by a common purpose, to keep
that control in as few hands as possible. Whenever there was sign of peril
from without they flung away differences, pooled resources, marched in
full force to put down the insurrection. For they looked on any attempt
to interfere with them as a mutiny, as an outbreak of anarchy. This band
persisted, but membership in it changed, changed rapidly. Now, one would
be beaten to death and despoiled by a clique of fellows; again, weak or
rash ones would be cut off in strenuous battle. Often, most often, some
too-powerful or too-arrogant member would be secretly and stealthily
assassinated by a jealous associate or by a committee of internal safety.
Of course, I do not mean literally assassinated, but assassinated, cut off,
destroyed, in the sense that a man whose whole life is wealth and power is
dead when wealth and power are taken from him.

Actual assassination, the crime of murder--these "gentlemen" rarely did
anything which their lawyers did not advise them was legal or could be made
legal by bribery of one kind or another. Rarely, I say--not never. You will
see presently why I make that qualification.

I had my heart set upon membership in this band--and, as I confess now with
shame, my prejudices of self-interest had blinded me into regarding it
and its members as great and useful and honorable "captains of industry."
Honorable in the main; for, not even my prejudice could blind me to the
almost hair-raising atrocity of some of their doings. Still, morality is
largely a question of environment. I had been bred in that environment.
Even the atrocities I excused on the ground that he who goes forth to war
must be prepared to do and to tolerate many acts the church would have to
strain a point to bless. What was Columbus but a marauder, a buccaneer?
Was not Drake, in law and in fact, a pirate; Washington a traitor to his
soldier's oath of allegiance to King George? I had much to learn, and to
unlearn. I was to find out that whenever a Roebuck puts his arm round you,
it is invariably to get within your guard and nearer your fifth rib. I was
to trace the ugliest deformities of that conscience of his, hidden away
down inside him like a dwarfed, starved prisoner in an underground dungeon.
I was to be astounded by revelations of Langdon, who was not a believer,
like Roebuck, and so was not under the restraint of the feeling that he
must keep some sort of conscience ledgers against the inspection of