“_Six years ago no proposition to which the great corporation interests of the country were strongly opposed was looked upon as having any practical chance of being realized.... The killing and maiming or stifling of bills of this kind in committee was a foregone conclusion, and the only answer to protests was Tweed’s old query: ‘What are you going to do about it?_’” --FRANKLIN FABIAN. _Chapter Six_ FOR THIRTY PIECES OF SILVER I have, in previous chapters, touched very briefly upon some of the vile excrescences that have found a resting place within the gates of our once so fair city of Society. Again, I have sketched in the briefest outline the process by which the idle class was created. I have shown how the seed was planted in the too fertile soil of American industry. I have dwelt, but briefly, upon the simple fact that we of the older orders have come to find out something about that planting and the manner of the growth. I turn with something like dismay from a sketch of the methods of the culture of this growth. For it is watered with the bloody sweat of labour and the salt tears of bitter poverty and suffering; and it is fertilized with the dead bodies of men and women outworn in the grim battle of life. Tended and watched it is by a foul horde of underlings, hired judges in the law, panders in politics, prostitutes in the pulpit, lickspittles in college chancelleries, Judases in the press, blackmailers in business, and miserable, time-serving parasites clinging like filthy leeches upon the administrative bodies of the nation. To my mind, as I have studied this question, there has come a sad conviction: This nation is betrayed. The planting of the seed of our industrial system, whose fine flower has been reached in our class of idle rich, was quite possible without any betrayal of the people. Even its growth for two decades was possible without a conscious effort on the part of the keepers of the public citadels to throw open the doors to a public enemy. May a thinking man dare to say that the growth of this system since 1890 could have been possible without criminal negligence on the part of those public servants sworn to guard the true and lawful interests of the people of this nation?