“Cato, the Censor, declared: 'It is difficult to save that city from ruin where a fish sells for more than an ox.' By the bad practices of your vulgar rich, that, to-day, is a description of New York. Still, from the public standpoint, I should not call the luxury it tells of, the worst effect of wealth, nor the riches which indulge in such luxury the most baleful riches. There be those other busy black-flag millions which maraud a people. They cut their way through bars and bolts of government with the saws and files and acids of their evil influence--an influence whose expression is ever, and simply, bribes. I speak of those millions that purchase the passage of one law or the downfall of another, and which buy the people's officers like cattle to their will. But even as I reproach those criminal millions, I marvel at their blindness. Cannot such wealth see that in its treasons--for treason it does as much as any Arnold--it but undermines itself? Who should need strength and probity in government, and the shelter of them, more than Money? And yet in its rapacity without eyes, it must ever be using the criminal avarice of officials to pick the stones and mortar from the honest foundations of the state!” The Reverend Bronson resumed his walking up and down. Morton, the imperturbable, lighted a cigarette and puffed bland puffs as though he in no fashion felt himself described. Not at all would he honor the notion that the reverend rhetorician was talking either of him or at him, in his condemnation of those pirate millions. “I should feel alarmed for my country,” continued the Reverend Bronson, coming back to his chair, “if I did not remember that New York is not the nation, and how a sentiment here is never the sentiment there. The country at large has still its ideals; New York, I fear, has nothing save its appetites.”