Mr. MacCandlish paused for a brief space, and then once more that kindly voice flowed across the footlights. “It has always been my conviction that those who have lacked the opportunity to examine the operations of wealth are frequently led astray. In the first place, riches are invariably the direct result of great economic services undertaken for the good of mankind!”—and thus launched, Mr. MacCandlish began to deal not with the dead and dry of theories and panaceas, but with the living actualities of trade and production.
“Ain't it grand what the likes of him does for the likes of me!” thought Mr. Feeny in a pause, and then again that soft voice opened up fresh regions for him.
He saw that what Mr. MacCandlish called the law of supply and demand—which he seemed to hold in the very tenderest regard—regulated things. He saw, too, that millionaires were only far-sighted individuals who had mastered the fact that what the world tossed aside to-day it would urgently need to-morrow, and garnered this waste, exacting a small margin of profit for the service.
“It's great!” Mr. Feeny told himself in a spent whisper. “I go somewhere as far as I can get, and raise things—no matter what—and then one of these here capitalists comes along and says: 'Feeny, me boy, how are your crops? I've one end of a thousand miles of railroad track at your front gate for to haul 'em away with.' No wonder they're well paid... 'tis right they should be,—I begrudge 'em nothing.”
“And after all”—it was Mr. MacCandlish speaking—“let us see what actual advantages the millionaire has, what does his money buy him in excess of what another may have? A little better shelter perhaps, more costly clothes, and his three meals a day!”
“'Tis true,” thought Mr. Feeny. “They'd bust if they et oftener, the way they feed; and as for clothes, I've seen their lady friends with far less on than a workin' man's wife'd think decent.”
Mr. Feeny had entered that building a rather heedless person who got drunk at every port of call, and who knew the inside of every calaboose in every flea-bitten center of civilization along the Caribbean, but he was to quit it a groping intellectualist with a germ lodged in his brain that was to fructify.
Mr. Feeny boarded the Orinoco of the Gulf and Mexican Transportation Line a chastened spirit. His last hours ashore, and the last of his wages, had been spent in a second-hand book-shop where he had acquired three books that, under various titles, dealt with the burning question of why the other fellow happens to have it all; a condition that is much older than political economy, just as language is older than grammar. Now the Orinoco, newly scraped and painted as to staterooms and gilded saloons where the eye and foot of Mr. Feeny never penetrated, had been chartered for a mid-winter cruise. Mr. Feeny heard this directly from one of his mates, Tom Murphy, who had it from an oiler, who had it from the second assistant engineer.
“It's a party of magnates,” he explained. “We're to have close on to a billion dollars aboard,—live weight, you understand. MacCandlish, the big railroad man—you've heard of him in the papers, Feeny—is one of the bunch, and they've got a Protestant bishop along,—but I don't think much of the likes of him!” In theory, at least, Mr. Murphy was an ardent churchman.
“For what are they usin' this old hooker?” demanded Feeny.