“Melville, in addition to being president of one of the largest banks in the world, is a director in no less than seventy-three great industrial enterprises, including railways, telegraph companies, _savings-banks and life-insurance companies_. Bill Van Nest has done time in the Nevada State Penitentiary for horse-stealing.” * * * * * That was all. And it was enough--quite enough. I was a national figure, as much so as if I had tried to assassinate the president. Indeed, I had exploded a bomb under a greater than the president--under the chiefs of the real government of the United States, the government that levied daily upon every citizen, and that had state and national and the principal municipal governments in its strong box. I confess I was as much astounded at the effect of my bomb as old Melville must have been. I felt that I had been obscure, as I looked at the newspapers, with Matthew Blacklock appropriating almost the entire front page of each. I was the isolated, the conspicuous figure, standing alone upon the steps of the temple of Mammon, where mankind daily and devoutly comes to offer worship. Not that the newspapers praised me. I recall none that spoke well of me. The nearest approach to praise was the “Blacklock squeals on the Wall Street gang” in one of the sensational penny sheets that strengthen the plutocracy by lying about it. Some of the papers insinuated that I had gone mad; others that I had been bought up by a rival gang to the Roebuck-Langdon clique; still others thought I was simply hunting notoriety. All were inclined to accept as a sufficient denial of my charges Melville's dignified refusal “to notice any attack from a quarter so discredited.” As my electric whirled into Wall Street, I saw the crowd in front of the Textile Building, a dozen policemen keeping it in order. I descended amid cheers, and entered my offices through a mob struggling to shake hands with me--and, in my ignorance of mob mind, I was delighted and inspired! Just why a man who knows men, knows how wishy-washy they are as individuals, should be influenced by a demonstration from a mass of them, is hard to understand. But the fact is indisputable. They fooled me then; they could fool me again, in spite of all I have been through. There probably wasn't one in that mob for whose opinion I would have had the slightest respect had he come to me alone; yet as I listened to those shallow cheers and those worthless assurances of “the people are behind you, Blacklock,” I felt that I was a man with a mission! Our main office was full, literally full, of newspaper men--reporters from morning papers, from afternoon papers, from out-of-town and foreign papers. I pushed through them, saying as I went: “My letter speaks for me, gentlemen, and will continue to speak for me. I have nothing to say except through it.” “But the public--” urged one.