itude. His political education was given up as
hopeless.

Yet in spite of their gloomy predictions of his speedy ruin, he had
steadily grown in power and influence.

The work on which he had just entered was an investigation before an
unusually intelligent Grand Jury of the criminal acts of a group of the
most daring and powerful financiers of the world. These men controlled
through their position as trustees of the treasuries of great
corporations more millions than the combined treasuries of the
governments of the Republic--State and National. The act was not only
daring, it was extremely dangerous. Under certain conditions it might
produce a panic--so daring and dangerous was the move that its first
announcement was received as a joke by the press. The idea of a young
upstart questioning the honesty and position of the men who controlled
the treasuries of the great insurance and trust companies was
ridiculous. When he realized the magnitude of the task he had
undertaken, he at once put his house in order for the supreme effort.
It was necessary that he give up every outside interest that might
distract his attention from the greater task.

The one matter of grave importance to which he was giving his time
outside his office was his position as advisory counsel to Dr. Woodman
in his suit for damages against the Chemical Trust, which had been
dragging its course through the courts for years. To his amazement he
had just received an offer from Bivens's attorneys to compromise this
suit for a hundred thousand dollars. He would of course advise the
doctor to accept it immediately. He had never believed he could win a
penny.

What could be Bivens's motive in making such an offer? It was
impossible that the shrewd little president of the American Chemical
Company had anything to fear personally from this attack. His fortune
was vast and beyond question. His wealth had grown in the past nine
years like magic. Everything his smooth little hand touched had turned
to gold. Wherever an industry could pay a dividend, his ferret eyes
found it. The process was always the same. He brought together its
rival houses, capitalized the new combine for ten times its actual
value and bound the burden of this enormous fictitious value as an
interest-bearing debt on the backs of the consumers of the goods. The
people and their children and their children's children would have to
pay it.

His fortune now could not be less than forty mi