all the while, ’If you don’t advance me the money I ask for—­the three hundred thousand dollars I now demand—­you will be a convict, your children will be thrown in the street, you and your wife and your family will be in poverty again, and there will be no one to turn a hand for you.’  That is what Mr. Stener says Mr. Cowperwood said to him.  I, for my part, haven’t a doubt in the world that he did.  Mr. Steger, in his very guarded references to his client, describes him as a nice, kind, gentlemanly agent, a broker merely on whom was practically forced the use of five hundred thousand dollars at two and a half per cent. when money was bringing from ten to fifteen per cent. in Third Street on call loans, and even more.  But I for one don’t choose to believe it.  The thing that strikes me as strange in all of this is that if he was so nice and kind and gentle and remote—­a mere hired and therefore subservient agent—­how is it that he could have gone to Mr. Stener’s office two or three days before the matter of this sixty-thousand-dollar check came up and say to him, as Mr. Stener testifies under oath that he did say to him, ’If you don’t give me three hundred thousand dollars’ worth more of the city’s money at once, to-day, I will fail, and you will be a convict.  You will go to the penitentiary.’?  That’s what he said to him.  ’I will fail and you will be a convict.  They can’t touch me, but they will arrest you.  I am an agent merely.’  Does that sound like a nice, mild, innocent, well-mannered agent, a hired broker, or doesn’t it sound like a hard, defiant, contemptuous master—­a man in control and ready to rule and win by fair means or foul?

“Gentlemen, I hold no brief for George W. Stener.  In my judgment he is as guilty as his smug co-partner in crime—­if not more so—­this oily financier who came smiling and in sheep’s clothing, pointing out subtle ways by which the city’s money could be made profitable for both; but when I hear Mr. Cowperwood described as I have just heard him described, as a nice, mild, innocent agent, my gorge rises.  Why, gentlemen, if you want to get a right point of view on this whole proposition you will have to go back about ten or twelve years and see Mr. George W. Stener as he was then, a rather poverty-stricken beginner in politics, and before this very subtle and capable broker and agent came along and pointed out ways and means by which the city’s money could be made profitable; George W. Stener wasn’t very much of a personage then, and neither was Frank A. Cowperwood when he found Stener newly elected to the office of city treasurer.  Can’t you see him arriving at that time nice and fresh and young and well dressed, as shrewd as a fox, and saying:  ’Come to me.  Let me handle city loan.  Loan me the city’s money at two per cent. or less.’  Can’t you hear him suggesting this?  Can’t you see him?