“Well,” vouchsafed Caleb, grudgingly, “that’s an answer anyhow, and it comes nearer being sense than anything you’ve said so far. But you’re wrong for all that. You talk about honesty. What’s honesty? The pious Pilgrim Fathers came here and swindled old Lo, the poor Indian, out of his country in a blamed sight more raw fashion than I’ve ever bamboozled the people of the Mountain State. And the Mountain Staters were willing, while the Indian wasn’t. Yet the old settlers are called ‘nation builders’ and ‘martyrs,’ and a lot of other hot-air titles, and they get statues put up to their memories. How about the Uncle Sam’s buying a whole nation of Filipinos and coolly telling ’em: ‘_I’m_ bossing your islands now. Listen to me while I soften your rebellious hearts with the blessed gospel of the gatling gun.’ Yet Uncle Sam’s all right. So’s John Bull, who done the same trick, only worse, in India and Egypt. No one’s going to call America or England or the Pilgrim Fathers dishonest and crooks, is there? Then why do you call Caleb Conover dishonest for doing the same thing, only a lot more squarely and mercifully? The crook of to-day is the hero of to-morrow. And I’m no crook at that. Why, Son, a hundred years from now there’s liable to be a statue stuck up somewhere of ‘Caleb Conover, Railroader, Champion of the People.’ Honesty, eh? What _you_ call ‘honesty’ is just a sort of weak-kneed virtue meaning lack of chance to be something else. ‘Honester than me’ means ‘less chance than me.’ The honestest community on earth, according to you reformers’ way of thinking, is in the State Penitentiary. For not a crime of any sort’s committed there from one year’s end to the other.” Conover chuckled softly to himself, then continued: