misfortunes which had befallen Judge Rossmore and he understood now the reason for Shirley’s grave face on the dock and her little fib about summering on Long Island.  The news had been a shock to him, for, apart from the fact that the judge was Shirley’s father, he admired him immensely as a man.  Of his perfect innocence there could, of course, be no question:  these charges of bribery had simply been trumped up by his enemies to get him off the bench.  That was very evident.  The “interests” feared him and so had sacrificed him without pity, and as Jefferson walked along Central Park, past the rows of superb palaces which face its eastern wall, he wondered in which particular mansion had been hatched this wicked, iniquitous plot against a wholly blameless American citizen.  Here, he thought, were the citadels of the plutocrats, America’s aristocracy of money, the strongholds of her Coal, Railroad, Oil, Gas and Ice barons, the castles of her monarchs of Steel, Copper, and Finance.  Each of these million-dollar residences, he pondered, was filled from cellar to roof with costly furnishings, masterpieces of painting and sculpture, priceless art treasures of all kinds purchased in every corner of the globe with the gold filched from a Trust-ridden people.  For every stone in those marble halls a human being, other than the owner, had been sold into bondage, for each of these magnificent edifices, which the plutocrat put up in his pride only to occupy it two months in the year, ten thousand American men, women and children had starved and sorrowed.

Europe, thought Jefferson as he strode quickly along, pointed with envy to America’s unparalleled prosperity, spoke with bated breath of her great fortunes.  Rather should they say her gigantic robberies, her colossal frauds!  As a nation we were not proud of our multi-millionaires.  How many of them would bear the search-light of investigation?  Would his own father?  How many millions could one man make by honest methods?  America was enjoying unprecedented prosperity, not because of her millionaires, but in spite of them.  The United States owed its high rank in the family of nations to the country’s vast natural resources, its inexhaustible vitality, its great wheat fields, the industrial and mechanical genius of its people.  It was the plain American citizen who had made the greatness of America, not the millionaires who, forming a class by themselves of unscrupulous capitalists, had created an arrogant oligarchy which sought to rule the country by corrupting the legislature and the judiciary.  The plutocrats—­ these were the leeches, the sores in the body politic.  An organized band of robbers, they had succeeded in dominating legislation and in securing control of every branch of the nation’s industry, crushing mercilessly and illegally all competition.  They were the Money Power, and such a menace were they to the welfare of the people that, it had been estimated, twenty men in America had it in their power, by reason