tion, 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 around me? In
every office of the downtown 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 onto the cost of everything by which men live? All
along the line between the farm or mine or shop and the market, at
every one of the tollgates 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 a
little 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
always 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 them to get higher wages, so long
as their masters control and can and will recoup on, the prices of all
the things for which those wages must be spent?

However, as I was saying, 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. However, I
attempt no excuses for myself; I need them no more than a judge in the
Dark Ages needed to apologize for ordering a witch to the stake. I
could no more have done differently than a fish could breathe on land
or a man under water. I did as all the others did--and I had the
justification of necessity. Right of might being the code, when men
set upon me with pistols, I meet them with pistols, not with the
discarded and antiquate