But
the house and its treasures is, after all, but a mausoleum, and the
grave it covers holds the man that might have been. Life in its larger
meanings has remained a sealed book, and the gold counted as chief good
becomes at last an impenetrable barrier between him and any knowledge of
what might have been his portion. He is content, and remains content
till the end, and that new beginning in which the starved soul comes to
the first consciousness of its own most desperate and pitiful poverty.

This for one type, and a type more and more common with every year of
the system in which competition is king. But here and there one finds
another,--that of the man whose conscience remains sensitive, no matter
what familiarity with legalized knavery may come, and who ponders the
question of what he owes to those by whose aid his fortune is made. Nor
is he the employer who evades the real issue by a series of what he
calls benefactions, and who organizes colonies for his work-people, in
which may be found all the charm of the feudal system, and an underlying
despotism no less feudal. He would gladly make his workers copartners
with him were intelligence enough developed among them to admit such
action, and he experiments faithfully and patiently.

It is such an employer whose own words best give the story he has to
tell. It is not an American that speaks but a German Jew,--a title often
the synonyme for depths of trickery, but more often than is known
meaning its opposite in all points. Keen sagacity rules, it is true, but
there is also a large and tender nature, sorrowing with the sorrow of
humanity and seeking anxiously some means by which that sorrow may
lessen. A small manufacturer, fighting his way against monopoly, he is
determinately honest in every thread put into his goods, in every method
of his trade; his face shrewd yet gentle and wise,--a face that child or
woman would trust, and the business man be certain he could impose upon
until some sudden turn brought out the shrewdness and the calm assurance
of absolute knowledge in his own lines. For thirty years and more his
work has held its own, and he has made for himself a place in the trade
that no crisis can affect. His own view of the situation is distinctly
serious, but even for him there was a flickering smile as he recalled
some passages of the experience given here in part. His English limps
slightly at moments of excitement, but his mastery of its shades of