yielded vast wealth, part of
which was used in succeeding years in getting more law-created sources
of wealth. If professional politicians had long since got into the habit
of expecting to be bought, it was because the landholders, traders and
bankers had accustomed them to the lucrative business of getting bribes
in return for extraordinary laws.

Since the men of wealth, or embryo capitalists who by hook or crook
raised the funds to bribe, were themselves ready at all times to buy
laws in common councils, legislatures and in Congress, it naturally
followed that each of them was fully as eager to participate in the
immense profits accruing from charters, franchises or special grants
obtained by others of their own class. They never questioned the means
by which these laws were put through. They did not care. The mere fact
that a franchise was put through by bribery was a trite, immaterial
circumstance. The sole, penetrating question was whether it were a
profitable project. If it were, no man of wealth hesitated in investing
his money in its stock and in sharing its revenue. It could not be
expected that he would feel moral objections, even the most attenuated,
for the chances were that while he might not have been a party to the
corrupt obtaining of this or that particular franchise, yet he was
involved in the grants of other special endowments. Moreover, money
making was not built on morality; its whole foundation and impetus lay
in the extraction of profits. Society, it is true, professed to move on
lofty moral planes, but this was a colossal pretension and nothing less.

THE INVERTED NATURE OF SOCIETY.

Society--and this is a truth which held equally strong of succeeding
decades--was incongruously inverted. In saying this, the fact should not
be ignored that the capitalist, as applied to the man who ran a factory
or other enterprise, was an indigenous factor in that period, even
although the money or inventions by which he was able to do this, were
often obtained by fraud. Every needed qualification must be made for the
time and the environment, and there should be neither haste in
indiscriminately condemning nor in judging by the standards or maturity
of later generations.

Yet, viewing society as a whole and measuring the results by the
standards and ideas then prevailing, it was undoubtedly true that those
who did the world's real services were the lowly, despoiled and much
discriminated-against mass of ma