“I don’t see,” said my wife, “any mention in this account of the thousands who have been reduced to poverty by this operation.”

“No,” said Morgan; “that is not interesting.”

“But it would be very interesting to me,” Mrs. Fletcher remarked.  “Is there any protection, Mr. Morgan, for people who have invested their little property?”

“Yes; the law.”

“But suppose your money is all invested, say in a railway, and something goes wrong, where are you to get the money to pay for the law that will give you restitution?  Is there anything in the State, or public opinion, or anywhere, that will protect your interests against clever swindling?”

“Not that I know of,” Morgan admitted.  “You take your chance when you let your money go out of your stocking.  You see there are so many people who want it.  You can put it in the ground.”

“But if I own the ground I put it in, the voters who have no ground will tax it till there is nothing left for me.”

“That is equality.”

“But it isn’t equality, for somebody gets very rich in railways or lands, while we lose our little all.  Don’t you think there ought to be a public official whose duty it is to enforce the law gratis which I cannot afford to enforce when I am wronged?”

“The difficulty is to discover whether you are wronged or only unfortunate.  It needs a lawyer to find that out.  And very likely if you are wronged, the wrongdoer has so cleverly gone round the law that it needs legislation to set you straight, and that needs a lobbyist, whom the lawyer must hire, or he must turn lobbyist himself.  Now, a lawyer costs money, and a lobbyist is one of the most expensive of modern luxuries; but when you have a lawyer and lobbyist in one, you will find it economical to let him take your claim and all that can be made out of it, and not bother you any more about it.  But there is no doubt about the law, as I said.  You can get just as much law as you can pay for.  It is like any other commodity.”

“You mean to say,” I asked, “that the lawyer takes what the operator leaves?”

“Not exactly.  There is a great deal of unreasonable prejudice against lawyers.  They must live.  There is no nobler occupation than the application of the principle of justice in human affairs.  The trouble is that public opinion sustains the operator in his smartness, and estimates the lawyer according to his adroitness.  If we only evoked the aid of a lawyer in a just cause, the lawyers would have less to do.

“Usually and naturally the best talent goes with the biggest fees.”

“It seems to me,” said my wife, musing along, in her way, on parallel lines, “that there ought to be a limit to the amount of property one man can get into his absolute possession, to say nothing of the methods by which he gets it.”

“That never yet could be set,” Morgan replied.  “It is impossible for any number of men to agree on it.  I don’t see any line between absolute freedom of acquisition, trusting to circumstances, misfortune, and death to knock things to pieces, and absolute slavery, which is communism.”