o rise
for another ten years as it has during the past ten under your
organizing the human race will be compelled to make still further
progress. They will have to move to another planet. Nobody but a
millionaire can live on this one. A day of reckoning is bound to come."

Bivens laughed, walked back to the window and gazed down on the narrow
streets below.

"A day of reckoning!" he exclaimed. "Look at those crawling lines of
men, Jim, and think for a moment of the millions like them on the
surface of the earth, each one fighting tooth and nail for his own
kennel and the bone that he claims. Think of the centuries of stupid
history back of each generation of those crawling things--their selfish
habits, as fixed as the colour of hair and eyes, their pride, their
little prejudices of race and creed--and talk to me about days of
reckoning and revolution! Hurl yourself against the mighty system of
business that has slowly built itself through the centuries out of such
material and you simply beat your brains out against a granite wall."

"Well, I see something entirely different," Stuart answered, "as I look
on that slowly moving line of men down there. To me they symbolize the
eternal, the endless stream that sweeps through time to whose life a
century is but a moment. You think that you are one of the mighty. By
the signs on that table you are. And yet, you could die to-night and
that black stream of humanity would flow along that narrow street
to-morrow as it does to-day and not one in all the crowd would pause to
look up at the flag at half mast on your building. One by one the
mighty fall and are forgotten and yet that crowd grows denser, its feet
swifter, and the pressure of its united life becomes more and more
resistless. A hundred years from now and your name will have vanished
from human memory. A millionaire dies every day. Nobody knows. Nobody
cares. Is such a life at its best worth living? And yours is never at
its best. You can't eat much. You don't sleep well and you can't live
beyond fifty-five."

Bivens's dark face grew suddenly pale and his slender fingers touched
one of the piles of gold.

"Don't talk nonsense, Jim, I'll live as long as you."

"And yet you turn pale when I speak of death."

Bivens suddenly drew his watch and spoke with quick nervous energy:

"I must call those reporters and get rid of them as soon as possible."

He gave the order, and in a few moments walked back into the room