He moved toward a different attitude in his work downtown. Here the violent yet canny preachments of Tom helped also. “The weak man,” Tom said, “stays in business and yet despises it. So that the one End of business--success--escapes him. Of course I am not now talking of the mediocre fool who respects business--as he is told to--and ekes out his pittance blacking the other fellow’s boots. You are beyond that, Davie. But there is another sort of fool--a more intelligent sort: the man who ‘sees through’ business, despises it and therefore muffs it. He is unreasonable also. If he can’t stand business, let him clear out! If he decides to stay in he is a fool not to win. One must of course despise business. One must know that it is the scramble of rather lowly-evolved and very greedy persons. One should be conscious of the gullibility and venality of bankers, of the wastefulness of manufacturers, of the opaqueness of middlemen. It should be clear to you that the elements that lift up the Rockefellers and the Morgans and the Hills are chiefly the singlemindedness of the stupid, the unimaginative and the dishonest. But what sort of a fool is it, David, who being aware of these inferior forces permits himself to be worsted by them? That seems to me an altogether illogical conclusion. It seems to me that just this knowledge should make the knower come out on top. In other words, the man who has brains enough to despise business should be the successful business man: not himself but the mediocrities should become the victims of his disgust. Therefore, David, through the very clarity of your vision into the nature of affairs, you must master them. God, man! would you be anywhere save _on top_ of such a muck-heap?” Tom had not failed to help make David’s vision clear. As he said: “Law is pandar to all of business’s ugly lusts. I ought to know the system’s filthiness if any one.”