ists. When the advertisers' greed saw the artists' hunger, the result
was _that_!" He pointed to five score dehumanized faces before him.

"Great!" murmured the _Sun_ man.

"Hereafter watch the sandwich-man, and in one corner of the sign look
for the union label--a skeleton carrying a coffin, to remind us that no
matter what a man is when he is born, he goes to his Maker between
boards. In death all men are equal, and in his coffin a man is the
Ultimate Sandwich!"

"That's literature!" muttered the serious young man from the _Journal_.

"We refuse to be thieves. Therefore we decline to do any sandwiching for
patent medicines, banks, quack cures, fraudulent stores, immoral books,
coal-dealers, fake doctors, suburban real estate, bum chiropodists, or
disreputable people of any kind, class, or nature whatsoever. We start
with professional ethics, which is where most professions end. We who
have been the lowest of the low class that work for their daily bread
are now the S. A. S. A.--the Society of American Sandwich Artists. All
we ask is permission to live! Our headquarters will be in the Allied
Arts Building on Fifth Avenue."

His speech had quotable phrases. A country that once cast the biggest
vote in its history for the square deal, that makes minions of dollars
out of asking you if you see that hump, and from promising to do the
rest if you push the button, and boasts of the thorn that made a rose
famous, is bound to be governed by phrases. The only exceptions are the
Ten Commandments. They are quotable, but not memorable.

All the newspapers spread themselves on that story. In their clubs the
managing editors heard their fellow-members talk about the parade, and
this made each M. E. telephone to the city editor to play it up. It was
too picturesque not to be good reading, and since good reading is always
easy writing, both reporters and editorial writers enjoyed themselves.
That made them artists instead of wage-earners.

Hendrik Rutgers possessed the same quality of political instinct that
nearly made the luckiest man in the world President of the United
States. By blindly following it, young Mr. Rutgers jumped into the very
heart of a profound truth. And once he landed, the same sublimated
sagacity impelled him to stamp with both feet hard. Then, unemotionally
perceiving exactly what he had done, he proceeded very carefully to pick
out his own philosophical steps, in order to be able later on to prove
that h