“Now, gentlemen, what are the facts? You can see for yourselves exactly how this whole situation has come about. You are sensible men. I don’t need to tell you. Here are two men, one elected treasurer of the city of Philadelphia, sworn to guard the interests of the city and to manipulate its finances to the best advantage, and the other called in at a time of uncertain financial cogitation to assist in unraveling a possibly difficult financial problem; and then you have a case of a quiet, private financial understanding being reached, and of subsequent illegal dealings in which one man who is shrewder, wiser, more versed in the subtle ways of Third Street leads the other along over seemingly charming paths of fortunate investment into an accidental but none the less criminal mire of failure and exposure and public calumny and what not. And then they get to the place where the more vulnerable individual of the two—the man in the most dangerous position, the city treasurer of Philadelphia, no less—can no longer reasonably or, let us say, courageously, follow the other fellow; and then you have such a spectacle as was described here this afternoon in the witness-chair by Mr. Stener—that is, you have a vicious, greedy, unmerciful financial wolf standing over a cowering, unsophisticated commercial lamb, and saying to him, his white, shiny teeth glittering all the while, ‘If you don’t advance me the money I ask for—the three hundred thousand dollars I now demand—you will be a convict, your children will be thrown in the street, you and your wife and your family will be in poverty again, and there will be no one to turn a hand for you.’ That is what Mr. Stener says Mr. Cowperwood said to him. I, for my part, haven’t a doubt in the world that he did. Mr. Steger, in his very guarded references to his client, describes him as a nice, kind, gentlemanly agent, a broker merely on whom was practically forced the use of five hundred thousand dollars at two and a half per cent. when money was bringing from ten to fifteen per cent. in Third Street on call loans, and even more. But I for one don’t choose to believe it. The thing that strikes me as strange in all of this is that if he was so nice and kind and gentle and remote—a mere hired and therefore subservient agent—how is it that he could have gone to Mr. Stener’s office two or three days before the matter of this sixty-thousand-dollar check came up and say to him, as Mr. Stener testifies under oath that he did say to him, ‘If you don’t give me three hundred thousand dollars’ worth more of the city’s money at once, to-day, I will fail, and you will be a convict. You will go to the penitentiary.’? That’s what he said to him. ‘I will fail and you will be a convict. They can’t touch me, but they will arrest you. I am an agent merely.’ Does that sound like a nice, mild, innocent, well-mannered agent, a hired broker, or doesn’t it sound like a hard,