small means. The great insurance companies which
he had in mind were really, he said, "philanthropies."
They rested as they should on a sound financial
basis. They would not otherwise carry such blessing
to the millions of insured and be the mainstay of the
widowed and the orphaned. What, then, was to be
thought of those scribblers despicable enough to un-
dermine this one reliance -- public confidence?

If in that little group of listeners some one had
then known enough to tell him that the long sanc-
tioned practices in his own company had already
begun to do this deadly work of destroying public
confidence; that the "muck-raker" was merely
directing general attention to a few of these prac-
tices, the high moral swagger of this gentleman
would not have been in the least disturbed. His
tirade against the agitator had every appearance of
sincerity. He believed what he was saying because
he had not then been forced to look at his own busi-
ness from the large organic and social point of view.
He imagined that he and his friends had a private
and exclusively owned business and that they were
perfectly free to use other people's money in specu-
lative investments as if it were their own. When, by
shock after shock, he was awakened and compelled
to see clearly what had been done, and what was
thought of it, it went far to kill him.

What finally happened to that man has begun to
happen to the general community. By one explosion

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