part of your present income.  It is true that there is your business.  But your business would be naught without you.  You are your business.  Remove yourself from it, and the residue is negligible.  Your son, left alone with it, would wreck it in a year through simple ignorance and clumsiness; for you have kept him in his inexperience like a maiden in her maidenhood.  You say that you desired to spare him.  Nothing of the kind.  You were merely jealous, of your authority, and your indispensability.  You desired fervently that all and everybody should depend on yourself....

“Conceive that three years have passed and that you are in fact dead.  You are buried; you are lying away over there in the cold dark.  The funeral is done.  The friends are gone.  But your family is just as alive as ever.  Disaster has not killed it, nor even diminished its vitality.  It wants just as much to eat and drink as it did before sorrow passed over it.  Look through the sod.  Do you see that child there playing with a razor?  It is your eldest son at grips with your business.  Do you see that other youngster striving against a wolf with a lead pencil for weapon?  It is your second son.  Well, they are males, these two, and must manfully expect what they get.  But do you see these four creatures with their hands cut off, thrust out into the infested desert?  They are your wife and your daughters.  You cut their hands off.  You did it so kindly and persuasively.  And that chiefly is why you are a scoundrel. ...

“You educated all these women in a false and abominable doctrine.  You made them believe, and you forced them to act up to the belief, that money was a magic thing, and that they had a magic power over it.  All they had to do was to press a certain button, or to employ a certain pretty tone, and money would flow forth like water from the rock of Moses.  And so far as they were concerned money actually did behave in this convenient fashion.

“But all the time you were deceiving them by a conjuring-trick, just as priests of strange cults deceive their votaries....  And further, you taught them that money had but one use—­to be spent.  You may—­though by a fluke—­have left a quantity of money to your widow, but her sole skill is to spend it.  She has heard that there is such a thing as investing money.  She tries to invest it.  But, bless you, you never said a word to her about that, and the money vanishes now as magically as it once magically appeared in her lap.

“Yes, you compelled all these four women to live so that money and luxury and servants and idleness were absolutely essential to them if their existence was to be tolerable.  And what is worse, you compelled them to live so that, deprived of magic money, they were incapable of existing at all, tolerably or intolerably.  Either they must expire in misery—­after their splendid career with you!—­or they must earn existence by smiles and acquiescences and caresses. (For you cut their hands off.) They must beg for their food and raiment.  There are different ways of begging.