The nearest enemy was the latest. This is always true. Therefore Hendrik Rutgers, in thinking of fighting, thought of the bank and the people who made of banks temples to worship in. All he needed now was an excuse. There was no doubt that he would get it. Some people call this process the autohypnosis of the great. Two sandwich-men slouched by in opposite directions. One of them stopped and from the edge of the sidewalk stared at a man cleaning windows on the fourteenth story of a building across the way. The other wearily shuffled southward. Above his head swayed an enormous amputated foot. Rutgers himself walked briskly to the south. To avoid a collision with a hurrying stenographer-girl--if it had been a male he would have used a short jab--he unavoidably jostled the chiropodist's advertisement into the gutter. The sandwich-man looked meekly into Rutgers's pugnacious face and started to cross the street. Hendrik felt he should apologize, but before his sense of duty could crystallize into action the man was too far away. So Hendrik turned back. The other sandwich-man was still looking at the window-cleaner on the fourteenth story across the street. Happening to look down, he saw coming a man who looked angry. Therefore the sandwich-man meekly stepped into the gutter, out of the way. It was the second time within one minute! Hendrik stopped and spoke peevishly to the meek one in the gutter: "Why did you move out of my way?" The sandwich-man looked at him uneasily; then, without answering, walked away sullenly. "Here I am," thought Rutgers, "a man without a job; and there he is, a man with a job and afraid of me!" Something was wrong--or right. Something always is, to the born fighter. Who could be afraid of a man without a job but sandwich-men who always walked along the curb so they could be pushed off into the gutter among the other beasts? Nobody ever deliberately became a sandwich-man. When circumstances, the police, hopeless inefficiency, or shattered credit prevented a hobo from begging, stealing, murdering, or getting drunk, he became a sandwich-man in order to live until he could rise again. Whatever a sandwich-man changed himself into, it was always advancement. Once a sandwich-man, never again a sandwich-man. It was not boards they carried, but the printed certificates of hopelessness. Men who could not keep steady jobs became either corpses or sandwich-men. The sandwich illustrated the tyranny of the regular income just as the need of a regular income illustrated the need of Christianity. The sandwich thus had become the spirit of the times.