home.  It was not my heart, and somehow, I looked at it as a part of the game and let it go at that.  To-day I know what it means to be put on the chopping-block of the ‘System’ butchers.  I know what it is to see my heart and the heart of one I love—­and yours, too, Jim—­systematically skewered to those of the hundreds and thousands of victims who have gone before.  Jim, we must be three millions losers, and the men who have our money have so many, many millions that they can’t live long enough even to thumb them over.  Men who will use our money on the gambling-table, at the race-tracks, squander it on stage harlots, or in turning their wives and daughters or their neighbours’ wives and daughters into worse than stage harlots.  Men, Jim, who are not fit, measured by any standard of decency, to walk the same earth as you and Judge Sands.  Men whose painted pets pollute the very air that such as Beulah Sands must breathe.  I’ve learned my lesson to-day.  I thought I knew the game of finance, but I’m suddenly awakened to a realisation of the dense ignorance I wallowed in.  Jim, but for the loading of the dice, I should now have been taking Beulah Sands to her father with the money that the hellish ‘System’ stole from him.  Later I should have taken her to the altar, and after, who knows but that I should have had the happiest home and family in all the world, and lived as her people and mine have lived for generations, honest, God-fearing, law-abiding, neighbour-loving men and women, and then died as men should die?  But now, Jim, I see a black, awful picture.  No, I’m not morbid, I’m going to make a heroic effort to put the picture out of sight; but I’m afraid, Jim, I’m afraid.”

He stopped as we pulled up on the sidewalk in front of Randolph & Randolph’s office.  “Here it is on the bulletin.  See what did the trick, Jim.  They held the Sugar meeting last night instead of waiting till to-morrow, and cut the dividend instead of increasing it.  The world won’t know it until to-morrow.  Then they will know it, then they will know it.  They will read it in the headlines of the papers—­a few suicides, a few defaulters, a few new convicts, an unclaimed corpse or two at the morgue; a few innocent girls, whose fathers’ fortunes have gone to swell Camemeyer’s and ‘Standard Oil’s’ already uncountable gold, turned into streetwalkers; a few new palaces on Fifth Avenue, and a few new libraries given to communities that formerly took pride in building them from their honestly earned savings.  A report or two of record-breaking diamond sales by Tiffany to the kings and czars of dollar royalty, then front-page news stories of clawing, mauling, and hair-pulling wrangles among the stage harlots for the possession of these diamonds.  They were not quite sure that the dividend cut alone would do the trick, and they were taking no chances, these mighty warriors of the ‘System,’ so their hireling Senate committee held a session last night and unanimously reported