access to their secrets as I ever
had--and, if they discharged all who now serve them, I should be able soon
to reestablish my lines; men of their stripe can not hope to be served
faithfully.

Third, I had offers from all but three of "The Seven" to "peach" on the
others in return for immunity. There may be honor among some thieves, but
not among "respectable" thieves. Hypocrisy and honor will be found in the
same character when the sun shines at night--not before.

* * * * *

It was the sardonic humor of fate that Langdon, for all his desire to keep
out of my way, should have compelled me to center my fire upon him; that I,
who wished to spare him, if possible, should have been compelled to make of
him my first "awful example."

I had decided to concentrate upon Roebuck, because he was the richest and
most powerful of "The Seven." For, in my pictures of the three main phases
of "finance"--the industrial, the life-insurance and the banking--he, as
arch plotter in every kind of respectable skulduggery, was necessarily in
the foreground. My original intention was to demolish the Power Trust--or,
at least, to compel him to buy back all of its stock which he had worked
off on the public. I had collected many interesting facts about it, facts
typical of the conditions that "finance" has established in so many of our
industries.

For instance, I was prepared to show that the actual earnings of the Power
Trust were two and a half times what its reports to stock-holders alleged;
that the concealed profits were diverted into the pockets of Roebuck, his
sons, eleven other relatives and four of "The Seven," the lion's share
going, of course, to the lion. Like almost all the great industrial
enterprises, too strong for the law and too remote for the supervision
of their stock-holders, it gathered in enormous revenues to disburse
them chiefly in salaries and commissions and rake-offs on contracts to
favorites. I had proof that in one year it had "written off" twelve
millions of profit and loss, ten millions of which had found its way to
Roebuck's pocket. That pocket! That "treasury of the Lord"!

Dishonest? Roebuck and most of the other leaders of the various gangs,
comprising, with all their ramifications, the principal figures in
religious, philanthropic, fashionable society, did not for an instant
think their doings dishonest. They had no sense of trusteeship for this
money intrusted to them a