David took these tirades with a grain of salt. He was convinced of the Quixotic extravagance in Tom’s idealism. Yet, the essence of his teaching must be right. David believed he knew this, now. Business was indeed a scramble in life’s gutters for food: the unfortunate way men had of getting their bread. But what was one to do? There was the bread in the muddy gutter. Plenty of it, plenty to go round. Tom had assured him that the economists who said “No” were slaves of the scramblers. Let him just read Kropotkin. Production was in a state of wasteful anarchy. But men had somehow preferred to ship their fair food from the fields where it grew, and drop it in the filth of a million scurrying feet, in the gutters that were rutted and befouled by years of greedy commotion. Here they preferred to fight for it like pigs nosing to a trough: to expend their energies and debase their spirits for its hoarding and for the depriving of others. It must all have been in some way deeply needful, else why should this idiotic condition have arisen, why should the simpler way not have been found, by which all men might have what they needed to eat--expend the rest of their forces in higher works? This was the rule. David must scramble along. “The one danger,” said Tom, “is not to understand. The one degradation is to exalt this pother, to make a noble thing out of the job of earning one’s living. The cult of Business. You see it everywhere. Men must worship: it is easier to worship low than high.” All this was sound enough, thought David. On his way down Wall Street, to and from his office, he saw a spectacle strangely near the gutter metaphor of Tom. David remembered how this sight had at first aroused him: how quickly it had become an unnoticed feature of that downtown world so that, if he had missed it, in rain or in snow, he should have known that a great dislocation had come upon the Temple.