as to be little more than a name, and it is through the "curb"
that the value of "Standard Oil" stock is established, for it is daily
bought and sold there at the steadily held prices of 650 to 800, and the
press of the world makes daily record of these prices.

CHAPTER IX

A VOTARY OF THE "SYSTEM"

The "System" has all sorts of votaries. About J. Edward O'Sullivan
Addicks there is nothing that remotely suggests coworkers of the types
of Mr. Rogers and William Rockefeller. A description that left him in
any part a duplicate of either would do him and them a grievous wrong.
Henry H. Rogers and William Rockefeller have two sides, their social
side and their business side. Socially, they are good men; in business
they work evil. J. Edward O'Sullivan Addicks is a bad man, socially, in
business, in every way. The term "bad man" is used advisedly. My idea of
a "bad man" is that like a bad dollar he is a counterfeit. A counterfeit
has all the appearances of reality, and is yet devoid of its properties
and virtues. So with Addicks. It is easy to find men who will declare by
all that is sacred that Henry H. Rogers is one of the best fellows in
the world, though as many more will as earnestly proclaim him the fiend
incarnate. About Addicks, among those who know the man, there is but one
opinion. I have yet to meet the man, woman, or child who would say aught
of Addicks, after a month's acquaintance, other than, "Don't mention
him! He is the limit." And it will be said with the calm of
dispassionate conviction, as one might speak of a stuffed tiger in a
dime-museum jungle.

Here we have a man without a heart, without a soul, and, I believe,
absolutely without conscience--the type of man who even his associates
feel is likely to bring in after their deaths queer bills against their
estates as an offset for what he owes them; the type of man whose
promise is just as good as his bond, and whose bond is so near his
promise as to make it absolutely immaterial to him which you take.

Exhibited in the side show of one of the great circuses some years ago
was a strange creature which, for lack of a better name, its owner and
the public dubbed, "A What Is It?" This freak had the semblance of
humanity, and yet was not human. All its functions and feelings reversed
the normal. Tickle it and it would cry bitterly; pinch or torture it and
it would grin rapturously; when starved it repelled food, and when
overfed it was ravenous f