“Is that why you came here?” asked he whose only claim to fame was that an ass had spoken to him.
“Baalam’s itchy palm spoiled him for a prophet,” observed Tweed, addressing the chairman, and ignoring that individual. “No, gentlemen, it wasn’t one dollar that brought me here. It was $10,000,000 or $100,000,000; I forget which.”
“A cypher more or less makes no difference,” put in Carlyle, cynically. He evidently thought this a side-splitting English joke, for he laughed at his own wit.
“That depends whether there is a point back of it,” asserted Dr. Johnson.
“Truly these be tainted times, if we can place any dependence in the New York correspondence of the Cimmerian Chatterbox,” volunteered Tweed. “Poor Diagones has had to give up his quest for an honest man: not being in the trust, he cannot buy any oil for his lantern. But even a searchlight wouldn’t help him in these days. An honest man never gets within the rays of the calcium; he is too busy picking the pockets of the people.”
“Oil and money will come uppermost at last in the caldron of watered stocks underneath which are the fires of Hell, for both are Standard.”
“I don’t see how tainted money can be made from refined oil.” It was Solomon the wise who spoke.
“Tainted money, like crude oil, may be refined,” asserted Tweed. “Yet even crude oil is not to be despised, for it accrues interest and some of the taint can be carbolized by sending bad rum to the heathen. It matters not what denomination tainted money is in, although the Baptists ought to be able to wash some of the taint away. In to-day’s issue of the Stygian Siftings, I read that a certain sect who won’t trust any other denomination to read their Bible for them, say that the pilfered pelf of frenzied financiers is all right if it be used for good purposes. It isn’t even necessary to keep the dirty dough in a separate flour barrel from the certified wheat; they are willing to convert tares and all into breakfast food. It resolves itself into a case of homeopathic treatment—the use of tainted money to remove a greater taint.”
“Bribery, which in evening dress is called graft, has become such a popular pastime that the refusal of a man to touch money offered him leads one to the conclusion that it is not tainted but merely counterfeit,” said Shylock, as he tried to hide some degraded ducats in his blouse. “They wouldn’t let me shed one drop of blood, yet to-day the American capitalist gets his pound of flesh by bleeding the people.”
“It’s a wonder Atlas wasn’t exposed for holding up the earth,” mused Anon. “Since the days of the gods, many a man has had his shoulder put out of joint trying to do the same stunt, but the weight of the world is still cause for worry.”