good deal, and I fear somewhat loosely. It would make a difference to me, in my feelings, at least, whether I was knocked down by a ruffian, or by an electrical machine.”
“Doctor, your simile was not considered as carefully as are your prescriptions. If the machine be guided by the ruffian, what matters it whether you be struck by his hand, or with an electric current directed by his hand? If our great newspapers, which are influential, which claim to be independent, and which ought to be free, are restrained from publishing articles advocating postal telegraphy, or criticising the management of a news corporation, what matters it that the freedom of the press is choked by a board of directors rather than a government censor? If the citizen dare not give voice to his views on public affairs, what matters it whether his utterances be choked by the knuckles of a king, or the polite menaces of an employer? If the voter cast his ballot against his own convictions, and in accordance with the will of another, what matters it whether he be coerced by a soldier with a musket or a station agent with a freight bill? If the settler lose his land, what matter whether the despoiler be a personal bandit armed with a rifle, or a corporate robber equipped with a land-office decision? If capital exempt itself from taxation, and place the burden of sustaining government upon the broad back of labor, will it alleviate the pain of the load to know that it is not the law of feudal vassalage but of modern politics which accomplishes the exaction?
“Hallo! I have a bite! Ah! ha! my boy, your eagerness to swallow that minnow has brought you to grief!”
And the speaker lifted a twenty-ounce pickerel from the placid waters of Nine Mile Pond, and deposited it, struggling and shining, upon the green turf at his feet.
“Well, John,” inquired the doctor, “what are you going to do about it all?”
“We will have him split down the back and broiled for luncheon,” replied the professor absently.
“Broil who?” queried the doctor, “Jay Gould?”
“Eh? No; the pickerel I mean, though I am not sure that similar treatment might not be accorded to Gould, with advantage to the country.”
“You ask,” continued the professor, “what shall be done about it all? The wealth owners themselves should be able to see that existing conditions must sooner or later find cessation either in relief or in revolution. Monopolies in transportation, intelligence, land, light, fuel, water, and food—all concealed in the impersonality of private corporations—now sit like vampires upon the body of American labor, and suck its life blood, and they have grown so bold and so rapacious that they even neglect to fan their victims to continued slumber.”
“Why, John, you seem to have an attack of anticorporation rabies. You talk like a sand-lot politician who is trying to sell out to a railroad company. What is the matter with you? What have these much berated entities done?” said the doctor.
“Done?” replied Professor Thornton. “What have they not done? They have torn the bandages from the eyes of American justice and fastened false weights upon her scales. They have turned our legislative halls into shambles where men are bought and honor is butchered. They have written the word ‘lie’ across the Declaration of our fathers. They have struck the genius of American liberty in her fair mouth, until, with face suffused with the blushes and bedewed with the hot tears of shame, she turns piteously to her children to hide if they cannot defend her.”
“John Thornton,” ejaculated the doctor, “your remarks would be admirable in substance and style for an address before some gathering of work shirkers, organized to procure lessened hours of labor and larger schooners of beer, but to me you are talking what our transatlantic cousins call ‘beastly rot.’ I deny that a majority, or even any considerable number, of the capitalists of this country are dishonest, or unpatriotic, or indifferent to the rights and needs of their fellow-men.”
“I have not said that they were, doctor,” replied the professor. “Indeed, if such were the case, we might cry in despair, ‘God save the commonwealth!’ for only Omniscience could work its salvation. What I claim is that it is full time for the conscientious millionaires who love their country and their kind, to seriously consider a situation the perils of which they are every day augmenting by their indifference.”
“What perils do you mean, professor? How, for instance, would anybody be hurt or periled if I were to become a millionaire?”
“A great fortune is a great power, doctor, and not every man is fit to be intrusted with great power. To-day no second-class power in Europe can negotiate a treaty or make even a defensive war without the consent of the Rothschilds, while in America the owner of fifty millions is more powerful than the president of the United States, and the owner of ten millions more influential than the governor of a State.
“And so he ought to be,” interposed the doctor. “The man who can by fair means make $10,000,000 is more useful to the community in which he lives than a dozen governors of States.”
