“Well, John,” inquired the doctor, “what are you going to do about it all?”
“We will have him split down the back and broiled for luncheon,” replied the professor absently.
“Broil who?” queried the doctor, “Jay Gould?”
“Eh? No; the pickerel I mean, though I am not sure that similar treatment might not be accorded to Gould, with advantage to the country.”
“You ask,” continued the professor, “what shall be done about it all? The wealth owners themselves should be able to see that existing conditions must sooner or later find cessation either in relief or in revolution. Monopolies in transportation, intelligence, land, light, fuel, water, and food—all concealed in the impersonality of private corporations—now sit like vampires upon the body of American labor, and suck its life blood, and they have grown so bold and so rapacious that they even neglect to fan their victims to continued slumber.”
“Why, John, you seem to have an attack of anticorporation rabies. You talk like a sand-lot politician who is trying to sell out to a railroad company. What is the matter with you? What have these much berated entities done?” said the doctor.
“Done?” replied Professor Thornton. “What have they not done? They have torn the bandages from the eyes of American justice and fastened false weights upon her scales. They have turned our legislative halls into shambles where men are bought and honor is butchered. They have written the word ‘lie’ across the Declaration of our fathers. They have struck the genius of American liberty in her fair mouth, until, with face suffused with the blushes and bedewed with the hot tears of shame, she turns piteously to her children to hide if they cannot defend her.”
“John Thornton,” ejaculated the doctor, “your remarks would be admirable in substance and style for an address before some gathering of work shirkers, organized to procure lessened hours of labor and larger schooners of beer, but to me you are talking what our transatlantic cousins call ‘beastly rot.’ I deny that a majority, or even any considerable number, of the capitalists of this country are dishonest, or unpatriotic, or indifferent to the rights and needs of their fellow-men.”
“I have not said that they were, doctor,” replied the professor. “Indeed, if such were the case, we might cry in despair, ‘God save the commonwealth!’ for only Omniscience could work its salvation. What I claim is that it is full time for the conscientious millionaires who love their country and their kind, to seriously consider a situation the perils of which they are every day augmenting by their indifference.”
“What perils do you mean, professor? How, for instance, would anybody be hurt or periled if I were to become a millionaire?”