went into his office and meditated awhile. That was it: all
the traffic would bear. From top to bottom, that was the rule of the
game; and what kept the game going was the fact that a sucker was born
every minute. If a Jones were born every minute, the game wouldn't
last very long. Lucky for the players that the workers weren't Joneses.

But there were other and larger phases of the game. Little business
men, shopkeepers, and such ilk took what whack they could out of the
product of the worker; but, after all, it was the large business men
who formed the workers through the little business men. When all was
said and done, the latter, like Jones in Petacha Valley, got no more
than wages out of their whack. In truth, they were hired men for the
large business men. Still again, higher up, were the big fellows.
They used vast and complicated paraphernalia for the purpose, on a
large scale of getting between hundreds of thousands of workers and
their products. These men were not so much mere robbers as gamblers.
And, not content with their direct winnings, being essentially
gamblers, they raided one another. They called this feature of the
game HIGH FINANCE. They were all engaged primarily in robbing the
worker, but every little while they formed combinations and robbed one
another of the accumulated loot. This explained the
fifty-thousand-dollar raid on him by Holdsworthy and the
ten-million-dollar raid on him by Dowsett, Letton, and Guggenhammer.
And when he raided Panama Mail he had done exactly the same thing.
Well, he concluded, it was finer sport robbing the robbers than robbing
the poor stupid workers.

Thus, all unread in philosophy, Daylight preempted for himself the
position and vocation of a twentieth-century superman. He found, with
rare and mythical exceptions, that there was no noblesse oblige among
the business and financial supermen. As a clever traveler had
announced in an after-dinner speech at the Alta-Pacific, "There was
honor amongst thieves, and this was what distinguished thieves from
honest men." That was it. It hit the nail on the head. These modern
supermen were a lot of sordid banditti who had the successful
effrontery to preach a code of right and wrong to their victims which
they themselves did not practise. With them, a man's word was good
just as long as he was compelled to keep it. THOU SHALT NOT STEAL was
only applicable to the honest worker. They, the supermen, were abov