There you have it--the fundamental precept of the gospel of greed. "What must ye do to be rich? Extract every dollar." How the formula explains "Standard Oil," and how completely it reveals the Rockefeller attitude of mind! Greed crystallized into a practice, dignified into a principle, consecrated into a religion and become a fanaticism. But, mind you, not the dross, but the rule; not profit, but precedent. Money no object, but our laws must be kept. Shylock's god is "Standard Oil's." The ravenous lust for gold that possesses these men is not an appetite, but a fever. In them it is the craving of the tiger for blood. Gorged and glutted with riches, their millions piled into the hundreds, masters of the revenues of empires, still they are as the daughters of the horse-leech. Once in Ogreland there was a giant, larger and fiercer than any of his fellows, and it was the habit of this monster to compel the inhabitants of the territory which he ruled to render him every evening a tribute of human hearts. At sundown he would come out of his castle and seat himself in a great chair in front of the huge iron gate, and his vassals would lay at his feet the dripping sacks of hearts for which they had scoured the land. "How many have you brought me to-day, my merry men?" he would say as he weighed the sacks in his mighty fingers. "Are they large and juicy?" How they came or whence, he cared not at all; the screams of the unfortunates whose hearts were torn from their breasts he neither heard nor thought of; hearts he must have, and if people were killed, so much the worse for them. But the ogre _ate_ all the human hearts his vassals gathered for him; he lived on them and grew greater and lustier, for they were the food his great frame required for its sustenance, and he never had all he really wanted. "Standard Oil" in our life to-day plays the role of this mythological giant, forcing its tribute of dollars from the people, indifferent to the blood and tears in which they are soaked, oblivious of the cries of the victims from whom they have been dragged; but, unlike the giant, _"Standard Oil" does not need this tribute to sustain its life, nor to make richer its blood_. But to return to Mr. Rogers, who triumphantly proceeded with his plot: