But the tendency of the times is toward a fiercer battle in the struggle for existence, and weaker laws to keep the rapacious in check. Of the ever smaller surplus that the world’s work wins, a larger share is every year being demanded by the laborer, and aggregated capital, organized monopoly, growing hungrier as it has to take less, thirsts each year more greedily for all that is left. And the middle class, which has ruled the world so long, is being ground to pieces by these warring Titans. Tamms perceived this, not so dithyrambically, but more practically, and he profited by it. No one could turn in and out of corporations more cleverly than he; or turn them more adroitly to private ends, or drop out of them more apropos. Such an ingenious contrivance for clever men are these; more ingenious than the law which governs them. Indeed, the law has now dropped far behind, standing where it stood in the Middle Ages, when corporations were few and simple, and it stares agape at the Frankensteins of its own creation. But these same soulless monsters afford to their masters unlimited power, without interest or responsibility; and Tamms revelled in them. And Tamms was a self-made man, and a smart one; and the public deified him for both attributes, as is its wont; and his church would have canonized him, had his business needed a saintship instead of a seat in the Stock Exchange. Arthur’s head grew dizzy at the corporations, and syndicates, and pools and other unnamed enterprises that Tamms’s busy life was wound up in. Head and chief was, of course, the great Allegheny Central Railroad; this was the chief gold-mine that they worked; for in it Tamms could make his own market and buy and sell at his own price. But there were many others. And of these, the stock of the Silas Starbuck Oil Company had grown lately prominent. The Stock Exchange was no longer a strange sight to Arthur; he had grown familiar with it, with its moods, its dialect, its very battle-cries and interjections. And here he had seen the Allegheny Central bought and sold, and bought again; and of late he had been sent to out-of-the-way holes and corners, auctions, and even to the up-town houses of retired merchants (Mrs. Gower’s among the number, only Mrs. Gower would not sell) in search of the share certificates of the Starbuck Oil.