lf in this country?" With shoulders sagging and a
sort of stumble in his gait, he went toward the door. He paused there to
say: "I've served too long, Mr. Roebuck. There's no fight in me. I thought
there was, but there ain't. Do the best you can for me." And he took
himself out of our sight.

You will wonder how I was ever able to blind myself to the reality of this
frightful scene. But please remember that in this world every thought and
every act is a mixture of the good and the bad; and the one or the other
shows the more prominently according to one's point of view. There probably
isn't a criminal in any cell, anywhere, no matter what he may say in
sniveling pretense in the hope of lighter sentence, who doesn't at the
bottom of his heart believe his crime or crimes somehow justifiable--and
who couldn't make out a plausible case for himself.

At that time I was stuffed with the arrogance of my fancied membership in
the caste of directing financial geniuses; I was looking at everything
from the viewpoint of the brotherhood of which Roebuck was the strongest
brother, and of which I imagined myself a full and equal member. I did not,
I could not, blind myself to the vivid reminders of his relentlessness; but
I knew too well how necessary the iron hand and the fixed purpose are to
great affairs to judge him as infuriated Walters, with his vanity savagely
wounded, was judging him. I'd as soon have thought of describing General
Grant as a murderer, because he ordered the battles in which men were
killed or because he planned and led the campaigns in which subordinates
committed rapine and pillage and assassination. I did not then see the
radical difference--did not realize that while Grant's work was at the
command of patriotism and necessity, there was no necessity whatever
for Roebuck's getting rich but the command of his own greedy and cruel
appetites.

Don't misunderstand me. My morals are practical, not theoretical. Men must
die, old customs embodied in law must be broken, the venal must be bribed
and the weak cowed and compelled, in order that civilization may advance.
You can't establish a railway or a great industrial system by rose-water
morality. But I shall show, before I finish, that Roebuck and his gang of
so-called "organizers of industry" bear about the same relation to industry
that the boll weevil bears to the cotton crop.

I'll withdraw this, if any one can show me that, as the result of the
activities