I might be torn limb from limb by the black, creeping thing on the
pavements below, that clutched at your throat that day, but for the
fact that they all love money and lust after it with abject longing.

"The people will only get justice when they learn to love justice.
Because they love privilege and lust after money they are plundered by
men who are their superiors in intelligence. If I am a wolf it's
because so many lambs are always bleating at my heels that I have to
eat them to save my self-respect. People will continue to starve so
long as they are content with a circus and a bread-line. And such
people ought to starve. They get what they deserve. The government is
trying to rescue four thousand men who are stranded and starving in
Alaska. Are they paupers? No, just average business men who are mad for
money, who dare frozen seas or blazing deserts, death or hell to win
it. That's why my power _is_ power. This passion for money, money for
its own sake, right or wrong, is the motive power of the modern world.
That's why I laugh at my critics and sneer at threats. I am secure
because I've built my career on the biggest fact of the century. You'd
as well have common sense and accept the world as it is. As you've just
said, we've only a little while to live in it anyhow."

"But I want to really live," Stuart broke in, "not merely exist. You
don't live. You are engaged in an endless fight, desperate, cruel,
mercenary--for what? The superfluous, ambitions you never exploit,
privileges you don't know how to use, caprices without the genius to
express them, pleasures when you don't know how to play. Why?"

"The game man, the game!"

"Game? what game? To crush and kill for the mere sake of doing it, as a
sheep-killing dog strangles fifty lambs in a night for the fun of
hearing them bleat? Isn't there a bigger game? a game of mutual joys
and hopes, of sunlight and laughter?"

"But, Jim," the little financier protested, "I don't make men as they
are, nor did I make conditions."

"Still is that any reason why a man shouldn't take his place on the
right side of the fight? The eternal struggle is always on between Life
and Death. A man's in league with one or the other. Which is it? You
are a wrecker and not a builder."

"But is that true?" Bivens interrupted eagerly. "I'm organizing the
industries of the world. I have furthered the progress of humanity."

"Yes, in a way you have. And if the price of goods continues t