I had decided to concentrate upon Roebuck, because he was the richest and most powerful of “The Seven.” For, in my pictures of the three main phases of “finance”--the industrial, the life-insurance and the banking--he, as arch plotter in every kind of respectable skulduggery, was necessarily in the foreground. My original intention was to demolish the Power Trust--or, at least, to compel him to buy back all of its stock which he had worked off on the public. I had collected many interesting facts about it, facts typical of the conditions that “finance” has established in so many of our industries. For instance, I was prepared to show that the actual earnings of the Power Trust were two and a half times what its reports to stock-holders alleged; that the concealed profits were diverted into the pockets of Roebuck, his sons, eleven other relatives and four of “The Seven,” the lion's share going, of course, to the lion. Like almost all the great industrial enterprises, too strong for the law and too remote for the supervision of their stock-holders, it gathered in enormous revenues to disburse them chiefly in salaries and commissions and rake-offs on contracts to favorites. I had proof that in one year it had “written off” twelve millions of profit and loss, ten millions of which had found its way to Roebuck's pocket. That pocket! That “treasury of the Lord”! Dishonest? Roebuck and most of the other leaders of the various gangs, comprising, with all their ramifications, the principal figures in religious, philanthropic, fashionable society, did not for an instant think their doings dishonest. They had no sense of trusteeship for this money intrusted to them as captains of industry bankers, life-insurance directors. They felt that it was theirs to do with as they pleased. And they felt that their superiority in rank and in brains entitled them to whatever remuneration they could assign to themselves without rousing the wrath of a public too envious to admit the just claims of the “upper classes.” They convinced themselves that without them crops would cease to grow, sellers and buyers would be unable to find their way to market, barbarism would spread its rank and choking weeds over the whole garden of civilization. And, so brainless is the parrot public, they have succeeded in creating a very widespread conviction that their own high opinion of their services is not too high, and that some dire calamity would come if they were swept from between producer and consumer! True, thieves are found only where there is property; but who but a chucklebrain would think the thieves made the property?