"The trouble with our people--our country--the world--is that our whole system--social--commercial--political--every activity is based on greed, mere, sheer greed. State and Church act on it--live by it. The success of the Jew which has brought on him so much suffering through the ages has revenged itself by stamping on your life the very evil with which you charge him--love of money. What ideals have we? None but money. We call it wealth. We have debased the name, and its debasement shows the debasement of the race. Once it meant weal, now mere riches, though employed basely, the very enemy and assassin of weal. The covetousness, whose reprobation in the last of the commandments was intended as a compendium to embrace the whole, has honeycombed our whole life, public and private. The amassing of riches, not for use only, for display--vulgar beyond belief--the squandering of riches, not for good, but for evil, to gratify jaded appetites which never at their freshest craved anything but evil or folly, marks the lowest level of the shopkeeping intellect. The Argands and the Canters are the aristocrats of the community, and the Capons are the fit priests for such people." He turned away in disgust--but I prodded him. "What is your remedy? You criticise fiercely! but give no light. You are simply destructive." "The remedy is more difficult to give," he said gravely; "because the evil has been going on so long that it has become deep-rooted. It has sunk its roots into, not only the core of our life, but our character. It will take long to eradicate it. But one economic evil might be, and eventually must be changed, unless we wish to go down into the abyss of universal corruption and destruction." "You mean----?" "Capitalism--the idea that because a man is accidentally able to acquire through adventitious and often corrupt means vast riches which really are not made by himself, but by means of others under conditions and laws which he did not create, he may call them his own; use them in ways manifestly detrimental to the public good and, indeed, often in notorious destructiveness of it, and be protected in doing so by those laws." "'Accidentally'--and 'adventitious means'! That does not happen so often. It may happen by finding a gold mine--once in ten thousand times--or by cornering some commodity on the stock or Produce Exchange once in one hundred thousand times, but even then a man must have intellect--force--courage--resourcefulness--wonderful powers of organization." "So has the burglar and highwayman," he interrupted. "But they are criminals--they break the law." "What law? Why law more than these others? Is not the fundamental law, not to do evil to others?" "The law established by society for its protection." "Who made those laws?" "The people--through their representatives," I added hastily, as I saw him preparing to combat it.