ten where it used
to fawn?" Y.D.'s wife asked, and Grant was spared a hard answer by the
rancher's interruption, "Hit the profiteer as hard as you like. He's got
no friends."

"That depends upon who is the profiteer--a point which no one seems
to have settled. In the cities you may even hear prosperous ranchers
included in that class--absurd as that must seem to you," Grant added,
with a smile to Y.D. "Require every man to give service according to
his returns and you automatically eliminate all profiteers, large and
small."

"But you will admit," said Mrs. Squiggs, "that we must have some
well-off people to foster culture and give tone to society generally?"

"I agree that the boy who is brought up in a home with a bath tub, and
all that that stands for, is likely to be a better citizen than the boy
who doesn't have that advantage. That's why I want every home to have a
bath tub."

Mrs. Squiggs subsided rather heavily. In youth her Saturday night
ablutions had been taken in the middle of the kitchen floor.

"I have a good deal of sympathy," said Transley, "with any movement
which has for its purpose the betterment of human conditions. Any
successful man of to-day will admit, if he is frank about it, that he
owes his success as much to good luck as to good judgment. If you could
find a way, Grant, to take the element of luck out of life, perhaps
you would be doing a service which would justify you in keeping
those millions which worry you so. But I can't see that it makes any
difference to the prosperity of a country who owns the wealth in it, so
long as the wealth is there and is usefully employed. Money doesn't
grow unless it works, and if it works it serves Society just the same as
muscle does. You could put all your wealth in a strong-box and bury it
under your house up there on the hill, and it wouldn't increase a nickel
in a thousand years, but if you put it to work it makes money for
you and money for other people as well. I'm a little nervous about
new-fangled notions. It's easier to wreck the ship than to build a new
one, which may not sail any better. What the world needs to-day is the
gospel of hard work, and everybody, rich and poor, on the job for all
that's in him. That's the only way out."

"We seem to have much in common," Grant returned. "Hard work is the only
way out, and the best way to encourage hard work is to find a system by
which every man will be rewarded according to the service rendered