“Service!” Eldon Parr had seized upon the word as it passed and held it.  “What do you think my life has been?  I suppose,” he said, with a touch of intense bitterness, “that you, too, who six months ago seemed as reasonable a man as I ever met, have joined in the chorus of denunciators.  It has become the fashion to-day, thanks to your socialists, reformers, and agitators, to decry a man because he is rich, to take it for granted that he is a thief and a scoundrel, that he has no sense of responsibility for his country and his fellow-men.  The glory, the true democracy of this nation, lies in its equal opportunity for all.  They take no account of that, of the fact that each has had the same chance as his fellows.  No, but they cry out that the man who, by the sweat of his brow, has earned wealth ought to divide it up with the lazy and the self-indulgent and the shiftless.

“Take my case, for instance,—­it is typical of thousands.  I came to this city as a boy in my teens, with eight dollars in my pocket which I had earned on a farm.  I swept the floor, cleaned the steps, moved boxes and ran errands in Gabriel Parker’s store on Third Street.  I was industrious, sober, willing to do anything.  I fought, I tell you every inch of my way.  As soon as I saved a little money I learned to use every ounce of brain I possessed to hold on to it.  I trusted a man once, and I had to begin all over again.  And I discovered, once for all, if a man doesn’t look out for himself, no one will.

“I don’t pretend that I am any better than any one else, I have had to take life as I found it, and make the best of it.  I conformed to the rules of the game; I soon had sense enough knocked into me to understand that the conditions were not of my making.  But I’ll say this for myself,” Eldon Parr leaned forward over the blotter, “I had standards, and I stuck by them.  I wanted to be a decent citizen, to bring up my children in the right way.  I didn’t squander my money, when I got it, on wine and women, I respected other men’s wives, I supported the Church and the institutions of the city.  I too even I had my ambitions, my ideals —­and they were not entirely worldly ones.  You would probably accuse me of wishing to acquire only the position of power which I hold.  If you had accepted my invitation to go aboard the yacht this summer, it was my intention to unfold to you a scheme of charities which has long been forming in my mind, and which I think would be of no small benefit to the city where I have made my fortune.  I merely mention this to prove to you that I am not unmindful, in spite of the circumstances of my own life, of the unfortunates whose mental equipment is not equal to my own.”