“But look at the danger to the people, doctor, of these great fortunes. There are ten men in the United States whose aggregate wealth amounts to $500,000,000, and who represent, and control, and wield the influence of property amounting to $3,000,000,000. If these men should choose to settle their rivalries and combine their interests and efforts, they could about fix the prices of every acre of land, every barrel of flour, every ton of coal, and every day’s wages of labor between Bangor and San Francisco. They could name every senator, governor, judge, congressman, and legislator in twenty States. They could rule a greater empire than any possessed by crowned kings. They could promulgate ukases more absolute, more despotic, and more certain of being enforced, than any which ever went forth from St. Petersburg to carry desolation to a race. They could say to the laborer in the grain-fields, ‘Henceforth you shall be reduced to the condition of your brother in England or Scotland, and eat meat but once a week.’ They could say to the toiler in the humming factory or over the red forge, ‘Henceforth you must toil twelve hours in each twenty-four.’ They could say to every wageworker in the land, ‘Henceforth we will take all the results of your labor, and give you only the slave’s share—existence and subsistence.’”
“All you need, Professor John Thornton,” said Dr. Eustace, “is a long beard, a woman with green goggles and a tamborine, a fat boy with a snare drum, and a pair of bellows in your chest, to be a Salvation Army seeking recruits for the church of Anarch. You know just as well as I do that you are talking nonsense, and that the capitalists of our country would be neither so inhuman nor so unwise as to push their power as you indicate.”
“Maybe not, doctor, maybe not, but their ability to so use their power if they choose is a menace to a free people, and a standing inducement to disorder, and unless the plutocrats cease their aggressions the people may invoke the motto, ‘Salva republica suprema lex,’ and tax all great fortunes out of existence.”
“What aggressions do you refer to, professor? For the life of me I cannot see that this country or this people have any just cause of complaint. The census returns of 1890 show that in the preceding ten years there was added to our national wealth, values amounting to nearly $20,000,000,000.”
“The census returns tell only a part of the story, doctor. The cottages of the land will tell you that while as a nation we may have grown of late years very rich and prosperous, yet among the individuals composing the nation its wealth is possessed and its prosperity enjoyed within a very narrow circle. The value of all the property in the United States in the year 1890 was $66,000,000,000. Do you know that $40,000,000,000, or sixty per cent of the wealth of America, is owned by less than forty thousand people? Do you know that in the last twenty years the laborers of the United States have added to the general wealth of the nation, values amounting to $30,000,000,000?”
“Well, what is there to complain of in that fact?” questioned the doctor.
“The complaint is that the money has not been divided among the ten million workers who earned it. The complaint is that it has not furnished each of ten million households with a $3,000-shield against the assaults of poverty. The complaint is that as fast as created it has been seized by the centripetal tendency which now dominates our civilization and hurried into the strong boxes of ten thousand Past-Masters of the art of accumulating the earnings of other people.”
“The complete answer, professor, to your diatribe is that the accumulations of which you speak are not the earnings of other people. The greater portion of this wealth has been developed from the bounty of nature in ways which could not have been pursued without large combinations of capital.”
“That is a mere assumption, doctor.”
“Not at all, professor. The money taken from gold, silver, copper, lead, iron, and coal mines, has come from the treasure vaults of nature, and has not been filched from the earnings of anybody.”
“Mining is the one exception to the rule, doctor.”
“I beg your pardon, professor, but it is not. Another avenue to wealth has been the organization and reorganization of great industries on unwasteful and remunerative principles. For instance, the beef and pork packing establishments of the West supply the retail butchers of the land with meat at a less price than is paid for the live cattle.”
“Where, then, doctor, do these philanthropists of whom you speak make their money?”
“They make it, professor, by scientific utilization of the hoofs and horns, bones and blood, which in small butcher shops are necessarily wasted.”
“You believe, then, in the rightfulness of monopolies and trusts, do you, doctor?”
“John, there are no monopolies. No restrictions are placed by law on any man who chooses to embark in any reputable business. As for the much-abused ‘trusts,’ they have all resulted in higher wages and more constant employment to the workman, and lower prices and better goods to the consumer. I suppose you will not claim that the capitalists alone are responsible for all the crime and pauperism of the land?”
