an and niggardly--that you're afraid to spend a
dollar. The fact that you have raised the wages of your staff doesn't
seem to answer them; they rather hold that against you, because it has
a tendency to make them do the same. Other office staffs are going to
their heads and saying, 'Grant is paying his help so much.' That doesn't
popularize you. To be a good fellow you should hold your staff down to
the lowest wages at which you can get service, and the money you save in
this way should be spent with gusto and abandon at expensive hotels and
other places designed to keep rich people from getting too rich."

"I am afraid you are satirizing them a little, but there is a good deal
in what you say. They think I'm mean because they don't understand me,
and they can't understand my point of view. I believe that money was
created as a medium for the exchange of value. I think they will all
agree with me there. If that is so, then I have no right to money unless
I have given value for it, and that is where they part company with me;
but surely we can't accept the one fact without the other."

Grant found himself thumbing his pockets. "You may smoke, if you have
tobacco," said Mrs. Bruce. "My husband smoked, and although I did not
approve of it then, I think I must have grown to like it."

He lighted a cigarette, and continued. "Not all the moral law was given
on Mount Sinai. It seems to me that the supernaturalism which has been
introduced into the story of the Ten Commandments is most unfortunate.
It seems to remove them out of the field of natural law, whereas they
are, really, natural law itself. No social state can exist where they
are habitually ignored. But of course these natural laws existed long
before Moses. He did not make the law; he discovered it, just as Newton
discovered the law of gravitation. Well--there must be many other
natural laws, still undiscovered, or at least unaccepted. The thing is
to discover them, to obey them, and, eventually, to compel others to
obey them. I am no Moses, but I think I have the germ of the law which
would cure our economic ills--that no person should be allowed to
receive value without earning it. Because I believed in that I gave up
a fortune and went to work as a laborer on a ranch, but Fate has forced
wealth upon me, doubtless in order that I may prove out my own theories.
Well, that is what I am doing."

"It shouldn't be hard to get rid of money if you don't want it," Mrs.