“Hold on, I’m not through with you.  It’s only last year that the labour ticket of Colorado elected a governor.  He was never seated.  You know why.  You know how your brother philanthropists and capitalists of Colorado worked it.  It was a case of getting labour down and gouging it.  You kept the president of the South-western Amalgamated Association of Miners in jail for three years on trumped-up murder charges, and with him out of the way you broke up the association.  That was gouging labour, you’ll admit.  The third time the graduated income tax was declared unconstitutional was a gouge.  So was the eight-hour Bill you killed in the last Congress.

“And of all unmitigated immoral gouges, your destruction of the closed-shop principle was the limit.  You know how it was done.  You bought out Farburg, the last president of the old American Federation of Labour.  He was your creature—­or the creature of all the trusts and employers’ associations, which is the same thing.  You precipitated the big closed-shop strike.  Farburg betrayed that strike.  You won, and the old American Federation of Labour crumbled to pieces.  You follows destroyed it, and by so doing undid yourselves; for right on top of it began the organization of the I.L.W.—­the biggest and solidest organization of labour the United States has ever seen, and you are responsible for its existence and for the present general strike.  You smashed all the old federations and drove labour into the I.L.W., and the I.L.W. called the general strike—­still fighting for the closed shop.  And then you have the effrontery to stand here face to face and tell me that you never got labour down and gouged it.  Bah!”

This time there were no denials.  Garfield broke out in self-defence—­

“We’ve done nothing we were not compelled to do, if we were to win.”

“I’m not saying anything about that,” Bertie answered.  “What I am complaining about is your squealing now that you’re getting a taste of your own medicine.  How many strikes have you won by starving labour into submission?  Well, labour’s worked out a scheme whereby to starve you into submission.  It wants the closed shop, and, if it can get it by starving you, why, starve you shall.”

“I notice that you have profited in the past by those very labour gouges you mention,” insinuated Brentwood, one of the wiliest and most astute of our corporation lawyers.  “The receiver is as bad as the thief,” he sneered.  “You had no hand in the gouging, but you took your whack out of the gouge.”

“That is quite beside the question, Brentwood,” Bertie drawled.  “You’re as bad as Hanover, intruding the moral element.  I haven’t said that anything is right or wrong.  It’s all a rotten game, I know; and my sole kick is that you fellows are squealing now that you’re down and labour’s taking a gouge out of you.  Of course I’ve taken the profits from the gouging and, thanks to you, gentlemen, without having personally to do the dirty work.  You did that for me—­oh, believe me, not because I am more virtuous than you, but because my good father and his various brothers left me a lot of money with which to pay for the dirty work.”