“Thank you!”
“A Napoleon in pétto, but a dire menace, all the same, to the peace of the world. Still, your wings are about to be clipped and that is reason enough for honest men to rejoice.”
Saul Hartz resented these words deeply, but his arrogance was too great to allow the fact to appear in his manner. His laugh had even a ring of good humor. Wygram, fully bent on taking the measure of the man, did not let that laugh escape him. He rather liked the fellow for being able to indulge it at such a moment. After all, this brummagem Colossus might be of larger mold than on the surface he seemed.
One thing was clear. They were well met, these two. Each sought to assay the other, and if possible, transmute any residuum of exact knowledge into power.
“You are out of sympathy with my aims and ambitions.” The mildness of Saul Hartz had quite an apologetic sound. “But don’t for that reason blind yourself willfully to the fact that the remedy we are up against is far worse than the disease.”
“I wonder!”
“You needn’t!” said the Colossus, sternly. “This Vehmgericht is trying to put back the clock five hundred years.”
“The U. P.,” said Wygram, “aims at even more than that. It would reduce the whole world to slavery.”
“A mere figure of speech, my friend!”
“We shall not agree. The U. P. is now an international ring of newspaper bosses which has corralled everything that relates to the printed word. Cables, labor, paper, ink, power of distribution—it has cornered them all. The time is at hand when the humblest sheet of provincial gossip will be subject to your veto here, and the veto of Breit in America.”