"I have here," said Armstrong, "a complete account of my stewardship."
De Brett drew a cautious but profound breath of relief.
"It shows who have been dismissed, why they were dismissed, each man accounted for in detail; what extravagances I found, how I have cut them off; the contrast of the published and the actual conditions of the company when I became its president, the present condition—which I may say is flourishing, with the expenses vastly cut down and the profits for the policy holders vastly increased. As soon as your committee shall have vindicated the management, the O.A.D. will start upon a new era of prosperity and will soon distance, if not completely put out of business, its rivals, loaded down, as they are, with grafters."
Armstrong took up the bundle of typewriting and handed it to Reed. "Before you give that document to the press," he went on, "I want to make one suggestion. The men who have been feeding on the O.A.D. are, of course, personally responsible—but only in a sense. They are, rather, the product of a system. No law, no safeguards will ever be devised for protecting a man in the possession of anything which he himself neglects and leaves open as a temptation to the appetites of the less scrupulous of his fellow men. These ravagers of your property, of our property, are like a swarm of locusts. They came; they found the fields green and unprotected; they ate. They have passed on. They are simply one of a myriad of similar swarms. If we leave our property unguarded again, they will return. If we guard it, they will never bother us again. The question is whether we—you—would or would not do well to publish the names and the records of these men. Will it do any good beyond supplying the newspapers with sensations for a few days? Will the good be overbalanced by the harm, by the—if I may say so—the injustice? For is it not unjust to single out these few hundreds of men, themselves the victims of a system, many of them the unconscious victims—to single them out, when, all over the land, wherever there is a great unguarded property, their like and worse go unscathed, and will be free to swell the chorus of more or less hypocritical denunciations of them?"
"We shall let no guilty man escape," said Roberts, eying Armstrong sternly, "not even you, Mr. Armstrong, if we find you guilty."
"If there is any member of the committee who can, after searching his own life, find no time when he has directly or indirectly grafted or aided and abetted graft or profits by grafting—or spared relatives or friends when he caught them in the devious but always more or less respectable ways of the grafter—if there is such a one, then—" Armstrong smiled—"I withdraw my suggestion."
"We must recover what has been stolen! We must send the thieves to the penitentiary!" exclaimed Mulholland.
"But you can do neither," said Armstrong.
"And why not?" demanded Reed.
"Because they have too many powerful friends. They own the departments of justice here and at Washington. We should only waste the money of the O.A.D., send good money after bad. As you will see in my statement there, I have recovered several millions. That is all we shall ever get back. However, I shall say no more. I am ready to answer any questions. My staff is ready. The books are all at your disposal."