Here Robert was reminded abruptly of the half dozen letters—bills, circulars, and the like, as he surmised—which he had rammed into his coat pocket at the a toute heure restaurant. The coat in question was in his stateroom and he would look for the letters when he went below.
Half an hour later he found them. One of the first envelopes bore the heading: Simons and Hunt, Attorneys-at-Law, 150 Broadway. It had two enclosures. The first one he opened read:
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My Dear Nephew:
About a year ago you wrote to me suggesting that I do something handsome by you. In your own delicate words you asked me to subsidize your imagination, a quality you believed of sufficient value to your fellow men to be worth preserving. As a proof that you possessed this quality, you provided me with an outline of your career in all its ups and downs, chiefly downs. You were also good enough to favor me with copies of your several articles on social and industrial reform.
As I am in receipt of some ten thousand requests for money every year, it is obviously impossible for me to comply with them all. And I am bound to say that I saw no reason for complying with your request, the more so in that its tone of mockery and sly derision led me to doubt whether it was made in entire good faith. The claim of kinship which you advanced (somewhat belatedly I thought) had little weight with me. You know what family ties are amongst the Lloyds! I was but a youngster of fourteen when my father and my elder brother (your father) ripped up my gilded dreams of a future as an artist and hashed my romantic plans by a single practical act. They pitched me out of the house into the street. There I remained to live on my own wits, and this fate I have had little occasion to complain of.
But to return to your letter. It did not win me to your way of thinking. Nor, to be candid, did your articles on "the collapse of modern society." I will admit that your attacks on land speculators (like myself) were witty, if not wise. And when you sailed into the monopoly on land values, you wrote with astonishing authority; indeed the only flaw I could find in your otherwise perfect qualifications for solving the economic problem of land was the trifling fact that you had never owned a foot of it.
This might have passed. Not so your observations on the distribution of the country's wealth and other related iniquities. Here you repeated the usual flub-dub with the usual fine flourish of the man who imagines he has made a startling discovery. Thus, you solemnly pointed out that there are only two kinds of people on earth: those who prey and those who are preyed upon. You announced that you had never seen the profiteer forsaken, nor the preying man begging his bread. And you informed the world that the [Transcriber's note: some text appears to be missing from the source book] intensified every year, the sheep being now more securely muzzled and more efficiently fleeced than ever before.
Now, my dear nephew, there is nothing new in your "discovery." Since the days of Plato all prudent men have been of one opinion respecting the class war, but no prudent man has ever admitted it. Conscious of this, I was unmoved by your ringing call to the sheep that they had nothing to lose but their muzzles; and your desire to see them organize for the purpose of destroying the wolves by mass action, left me cold. A world of sheep—and nothing but sheep—would not be to my taste. For the wolves, whatever else we may say of them, at least vary the drab monotony here below. Besides, I suspect that your indignation in the matter of the muzzles is largely shandygaff. It is not necessary to muzzle sheep!
In fine, your credentials did not greatly impress me. Your writings, it is true, were clever, witty, imaginative.