I have noticed the very curious fact about your views, that all your hope of betterment is in the future—it is always how we can prevent new stealing, never how we can punish the past. And so those thirty million dollars of Magee and Quay, the forty-six millions of the Amalgamated deal—they are safe and beyond recall forever? Mr. Lawson talks about “restitution”; do you think he will ever bring it about—do you see any signs of it so far? And yet those forty-six million dollars, assuming that they grow at ten per cent., a small earning for such a sum—year after year they will be, roughly speaking, as follows: 46, 51, 56, 63, 69, 76, 84, 92, 101, 111, 122, 134, 147, 162, 178, 196, 216, 238, 262, 288, 318, and so on. In other words, the heirs of the “Amalgamated” financiers will twenty years from now have multiplied that sum nearly seven times, and be receiving nearly seven times as much tribute from the sewing-girl in the Chicago slums and the children in the Georgia cotton mill. I, Mr. Steffens, am one of those who look upon all profits, rent, interest, and dividends as a survival of barbarism, the last but not the least of the devices whereby the strong enslave the weak and profit by their toil; but I assume that you are not one of these—that you are one of the class I heard described by a speaker the other night, “who think that the first dollar is a male dollar and the second a female, and that when you put them in the bank together they bring forth dimes and nickels, which in the course of the years grow up to be dollars as big as their parents.” Yet even so, you can not but recognise the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate children. You can not—to drop an inconvenient metaphor—claim that society can by any possibility whatever be required to go on paying tribute to that stolen forty-six millions—the three hundred and eighteen millions of twenty years from now. It is a maxim of law, Mr. Steffens, that there is no wrong without its redress.