Light-Fingered Gentry

by David Graham Phillips

Duncan began to "hedge." "I don't want you to have any hard feelings toward me," said he. "All the boys were hot for this thing, and I had to go in with them."

"You were displaced as general Western agent this morning," said Armstrong tranquilly. "I telegraphed your assistant to take charge. I also telephoned him a memorandum of what you owe the company, with instructions to bring suit unless you paid up in three days."

"It ain't fair to single me out this way," cried Duncan. "It's persecution."

"I haven't singled you out," said Armstrong. "I bounced the whole crowd of you at the same time, and in the same way. You charge me with extravagance. Well, you see, I've admitted the charge and have begun to retrench."

Duncan's fat, round face was purple and his brown eyes were glittering. "You think you've done us up," said he, with a nasty laugh. "But you're not as 'cute' as you imagine. We provided against just that move."

"I see that your committee of policy holders to receive proxies are dummies," replied Armstrong. "I know all about your arrangements."

"Then you know we're going to win."

Armstrong looked indifferent. "That remains to be seen," said he. "Good morning."

When Duncan had got himself out of the room, Armstrong laid the circular beside the one he himself had written and sent to each of the seven hundred thousand policy holders. His circular was a straight-forward statement of the facts—of how and why his policy of economy had stirred up all the plunderers of the company, great and small. It ended with a request that proxies be sent direct to him, by those who wished the new order to persist and did not wish a return to the old order with its long-standing and grave abuses. He compared the two circulars and laughed at himself. "Mine's the unvarnished truth," thought he. "But it doesn't sound as probable, as reasonable, as Duncan's lies. If the policy holders do stand by me, it'll be because most people are fools and hit it right by accident. Most of us are never so wrong as in our way of being right. The wise thing is always to assume that the crowd that's in is crooked."

If Armstrong had been a reformer, with the passion to reorganize the world on his own private plan, and in the event of the world's failure to recognize his commission as vice-regent of the Almighty, ready to denounce it as a hopeless case—if Armstrong had been a professional regenerator, those would have been trying days for him. The measures he took that were the most honest and the most honorable were the very measures that made the other side strong. He had weeded out a multitude of grafters and had shown an inflexible purpose to weed out the rest; and so he had organized and made powerful the conspiracy to restore graft. He had attacked the men—the big agents—who were using their influence with the policy holders to enable them to rob freely; and so he had stirred up those traitors still further to cozen their victims. He had cut down the enormous subsidies to the press, had cut off the graft of the great financiers who were the powers behind the great organs of public opinion; and so he had enlisted the press as an open and most helpful ally of the conspirators. The policy holders were told by agents—whom they knew personally and regarded as their representatives—that Armstrong was the "thieving tool of the Wall Street crowd"; the policy holders read in their newspapers that "on the whole the O.A.D. would probably benefit by a new management selected by the body of the policy holders themselves." It was ridiculous, it was tragic. Armstrong laughed, with a heavy and at times a bitter heart. "I don't blame the poor devils," he said. "How are they to know? I'm the damn fool, not they—I who, dealing with men all these years, have put myself in a position where I am appealing from the men who run the people to the people, who always have been run and always will be."