"The people will only get justice when they learn to love justice. Because they love privilege and lust after money they are plundered by men who are their superiors in intelligence. If I am a wolf it's because so many lambs are always bleating at my heels that I have to eat them to save my self-respect. People will continue to starve so long as they are content with a circus and a bread-line. And such people ought to starve. They get what they deserve. The government is trying to rescue four thousand men who are stranded and starving in Alaska. Are they paupers? No, just average business men who are mad for money, who dare frozen seas or blazing deserts, death or hell to win it. That's why my power _is_ power. This passion for money, money for its own sake, right or wrong, is the motive power of the modern world. That's why I laugh at my critics and sneer at threats. I am secure because I've built my career on the biggest fact of the century. You'd as well have common sense and accept the world as it is. As you've just said, we've only a little while to live in it anyhow." "But I want to really live," Stuart broke in, "not merely exist. You don't live. You are engaged in an endless fight, desperate, cruel, mercenary--for what? The superfluous, ambitions you never exploit, privileges you don't know how to use, caprices without the genius to express them, pleasures when you don't know how to play. Why?" "The game man, the game!" "Game? what game? To crush and kill for the mere sake of doing it, as a sheep-killing dog strangles fifty lambs in a night for the fun of hearing them bleat? Isn't there a bigger game? a game of mutual joys and hopes, of sunlight and laughter?" "But, Jim," the little financier protested, "I don't make men as they are, nor did I make conditions." "Still is that any reason why a man shouldn't take his place on the right side of the fight? The eternal struggle is always on between Life and Death. A man's in league with one or the other. Which is it? You are a wrecker and not a builder." "But is that true?" Bivens interrupted eagerly. "I'm organizing the industries of the world. I have furthered the progress of humanity." "Yes, in a way you have. And if the price of goods continues to rise for another ten years as it has during the past ten under your organizing the human race will be compelled to make still further progress. They will have to move to another planet. Nobody but a millionaire can live on this one. A day of reckoning is bound to come." Bivens laughed, walked back to the window and gazed down on the narrow streets below.