merely assert and maintain my right to live, they
deny the right of any but themselves to live. I say I criticize them;
but that does not mean that I sympathize with the public at large in its
complainings against them. The public, its stupidity and cupidity, creates
the conditions that breed and foster these men. A rotten cheese reviling
the maggots it has bred!

In those very hours when I was obeying the imperative law of
self-preservation, was clutching at every log that floated by me regardless
of whether it was my property or not so long as it would help me keep my
head above water--what was going on all round me? In every office of the
down town district--merchant, banker, broker, lawyer, man of commerce or
finance--was not every busy brain plotting, not self-preservation but
pillage and sack--plotting to increase the cost of living for the masses of
men by slipping a little tax here and a little tax there on to everything
by which men live? All along the line between the farm or mine or shop
and the market, at every one of the toll-gates for the collection of
_just_ charges, these big financiers, backed up by the big lawyers and
the rascally public officials, had an agent in charge to collect on each
passing article more than was honestly due. A thousand subtle ways of
levying, all combining to pour in upon the few the torrents of unjust
wealth. I laugh when I read of laboring men striking for higher wages.
Poor, ignorant fools--they almost deserve their fate. They had better be
concerning themselves with a huge, universal strike at the polls for lower
prices. What will it avail to get higher wages, as long as the masters
control and recoup on the prices of all the things for which those wages
must be spent?

I lived in Wall Street, in its atmosphere of the practical morality of
"finance." On every side swindling operations, great and small; operations
regarded as right through long-established custom; dishonest or doubtful
operations on the way to becoming established by custom as "respectable."
No man's title to anything conceded unless he had the brains to defend it.
There was a time when it would have been regarded as wildly preposterous
and viciously immoral to deny property rights in human beings. There may
come a time--who knows?--when "high finance's" denial of a moral right
to property of any kind may cease to be regarded as wicked; may become a
generally accepted canon, as our Socialist friends predict.