He has cut down his income to less than one-twentieth what it was; but still a vast sum, far more than he can possibly spend, pours in upon him and demands investment. Further, many of the enterprises in which he is a large but not a controlling factor are of so suspicious a character, are so dependent for success upon roguery, that he feels he cannot continue in them. To abandon his holdings would be merely to add to the incomes of the rascals; he sensibly, but not without qualms, sells out at as large a price as he can get. Looking for new investments, he goes into the most crowded and squalid section of each of the cities and large towns in which he has interests--into those sections where the workers associated with his various enterprises are congregated. He buys up whole blocks and sections of unsanitary tenements. He tears them down and builds in place of them houses fit for human habitation. And he adjusts the scale of rents there, not on the familiar principle of robbing the poor because it is so easy to do, but on the same principles that he would apply to business property of the kinds used by people whose necessities are not so great that they are helpless before the robber. He is content with a decent profit; he takes no blood-money. He is a business-like, human landlord, not a bloody bandit, not a “clamorer for dividends.” In each of these neighborhoods he establishes a huge department store in which he sells everything; and he gives value, not sham and shoddy. These stores make a specialty of food. They sell only wholesome food--and they can easily afford to sell it at the same prices which the former purveyors to these poor got for vile, poisonous, rotten meat and vegetables. Then he buys up the street-car lines in his neighborhoods as far as he can, and establishes two-cent fares. He realizes the importance of the item of car-fare to the poor, the wickedness of stock and bond watering to keep up the cruelest of all taxes. And now he is in hot water! He has alienated a large and influential section of every one of the grand divisions of respectable society. He has against him, and purple with rage at the very mention of his name, all the men and all the women and all the families that directly or indirectly, consciously or unconsciously, live by exploiting the poor. Right and left he has cut into or cut entirely away incomes, sources of vast profit, those infamous yet “respectable” capitalizations of the industry of picking the pockets in the tattered dress of the working girl, in the ragged overalls of the laborer! What an uproar from all that is articulate! They cry in the newspapers that he is worse than his father, that he is impoverishing the “best citizens,” et cetera. They scream that he is doing it, is using the almost infinite power of his father’s massed millions, with an ulterior motive--solely to increase his income.