“I have felt for two years,” said Roebuck to Schilling, who repeated it to me soon afterward, “that Blacklock was about the most dangerous fellow in the country. The first time I set eyes on him, I saw he was a born iconoclast. And I've known for a year that some day he would use that engine of publicity of his to cannonade the foundations of society.” “He knew me better than I knew myself,” was my comment to Schilling. And I meant it--for I had not finished the demolition of the Coal combine when I began to realize that, whatever I might have thought of my own ambitions, I could never have tamed myself or been tamed into a devotee of dollars and of respectability. I simply had been keeping quiet until my tools were sharp and fate spun my opportunity within reach. But I must, in fairness, add, it was lucky for me that, when the hour struck, Roebuck was not twenty years younger and one-twentieth as rich. It's a heavy enough handicap, under the best of circumstances, to go to war burdened with years; add the burden of a monster fortune, and it isn't in human nature to fight well. Youth and a light knapsack! But--to my fight on the big bank. Until I opened fire, the public thought, in a general way, that a bank was an institution like Thornley's Discount and Deposit National--a place for the safe-keeping of money and for accommodating business men with loans to be used in carrying on and extending legitimate and useful enterprises. And there were many such banks. But the real object of the banking business, as exploited by the big bandits who controlled it and all industry, was to draw into a mass the money of the country that they might use it to manipulate the markets, to wreck and reorganize industries and wreck them again, to work off inflated bonds and stocks upon the public at inflated prices, to fight among themselves for rights to despoil, making the people pay the war budgets--in a word, to finance the thousand and one schemes whereby they and their friends and relatives, who neither produce nor help to produce, appropriate the bulk of all that is produced.