“So deep-rooted in the universe is graft,” asserted Tweed, “that the chairman of an investigating committee, in making his report, went to the Jersey shore and looking out to sea, wrote: ‘I can see no graft.’ Even then he forgot the ship-building trust and also overlooked the unimportant fact that his very words were grafted from Lord Nelson.”
“Who was the first grafter?”
“Adam would have been had he been tempted with a plum instead of with an apple.”
“Graft,” explained Noah, surnamed Webster, “is a botanical term for ‘splitting straws’ in the garden politic. Its principal fruits are plums, leafing out in ‘long green.’ A grafter is a captain of industry who has been found out.”
“All men bow to the despotism of the dollar,” said a well-known anarchist with an unforgivable name. “It is no longer the divine right of kingship, but the divine right of dollarship, to rule the earth. The rulers of old had their armies and forced obedience; the rulers of to-day have their money bags and buy it.”
“The dollar,” declared Alexander Hamilton, “is the corner-stone of our egotistic civilization, and the dollar is terribly hard. Its hardness may make it better as a corner-stone but does not especially fit it for use as a pillow for tired humanity.”
“Growing socialistic, eh? My dear Alexander, you have been exclusive owner of six feet of land long enough to be cured of that fanciful fad.”
“Fads,” interposed Worcester, noting that Webster was ready with a definition and anxious to forestall him, “is a diversion of the wealthy and the only game on which Parker Brothers have no copyright. It is played similar to ‘Pit’ and ‘Bluff,’ although it is not confined to Wall Street.”
“Fancies,” declaimed Johnson, “is a vivid imagination diluted with printers’ ink for the purpose of converting the skeleton in the family flat into $1,500 cash. Usually the man who has ancestors doesn’t court investigation.”
“Investigation,” defined Roget, “is a popular kind of bookkeeping begun after the race is lost and the money is spent; a locking of the safe deposit doors after the deposits are safe in the cashier’s pocket. As the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children, Adam, being fatherless, is the only man in Hades whom the Stygian Insurance Company would guarantee immune from the epidemic of investigation which has been transplanted from the upper to the lower world. But even Adam suffered exposure before he plucked the ‘long green’ from the fig tree.”