"I suppose you have a reason for it." "I have a reason? Of course I have," he retorted. "So has every other decent man in the business."
"It depends on what you call decent. Every misfit claims to be more decent than the fellow who gets the business."
He grew pale. It almost looked as though we were coming to blows. After a pause he said, with an effect of holding himself in leash: "Business! Do you call that business? I call it peanuts."
"Well, the peanuts are rapidly growing in size while the oranges and the apples are shrinking and rotting. The fittest survives." ("A lot he knows about the theory of the survival of the fittest!" I jeered in my heart. "He hasn't even heard the name of Herbert Spencer.") "Peanuts are peanuts, that's all there's to it," he returned
"Then why are you excited? How can we hurt you if we are only peanuts?"
He made no answer
"We don't steal the trade we're getting, do we? If the American people prefer to buy our product they probably like it."
"Oh, chuck your big words, Levinsky. You fellows are killing the trade, and you know it."
He laughed, but what I said was true. The old cloak-manufacturers, the German Jews, were merely merchant. Our people, on the other hand, were mostly tailors or cloak operators who had learned the mechanical part of the industry, and they were introducing a thousand innovations into it, perfecting, revolutionizing it. We brought to our work a knowledge, a taste, and an ardor which the men of the old firms did not possess. And we were shedding our uncouthness, too. In proportion as we grew we adapted American business ways
Speaking in a semi-amicable vein, Loeb went on citing cases of what he termed cutthroat competition on our part, till he worked himself into a passion and became abusive again. The drift of his harangue was that "smashing" prices was something distasteful to the American spirit, that we were only foreigners, products of an inferior civilization, and that we ought to know our place.