Not personally," replied he in the same spirit, yet serious, too, at
bottom. "Inspector Bradlaugh was telling me, the other night, that there
were easily a thousand men in the slums of the East Side who could be hired
to kill a man for five hundred dollars."

I suppose Schilling, as the directing spirit of a corporation that
hid poison by the hogshead in low-priced foods of various kinds,
was responsible for hundreds of deaths annually, and for misery of
sickness beyond calculation among the poor of the tenements and cheap
boarding-houses. Yet a better husband, father and friend never lived. He,
personally, wouldn't have harmed a fly; but he was a wholesale poisoner for
dividends.

Murder for dividends. Poison for dividends. Starve and freeze and maim for
dividends. Drive parents to suicide, and sons and daughters to crime and
prostitution--for dividends. Not fair competition, in which the stronger
and better would survive, but cheating and swindling, lying and pilfering
and bribing, so that the honest and the decent go down before the dishonest
and the depraved. And the custom of doing these things so "respectable,"
the applause for "success" so undiscriminating, and men so unthinking in
the rush of business activity, that criticism is regarded as a mixture of
envy and idealism. And it usually is, I must admit.

Schilling lingered. "I hope you won't blame me for lining up against you,
Matt," said he. "I don't want to, but I've got to."

"Why?"

"You know what'd become of me if I didn't."

"You might become an honest man and get self-respect," I suggested with
friendly satire.

"That's all very well for you to say," was his laughing retort. "You've
made yourself tight and tidy for the blow. But I've a family, and a damned
expensive one, too. And if I didn't stand by this gang, they'd take
everything I've got away from me. No, Matt, each of us to his own game.
What _is_ your game, anyhow?"

"Fun--just fun. Playing the pipe to see the big fellows dance."

But he didn't believe it. And no one has believed it--not even my most
devoted followers. To this day Joe Ball more than half suspects that my
real objective was huge personal gain. That any rich man should do anything
except for the purpose of growing richer seems incredible. That any rich
man should retain or regain the sympathies and viewpoint of the class from
which he sprang, and should become a "traitor" to the class to which he
belongs, seems preposterou