. I am a master at the exploitation of intellectual
labor.

I have motors, saddle-horses, and a beautiful summer cottage at a cool
and fashionable resort. I travel abroad when the spirit moves me; I
entertain lavishly and am entertained in return; I smoke the costliest
cigars; I have a reputation at the bar, and I have an established income
large enough to sustain at least sixty intelligent people and their
families in moderate comfort. This must be true, for on the one hundred
and twenty-five dollars a month I pay my chauffeur he supports a wife
and two children, sends them to school and on a three-months' vacation
into the country during the summer. And, instead of all these things
giving me any satisfaction, I am miserable and discontented.

The fact that I now realize the selfishness of my life led me to-day to
resolve to do something for others--and this resolve had an unexpected
and surprising consequence.

Heretofore I had been engaged in an introspective study of my own
attitude toward my fellows. I had not sought the evidence of outside
parties. What has just occurred has opened my eyes to the fact that
others have not been nearly so blind as I have been myself.

James Hastings, my private secretary, is a man of about forty-five years
of age. He has been in my employ fifteen years. He is a fine type of man
and deserves the greatest credit for what he has accomplished. Beginning
life as an office boy at three dollars a week, he educated himself by
attending school at night, learned stenography and typewriting, and has
become one of the most expert law stenographers in Wall Street. I
believe that, without being a lawyer, he knows almost as much law as I
do.

Gradually I have raised his wages until he is now getting fifty dollars
a week. In addition to this he does night-work at the Bar Association at
double rates, acts as stenographer at legal references, and does, I
understand, some trifling literary work besides. I suppose he earns from
thirty-five hundred to five thousand dollars a year. About thirteen
years ago he married one of the woman stenographers in the office--a
nice girl she was too--and now they have a couple of children. He lives
somewhere in the country and spends an unconscionable time on the train
daily, yet he is always on hand at an early hour.

What happened to-day was this: A peculiarly careful piece of work had
been done in the way of looking up a point of corporation law, and I
inqui