“No,” replied the professor, “for the ignorant and vicious poor play into the hands of the selfish and vicious rich, and between the two the honest and industrious body of the people is being ground as between the upper and nether millstone. Indeed, I do not know which is the greater curse to the country, the stock thieves, whose dens are under the shadow of Trinity Church spire, and who combine to corrupt courts, juries, and legislators, or the dynamiters and anarchists who would involve the innocent and the guilty in one common wreck of social order. I hope I am no senseless alarmist, Dr. Eustace, but I am sure we must have relief, or there will be national ruin.”
“From what source, professor, do you expect relief to come?” inquired the doctor.
“Frankly, I don’t know,” was the reply.
“Maybe your next National Convention will relieve the situation,” insinuated the doctor, slyly.
“I am sure that relief will not come,” said the professor, “from existing political parties, whose orators grow earnest and belligerent over the ghosts of dead issues, and travel around and around over the same path, like an old horse on an arrastra, forever going somewhere and never getting anywhere, neither knowing or caring whether he is grinding pay rock or waste rock, conscious only of the whip of his driver, and hopeful only of his allowance of barley.”
“Why, John, I thought you were a devoted partisan,” said the doctor.
“Did you?” was the retort. “Well, you were mistaken. What can be hoped from political parties when legislators who are not free from suspicion of venality are voted for and elected year after year, because Grant captured Vicksburg, or Lincoln issued a proclamation of emancipation, or Stonewall Jackson was killed more than twenty-five years ago? Must the people forever submit to the rule of brawlers, and vote sellers, and trust betrayers, because such men hurrah for some flag which other men once carried into battle? Must the masses lie down in the path of Juggernaut and invite him to crush them, because the evil-visaged god parades his devotion to party issues which were long ago remitted to the limbo of things lost on earth?”
“The people will right all the evils of which you complain, professor, so soon as they see that it is to their interest to do so.”
“How can they doubt that it is their interest to right them? It is they who suffer both in purse and pride for every unjust exaction and every dishonest evasion. The poorest do not escape the consequences; it all comes out of their toil in the end. It depletes their pockets in a hundred unobserved ways. They pay for it in enhanced taxation of their homes, in the fuel which cooks their food, in a greater cost of the necessaries of life, in a higher rent, in the nails which hold their houses together, and in the increased cost of the blows of the hammer which drives them. I do not need to tell you, doctor, that labor must bear the burdens of the State. Labor at last pays all and capital pays nothing—all burdens of government, all expenses of courts and juries, and prisons and police, all cost of armies and navies. The diamonds which glitter upon the shirt front of the purchased legislator, the wine which hisses down the throat of the lobbyist, the steel doors and locks which guard watered stock and stolen bonds, the very powder and bullets which shoot out the life of maddened and insurgent labor, are all paid for out of the toil of the laborer.”
“While there is much truth in what you say, professor,” observed the doctor, “yet where is the immediate necessity for you to work yourself into such a state of mind about it?”
“Your remark, doctor, is a representative one,” replied Professor Thornton, “and the general indifference which it expresses is the most discouraging feature of the existing situation. Like the villagers who cultivate their vineyards at the base of Vesuvius, we heed not the rumblings of the volcano. Like the citizens long resident in Cologne, we scent the tainted air without discomfort. We cry with the French king, ‘After us the deluge,’ and we seem to care very little what may happen so long as it shall not happen to us.”
“There is the mate to your pickerel,” said the doctor, as he landed a fish upon the grass at his feet. “Two of the millionaires of Nine Mile Pond have succumbed to their own greed and the patience and cunning of intelligent labor.”
“Many of our millionaires,” resumed the professor, not to be driven from his theme, “and some of the most active and powerful of them all, are as selfish, as rapacious, as arrogant, as ignorant, as corrupt, and as despotic as Russian Boyars or Turkish Bashans. At the same time they are unaware of their danger, are utterly obtuse to their social and moral responsibilities, and conceited with the invulnerable conceit of self-made men. They do not seem to recognize that they are unprotected by an army, or a strong government, or spies, or the machinery of despotism, or any traditions or practices of rule, and they appear to take no thought of the infinite possibilities of disaster which line the path of every to-morrow.”
