way and I go mine.
You run your business to suit yourself and I'll do the same. The
world's big enough for us both----"

"That just the trouble," Bivens interrupted. "It isn't. We are entering
a new era of combination, merger, cooperation."

"Compulsory cooperation!" the doctor laughed.

"It may be so at last," the little man said soberly. "Certainly the old
idea of competition is played out. We no longer believe that business
men should try to cut each other's throats."

"Oh, I see," sneered the doctor, "they should get together, corral
their customers, and cut their throats. That certainly is better for
business, but how about the customers?"

"Business is business," was the grim answer.

"For beasts of the field, yes--but for men?"

"Still, you must recognize the fact that the drug trade is a business
enterprise, not a charity organization."

"Even so, still I happen to know that within a stone's throw of my
store swarms a population of a quarter of a million human beings so
poor that only three hundred of them ever have access to a bathroom.
The death rate of the children is 254 in a thousand. It should be about
20 in a thousand, if normal. I don't want any higher profits out of my
customers. If I've got to fight I'd rather fight the trade than fight
the people. I choose the lesser evil."

"But I don't ask you to do evil."

"You ask me to enter with you into a criminal conspiracy to suppress
freedom of trade, and use fraud and violence if necessary to win----"

"Fraud and violence?" Bivens interrupted, smilingly.

"Certainly. What sort of merchandise does the 'organizer' of modern
industry bring to market? Tricks and subterfuges in the form of printed
paper called stocks which represent no value. From the moment a
financier once tastes this blood he becomes a beast. With the first
fierce realization of the fact that under modern legal forms he can
coin money out of nothing by binding the burdens of debt on the backs
of helpless millions, he begins to laugh at the laws of man and God."

"Come, come, Doctor, you must realize the fact that in the drug
business we are bringing order out of chaos and at last putting the
trade on a paying basis."

"But at what a price! You have closed mills instead of opening them,
thrown out of work thousands, lowered the price paid for raw material,
bringing ruin to its producers, increased the price charged for your
products to the ruin of the consumer, and saddled mi