Shirley relapsed into silence.  Her brain was in a whirl.  It was true then.  This merciless man of money, this ogre of monopolistic corporations, this human juggernaut had crushed her father merely because by his honesty he interfered with his shady business deals!  Ah, why had she spared him in her book?  She felt now that she had been too lenient, not bitter enough, not sufficiently pitiless.  Such a man was entitled to no mercy.  Yes, it was all clear enough now.  John Burkett Ryder, the head of “the System,” the plutocrat whose fabulous fortune gave him absolute control over the entire country, which invested him with a personal power greater than that of any king, this was the man who now dared attack the Judiciary, the corner stone of the Constitution, the one safeguard of the people’s liberty.  Where would it end?  How long would the nation tolerate being thus ruthlessly trodden under the unclean heels of an insolent oligarchy?  The capitalists, banded together for the sole purpose of pillage and loot, had already succeeded in enslaving the toiler.  The appalling degradation of the working classes, the sordidness and demoralizing squalor in which they passed their lives, the curse of drink, the provocation to crime, the shame of the sweat shops—­ all which evils in our social system she had seen as a Settlement worker, were directly traceable to Centralized Wealth.  The labor unions regulated wages and hours, but they were powerless to control the prices of the necessaries of life.  The Trusts could at pleasure create famine or plenty.  They usually willed to make it famine so they themselves might acquire more millions with which to pay for marble palaces, fast motor cars, ocean-going yachts and expensive establishments at Newport.  Food was ever dearer and of poorer quality, clothes cost more, rents and taxes were higher.  She thought of the horrors in the packing houses at Chicago recently made the subject of a sensational government report—­ putrid, pestiferous meats put up for human food amid conditions of unspeakable foulness, freely exposed to deadly germs from the expectorations of work people suffering from tuberculosis, in unsanitary rotten buildings soaked through with blood and every conceivable form of filth and decay, the beef barons careless and indifferent to the dictates of common decency so long as they could make more money.  And while our public gasped in disgust at the sickening revelations of the Beef scandal and foreign countries quickly cancelled their contracts for American prepared meats, the millionaire packer, insolent in the possession of wealth stolen from a poisoned public, impudently appeared in public in his fashionable touring car, with head erect and self-satisfied, wholly indifferent to his shame.