“You really fear, then, the fulfillment of Macauley’s prophecy, professor?”
“What thoughtful man does not? There is in every large city of our land a multitude unindustrious, unfrugal of life, uncurbed of spirit, undisciplined, uneducated, fretful of small gains, accustomed to freedom of speech and action, jealous of anything which looks like oppression or class rule, unaccustomed to restrictions of any kind, irrreligious, materialistic, discontented, idle, envious, and often drunken.”
“In brief, a powder magazine,” said the doctor. “Great cities have always presented the same problem to rulers, yet civilization lives, nevertheless.”
“Because,” rejoined the professor, “in monarchial Europe the magazine is guarded by trained armies and watchful sentinels, while in our country it is left open and unguarded, and anarchists with lighted torches pass to and fro. In Europe the train of government is built of carefully-selected materials, it is officered by experienced engineers, and at every station the testing hammer rings against the wheels. Here we put in any piece of crystallized iron for wheel or axle, and give the control of the engine to any loud-voiced braggart who can climb into the cab, or any ambitious dotard who chooses to hire the tricksters of the caucus to hoist him there. Then we throw the brakes off, the throttle-valves open, and go screaming down the grade.”
“And how do you propose, John, to avoid a smash-up?” queried the doctor.
“We shall have passed the danger point,” replied the professor, “and entered upon an era of safer and better life for the republic, only when the great millionaires of America shall elect to consider themselves not merely as conquerers on the field of finance, entitled to the spoils of victory, but as trustees for humanity, as suns whose mission it is to draw the waters of affluence from overflowing lake and stream, not to hold those waters above the earth forever, but to distribute them in bounteous and fertilizing showers.”
“And do you suppose, John Thornton, that the people would either appreciate or respond to such seraphic unselfishness on the part of your regenerated and beatified millionaires?
“Dr. Eustace, let me tell you that when the great, industrious, intelligent, patriotic body of workers shall be made to feel that there is no necessary conflict between labor and capital, —when they shall be made to know that any considerable number of our millionaires are seeking further wealth not merely to add to their personal luxury and power, but in order that labor may be helped in turn to higher planes of life, when it can be said truthfully—
“‘Then none was for a party,
Then all were for the State;
Then the great man helped the poor
And the poor man loved the great’—
In that day professional labor agitators will lose their vocations, the workingman who never works will be without influence among his fellows, and the brotherhoods of beer and brawling which infest the purlieus of our larger cities, and clamor for bread or blood—meaning always somebody else’s bread or somebody else’s blood—will find occasion to disband. I do not despair of relief, I know that it must come. Whether it shall come through ‘a preserving or a destroying revolution,’ whether it shall come in wrath or in peace, is a question which the capitalists of this country must answer and answer speedily.”
“John, you dear old dreamer,” said the doctor, “I know of one millionaire whose gold has not corroded his humanity. I hope there are many such, but I fear that if the world looks to its wealth owners to lead it in a crusade of unselfishness, it will wait a long, long time. But I do not diagnose the disease as you do. You resemble a boy who has stubbed his toe. To him there is no world and hardly any boy outside of that sore toe. Yet if the cure be left to nature, in time the pain will abate and the toe recover. I do not believe that any law framed by man can make a pound of flour out of half a pound of wheat, or that any scheme of government can equalize the inevitable inequalities of human life.”
“Then you do not believe in the wisdom and beneficence of compelling the rapacious rich to aid the deserving poor?”
“No; I believe in the wisdom and beneficence of exact justice. I believe that the skillful and rapid bricklayer is entitled to higher wages and greater opportunities of employment than his stupid and slothful associate, and that to deny the former his rightful advantage is an outrage upon justice, whether such outrage be perpetrated by an employer or a trades union. I believe that every man is fairly entitled to all the fruits of his labor, his skill, his good judgment, and his good luck. The pickerel at your feet came by chance to your hook and not mine, and therefore it is your fish and not my fish.”
