red as he spoke. They were not his
proposals, but Stillman's and the others' who had been let in on the
several floors, but to whom he had never explained my rights nor my
position in the enterprise.

"The truth is, Lawson," he said--"and I'll not mince matters further:
From the beginning I have done business with you on a basis entirely
different from that on which it is our rule to deal with agents or
associates. At the start I expected that you would, as all others have
done, fall into our ways. Instead, you have grown more stubborn, and the
result is, I have been forced into all kinds of holes, some of which I
have not even let William Rockefeller know about. Here at last I am in
between the grinders. I cannot go to such men as Stillman and Morgan and
admit that you are the one who has been doing this copper business that
I have had them think I was doing myself. You would not ask me to put
myself in such a humiliating position. Think what John D. Rockefeller
would say of such a confession. It's impossible. And when these
associates of mine get down to this matter and all agree upon the way it
should be closed up, what can I do but go with them? If they knew the
facts it would be easy to run you in between us, and then you would
either have to convince them or give way yourself, but this is not
possible here."

The straight and narrow way is easy to follow, but once lost is hard to
find. The defaulting bank president who overnight "borrows" a few
thousands from his institution, fully intends to return the "loan" next
day, but repairing an error is even more difficult than resisting a
temptation, and when a man is in crime's net, his struggles to escape
seem only to tighten around him its meshes. When the incidents of his
downfall are before the jury or the coroner, there will always appear a
dozen places where the unfortunate might have cut his way out of the
strangling coils, but he who surveys such situations from the outside
has a clearer vision than the blinded and desperate wretch in the trap.
He who enlists with the brigands of "frenzied finance" and takes the
oath of addition, division, and silence cannot discharge himself because
his comrades are needlessly harsh to their victims. Eventually he may
decide on desertion as preferable to throat-cutting, but to suggest
resignation is to invite destruction, for it is a tradition of the
fraternity that the best cure for repentance is a knife-thrust.

Mr. Rogers