“No, Jim, I have work to do to-night, worn that won’t wait.  That Tariff Bill was buttoned up to-day, and it has just been announced that the Sugar directors have declared a big extra stock dividend.  Things have come out just about as I told you they would, and the stock is climbing to-day.  They say it will touch 200 to-morrow and ‘the Street’ is predicting 250 for it in ten days.  Barry Conant has been a steady buyer all day and the news bureaus announced that Camemeyer and the ‘Standard Oil’ are twenty millions winners.  They say the Washington gamblers, the Congressmen, Senators, and Cabinet members with their heelers and lobbyists have made a killing.  About every one seems to have fattened up, Jim, but you and me and Beulah Sands and the public.  The public gets the axe both ways as usual.  They have been shaken out of their stock, and they will be compelled to pay millions more each year for their sugar than they would if this law had not been made for their benefit.  Jim, there is no disguising the fact that the American people are as helpless in the hands of these thugs of the ‘System’ as though they lived in the realm of the Sultan, where a few cutthroat brigands are licensed to rob and oppress to their heart’s content.  Jim Randolph, you know this game of finance.  You know how it is worked and the men who work it.  Tell me if there is any consideration due Wall Street and its heart-and-soul butchers at the hands of honest men.”

“I don’t know what you mean, Bob.  What are you driving at?”

“Never mind what I am driving at.  I ask you whether, if an honest man knew how to beat Wall Street at its own game, he should hesitate to beat it—­hesitate because of anything connected with conscience or morals?  You saw what Barry Conant was able to do to us that day simply by standing on the floor of the Stock Exchange and outstaying me in opening and closing his mouth.  You saw he was able to sell Sugar to a point so low that I was obliged to let go of our 150,000 shares at eight to ten million dollars less than we could have got for them if we could have held them until to-day.  Because of this trick his clients, the ‘System,’ instead of us, make five to seven millions.”

“I don’t follow you, Bob.  I know that Barry Conant was able to do this because he had more money behind him than you.”

“You think so, do you, Jim?  That is the way it looks to you, but I tell you money had nothing to do with it.  Nothing had to do with it but the fiendish system of fraud and trickery upon which the whole stock-gambling structure is reared.  Nothing entered into the whole business but the trickery of stock-gambling as conducted to-day.  It was only a question, Jim, of a man’s opening and closing his mouth and spitting out words.  From the minute Barry Conant came into that crowd until he left and we were ruined, he showed no money, no anything that I did not show.  From the very nature of the business he could not.  He simply said ‘Sold’