“But by the law of nature, doctor, there is no difference between a beggar and a king.”
“There is where you are wrong, professor. The law of nature is a universal statute of equality of opportunity and inequality of result, and man distorts her purposes and violates her statutes when he places an unearned crown on the head of a king, or an unearned crust in the mouth of a beggar.”
“Do you think, then, that man has no excuse for his shortcomings, doctor?”
“He has many. He is controlled by the occult power of race transmissions, by laws which he did not help to make, by customs which he did not help to form, by organizations and environments beyond his power to change or combat. But because of these he should have no license to plunder his wealthier neighbor, for, in this republic, it is within the power of the people to change laws, and alter customs, and secure to every man the result of his own toil and skill—and that is all any man is entitled to.”
“But the wealth owners, doctor, have monopolized nearly all the resources of nature.”
“Nonsense. There is not a hungry idler in the purlieus of New York City but might catch fish enough at the nearest wharf to keep him from starvation, or find within a day’s walk a piece of land he could cultivate on ‘shares.’ The resources of nature are inexhaustible. If every adult male in the land were to build for himself a marble palace, there would be no perceptible diminution in nature’s supply of marble. If every farmer were to devote his energies and his acres to the production of wheat, until enough wheat should have been harvested to feed the world for five years, yet the capacity of soil and sun, water and air to produce more wheat would be neither exhausted nor impaired. For thousands of years the men of every civilization have been hewing forests, and smelting iron, yet the forests which are untouched and the mines which are unopened are practically limitless.”
“Doctor, a man cannot stir the earth without a spade, or cut down a tree without an ax, or mine iron ore without a pick, and the owners of the spades, and picks, and axes, exact from the laborer an undue share of his labor for their use.”
“Who is to determine whether the share exacted be an undue one? My own opinion is that the laborer’s share of results has grown larger, and the capitalist’s share smaller, during the last twenty years. At least, the rate of interest on money is not much more than half what it was before the war. But whether this be so or not it is not nature’s fault. Nature is not only implacably just, she is impartially generous. No suitor is denied the chance to gain her favors, and none is refused any favor he may have earned. There are floods and tornadoes, frosts and fevers, burning suns and chilling winds. Yet these, as well as the fruitage and the harvests, are the offspring of inexorable law, and science now interprets the law. It warns us of cyclones ten thousand miles away; it predicts the date of arrival, speed, and duration of hurricanes; it brings the ladybug from Australia to combat and destroy the scale-bug in California; it promises to conquer drought by exploding dynamite bombs in the air or by chemical production of rain; it restrains floods by diverting rivers; it destroys malarial germs by planting groves of eucalyptus; it analyzes soils; it selects seeds; it fertilizes with electric wires, and it ploughs and plants and harvests fields with iron-limbed and steam-lunged servants. A hundred years ago one man with spade and sickle slowly wrested from the earth the sustenance for his little household, with only sufficient surplus to scantily compensate the weaver, who, with hand loom, constructed a few yards of cloth between daylight and dark. Now a girl guides the spindles and shuttles and makes thousands of yards of cloth in a day, and the labor of one man industriously applied to so much land as he can advantageously cultivate with the aid of improved machinery, will in one year produce one thousand bushels of wheat, or their equivalent in agricultural products—enough to feed fifty men for a year.”
“I grant you, doctor, that the production of wealth has greatly increased. The problem of the hour is how to provide for a more equal and just distribution of it.”
“John, the solution of the problem is not difficult. Allow every man to have that which he earns, and compel every man to earn that which he has. Accord every man the opportunity to work or starve, with the assurance that for his work he will receive full value, and for his idleness a hunger that no public or private charity will alleviate. Hard labor and hard fare for the criminal, generous diet and tender care for the sick, an ax or a pump handle for the tramp, and allow no healthy man to eat his supper until he has earned it. Consider sporadic and indiscriminate charity as great an evil as injustice. Accord every man his dollar and demand from every man your dollar, and give and exact shilling for shilling. Emulate and copy the inexorable justice of nature.”
“Doctor,” said the professor, “I am silenced but not convinced. The sun is getting too high for further fishing. Come, let us go to luncheon.”