"Yes," said he, "a 'money of account.' Never coined. One-tenth of a cent. One-half a centime! Have you heard of Senator Aldrich's currency bill, S. F. 41144? It's got a clause in it providing for the coinage of the mill. And there's where I come in. I'm an unelected legislator—third house, you know. Let the constructive statesman bring in their little bills. I'm satisfied to put 'em through! S. F. 41144 is going to be put through, and old J. D.'ll sell his Bottle, Imp and all. Price, one mill. When this grip epidemic started in, he got a touch of it, and I'll state that a sick man feels a little nervous with that Imp in stock. So they wired for me. It's going to be a fight all right!"
"Why, who will oppose the bill?" said I. "No one will know its object."
"Lots of folks will oppose it," said he. "Every association of clergymen in the country is liable to turn up fighting it tooth and nail. There are too many small coins now for the interests of the people who depend on contribution boxes. The Sunday-schools will all be against it. And the street-car companies won't want the cent subdivided. Then it'll be hard to convince Joe Cannon; he's always looking for a nigger in the fence, and there is one here, you understand. But the mill's going to be coined, all the same!"
"But," said I, "who will buy the diabolical thing for a mill? If Keawe and his wife had such trouble selling it for a centime, it will be impossible to dispose of it for a mill, absolutely impossible! It's the irreducible minimum!"
"I take it, Sir," said he, with a recurrence of the capital S, "that you are not engaged in what Senator Lodge in our conference last night called 'hot finance'?"
"No," I admitted, for in spite of the orthoëpic error, I understood him. "No, I am not—exactly."
"I inferred as much from your remark," said he. "When there's anything to be done, too large for individual power, or dangerous in its nature, or, let us say, repugnant to some back-number criminal law, or, as in this case, dangerous to the individual's soul's salvation, what do you do? Why you organize a corporation, if you know your business, and turn the whole thing over to it—and there you are. The Federal Imp Company will take over the Bottle Imp at the price of one mill. Mr. R. won't own it any more. His stock will be non-assessable, and all paid up by the transfer of the Imp, and there can't be any liability on it. He can retain control of it if he wants to—and you notice he generally wants to, and can laugh in the Imp's face. We've got all kinds of legal opinions on that. And whoever controls that company will rule the world. That Imp is the greatest corporate asset that ever existed. All that's needed is for the president of the corporation to wish for anything, or the board of directors to pass a resolution, and the thing asked for comes a-running. The railways, steamships, banks, factories, lands—everything worth having—are just as good as taken over.
"Why it's the Universal Merger, the Trust of Trusts! The stock-holders of the Federal Imp Company will be the ruling class of the world, a perpetual aristocracy; and the man with fifty-one per cent. of the stock, or proxies for it, will be Emperor, Czar, Kaiser, Everything!"
"But this is stupendous!" I exclaimed: for, being a student of political economy—"economics," they call it now—I at once perceived the significance of his statements. "This is terrible! It is revolution! It is the end of democracy! Can't it be stopped?"
"M'h'm," said he quietly, evidently assenting to my rather excited statement; and then in reply to my question, he added with another chuckle, "Stop nothing! Federal injunction won't do it: presidential veto won't do it: nor calling out the militia: nor anything else. For the Imp controls the courts, the president, and the army; and J. D. R. runs the Imp—fifty-one per cent. of the Imp stock! The socialists will go out campaigning in favor of the government's taking over the Federal Imp Company, but the Imp controls the government—and the socialists, too, when you come down to brass nails. Oh, it's a cinch, a timelock, leadpipe cinch! The stuff's off with everybody else, if we can get this bill through!"