square away and keep sparring, for if I lost my temper and exploded, it meant that I should be ground up or disappear in the hopper, and then, good-by to independence. It was the first time I had ever sat in a finish game with the master of "Standard Oil," and I trembled at the possible outcome. Yet this duel—for it was as clearly a fight for life on my side as though we both were armed with deadly weapons—was but one of a thousand similar encounters the Rogerses and Rockefellers had had with other adversaries as fearless and as honest as I, and out of these heart-breaking and soul-crushing sit-downs they had always emerged survivors, while behind the "Standard Oil" juggernaut, defeated and submissive, trudged the men who had dared oppose them. Should the fate of these others be also mine? Across my mind flitted "not while my brain retains its fly-wheels and my hands their power"; and I found myself wondering if there were not some stage at which a man cornered by arbitrary conditions and legal observances was justified in bursting all such trammels and meeting artifice with physical violence. Murder is a crime against society and against nature, and we must all observe the canons of God and the regulations of the law; but at least a dozen times in my wrestles with the exasperating, grinding, hell-generating machine, it was only my inborn reverence for God's law and man's that prevented me from—well, shall I say, strangling the fox?
All this, however, was between me and my mind. I showed not a vestige of it on the surface, but went on with much earnestness:
"Mr. Rogers, I think I understand the situation perfectly, but let us see if I do. We have reached a point where we are out in the open, and the whole world is in position to pass judgment on us and our venture. There must be between us unanimity of purpose, for the time is past when I can say one thing, you another, and Stillman and his bank confuse all concerned by agreeing with one story and denying the second. It is essential that we all pull together, yet conditions are such—and no one's to blame for them, for they have so developed—that we cannot