Schilling gave me a genuine look of mingled pity and admiration. “I suppose you know what you're about,” said he, “but I think you're making a mistake.”
“Thanks, Ned,” said I—he had been my head clerk a few years before, and I had got him the chance with Roebuck which he had improved so well. “I'm going to have some fun. Can't live but once.”
“I know some people,” said he significantly, “who would go to any lengths to get an enemy out of the way.” He had lived close enough to Roebuck to peer into the black shadows of that satanic mind, and dimly to see the dread shapes that lurked there.
“I'm the safest man on Manhattan Island for the present,” said I.
“You remember Woodrow? I've always believed that he was murdered, and that the pistol they found beside him was a 'plant.'”
“You'd kill me yourself, if you got the orders, wouldn't you?” said I good-humoredly.
“Not personally,” replied he in the same spirit, yet serious, too, at bottom. “Inspector Bradlaugh was telling me, the other night, that there were easily a thousand men in the slums of the East Side who could be hired to kill a man for five hundred dollars.”
I suppose Schilling, as the directing spirit of a corporation that hid poison by the hogshead in low-priced foods of various kinds, was responsible for hundreds of deaths annually, and for misery of sickness beyond calculation among the poor of the tenements and cheap boarding-houses. Yet a better husband, father and friend never lived. He, personally, wouldn't have harmed a fly; but he was a wholesale poisoner for dividends.
Murder for dividends. Poison for dividends. Starve and freeze and maim for dividends. Drive parents to suicide, and sons and daughters to crime and prostitution—for dividends. Not fair competition, in which the stronger and better would survive, but cheating and swindling, lying and pilfering and bribing, so that the honest and the decent go down before the dishonest and the depraved. And the custom of doing these things so “respectable,” the applause for “success” so undiscriminating, and men so unthinking in the rush of business activity, that criticism is regarded as a mixture of envy and idealism. And it usually is, I must admit.
Schilling lingered. “I hope you won't blame me for lining up against you, Matt,” said he. “I don't want to, but I've got to.”