Mr. Garry went on to explain that these abuses had necessitated the organisation of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. The society made it its duty to interfere only in cases in which the maltreatment could be actually proved. Such a one was the case in hand. "For several years," he said, "New York has been overrun by a peculiar sort of freebooters." He laid emphasis on the word freebooters. "There is a connection between this phenomenon and the increasing atheism in our country, the increasing irreligion, and the craving for pleasure and dissipation, which always goes hand in hand with irreligion. This growing immorality, this festering corruption in our midst is the wind that fills the sails of those pirates. The disease is not of American origin. It has come to us from the dens of vice in the large European cities, London, Paris, Berlin, Vienna. It is an epidemic the spread of which must be arrested, and to that end we must put a curb upon the freebooters who spread the infection and continue to bring it in from abroad." Lilienfeld, red as a lobster with rage, fidgeted on his seat. "In the opinion of these men, circumventers and despisers of the laws of the land, the United States is here merely for their purposes, to allow them to sow disease and rake in the dollars. They are not good American citizens, these peculiar Europeans. They are not citizens at all." Mr. Garry pronounced every word with hard correctness. "That is why it is a matter of perfect indifference to them if our religion, our customs, our morals are destroyed. They are unscrupulous birds of prey, and once they have filled their crops, they return with their spoil to their haunts in Europe. The time has come when Americans should take thought and repel the invasion of such parasites." While the old jingo made these cutting remarks, speaking with an unshaken front, proudly, hitting straight out from the shoulder, Frederick unwearyingly watched every movement of his hard, noble old face. The anthropologist and the newly awakened sculptor in him were equally stirred. When comparing the "freebooters" to birds of prey, Garry himself had resembled a bird of prey. His expression was like an eagle's. He stood with his back to the windows, but with his head turned slightly to one side, and when he spoke of the birds filling their crops, it seemed to Frederick that his light-blue eyes paled to a whitish sheen. Garry now came down to the subject of Ingigerd.