k, whose fondest dream is a raise of
salary as the result of coming under the Master's eye in a
seventy-five-million-dollar deal, affixes a seal, and there is an
exchanging of thin slips of paper--checks--dollars--magically "made
dollars." Exit office-boys and lawyers.

The door closes--silence again. Then the air vibrates with the sound of
a hearty hand-slap and the genial, whole-souled greeting of the "Master"
to his partner. "William, I feel as though I had done an honest day's
labor! Thirty-six million dollars 'made' and no hitch, no delay!" Then
follows the partner's mild answer: "Yes, Harry, but don't forget James'
and the others' shares will shrink it up quite a bit."

Thirty-six million dollars for _one honest day's labor_! Thirty-six
million dollars--and Alaska cost us but seven millions and Spain
relinquished to us her claims on the Philippines for only twenty
millions. Thirty-six million dollars!--more than a hundred times as much
as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and "Abe" Lincoln together
secured for the patriotic labors of their lifetimes. And this vast sum
was taken from the people to enrich men whose coffers were already, as
the results of similar operations, so full of dollars that neither they
nor their children, nor their children's children could count them--as
the people count their savings, a dollar at a time--as thoughtlessly
taken as are the apples that the school-boy steals after he has eaten so
many that he can eat no more.

A thousand times have I tried to figure out in my mind what worlds of
misery such a sum of millions might allay if issued by a government and
intelligently distributed among a people--and do my readers know that
never in the world's recorded history has any nation felt itself rich
enough to devote thirty-six millions to the cause of charity--even in
the midst of the most awful calamities of fire, flood, war, or
pestilence? On the other hand, I have had to know about the horrors, the
misfortunes, the earthly hell, which were the awful consequences of the
appropriation of this vast amount. I have had to know about the
convicts, the suicides, the broken hearts, the starvation and
wretchedness, the ruined bodies and lost souls which strewed the fields
of the "System's" harvest.

Pondering all these things, I have ceased to wonder at the deep murmurs
of discontent that are rising, rising to my ears from all parts of the
continent.

Can it be that a just God suffers t