Armstrong slowly rose. "Any further business?" he asked curtly.
"Sit down, Horace. Don't get touchy. Damn it, I want your advice."
"I haven't any to offer."
"What'd you do if you were in my place?"
This was as weak as it sounded. In human societies concentrations of power are always accidental, in the sense that they do not result from deliberation; thus, the men who happen to be in a position to seize and wield the power are often ill-equipped to use it intelligently. Fosdick had but one of the two qualities necessary to greatness—he could attack. But he could not defend. So long as his career was dependent for success upon aggression, he went steadily ahead. It is not so difficult as some would have us believe to seize the belongings of people who do not know their own rights and possessions, and live in the habitual careless, unthinking human fashion. But now that his accumulations were for the first time attracting the attention of robbers as rich and as unscrupulous as himself, he was in a parlous state. And, without admitting it to himself, he was prey to uneasiness verging on terror. Our modern great thieves are true to the characteristics of the thief class—they have courage only when all the odds are in their favor; let them but doubt their absolute security, and they lose their insolent courage and fall to quaking and to seeing visions of poverty and prison.
"What would you do?" Fosdick repeated.
"What do your lawyers say?"
Fosdick sneered. "What do they always say? They echo me. I have to tell them what to do—and, by God, I often have to show 'em how to do it." The fact was that Fosdick, like almost all the admired "captains of industry," was a mere helpless appetite with only the courage of an insane and wholly unscrupulous hunger; but for the lawyers, he would not have been able to gratify it. In modern industrialism the lawyer is the honeybird that leads the strong but stupid bear to the forest hive—and the honeybird gets as a reward only what the bear permits. "Give me your best judgment, Horace," pursued Fosdick.
"In your place, I'd fight," said Armstrong.
"How?"