“ Huber would say of religion and law:
"Both are tools in the hands of compulsion. Both try to belittle divine humanity, the first making Man a pygmy before God and the second making Man a pygmy before a few men. There can be no crime against God, since God, or the force that created the world, is omnipotent; no crime against law, since law is an instrument of the great crime. The law a deterrent? It isn't. The statistics prove that, so far as statistics can prove anything. But you prove it yourself. Why do you try to refrain from conscious wrong? ”

“ Business, as Luke entered, was already under weigh, and the room was filled. In the body of the narrow hall a crowd of men lounged upon rows of those collapsible chairs, clamped together, which undertakers hire out for funerals; most of the men had cigars in their mouths, and the smoky air smelled of tobacco and the fumes from the action of alcohol on the digestive juices. On a small platform at one end of the room sat Venable, who was chairman, and, among the several persons grouped about him, Luke was surprised to note both Yeates and Nelson. ”

“ Betty listened to him with a rapt face; Luke honored him, but sincerely hoped that he would go. Fearing that this desire was becoming too patent, Luke said:
"The Manhattan and Niagara people don't seem to share your views."
"Ah," said Nicholson, "there you touch a vexed problem, because there you have to do with a corporation, and it is almost a fact that corporations have no souls."
"If that corporation ever had any, it is damned," said Luke; "but what I'm driving at is that the individuals composing a corporation have moral responsibilities." ”

“ His firm mouth quivered.
"Mr. Huber," he said, "I am in no frame of mind for joking to-day. This man is dead, and he was my friend——"
"I'm sorry to have seemed to joke," Luke interrupted.
Stein bowed and went on:
"He is dead, and whatever his faults—we all have our faults, Mr. Huber—they died with him. I am here only to ask you to show a decent respect for the memory of a dead enemy. I am here to ask you to be magnanimous, Mr. Huber."
"Magnanimous? You talk as if I had won!"
"The living are always the winners," said the Judge.
Luke began to doubt that theory. ”

“ It required more and more resistance, but Luke continued to hug tightly the faith that the wrongs of the world could be set right through honest laws administered by honest men.
As he loved his work, so also he came to love the scene of it. The vortex of the city fascinated him. Broadway, one color by day and another by night, one spot of color uptown, a second at its middle, and a third below the street that lies across New York like a gorged but devouring anaconda; the dark passages full of tenements; the quiet pavements bordered by prosperous dwellings ”

“ Happiness, if it was to be found at all, was to be found only in the perfect development of self, and such a development was impossible so long as self, seeking expression in politics, found expression thwarted by an evil opposition in the political field.
Nevertheless, this opposition, Luke was sure, could be crushed and swept away; his ideal for the good of the city, which had become his own good, could be attained; and then, he told himself, that other part of him, the part that loved Betty and that Betty loved, could enjoy Betty as the reward of the whole man. ”

“ Luke was standing above his caller, his hands deep in his pockets.
"Look here, Judge," he drawled, "are you by any chance threatening me?"
The Judge was not at all threatening him. "I am only telling you," he frankly explained, "what a long life in New York has shown me. I like you, Mr. Huber; I believe you could make a great success in life if you were less hot-headed; but I believe your hot-headedness can ruin you at the bar, can ruin you socially and financially, and can put a stop to your political career forever. ”

“ It was inevitable that they should, during the floodtide of the Washington scandal, speak of its revelations.
"I don't know what to make of them," sighed Luke. "It seems as if the fellows at the head of our party were no better than the fellows at the head of the other."
"They are not," said Forbes with conviction. "Here they all are blackmailing the tariff, a system the country owes all its prosperity to."
"We shall have to pick honest leaders in the future," Luke reflected. He still believed in the power of a party's individual members. "We've simply been too easy-going in the past." ”

“ There was so much to do in this life that he did not see how he had ever had time to think of any other. And now he was about to do his part of it conscientiously, with open eyes and with all his soul, and to do it with complete power over himself, using no compulsion upon others and allowing no other to use compulsion upon him. Luke had conquered. For every soul there is, somewhere, a separate road to salvation. Luke had found his own.... ”

“ The boy had died that, bound for New York, thought himself as a Templar entering Jerusalem, but from his ashes there rose a new Peter the Hermit preaching a new crusade.
"If we had the eyes to see," he said, "we'd know that from this city, the center of our civilization, slender threads, so numerous as to be beyond our counting, run out to every corner of the land. Slender threads: the merest gossamer, but so tough that, once entangled in them, no man escapes. No man, no woman, and no child. The delicate filaments catch and hold us by the thousand every day. ”

“ Get back! Do you want to kill the woman?"
It was that organizer of the strikers whom Luke had seen in Forbes's office when the employees made their last appeal to Forbes. It was the man Forbes had ignored.
With infinite slowness, against infinite opposition, the rescuer made way for them. Grumbling, growling, threatening, the crowd fell back. It menaced, it cursed, it hurled ribald jokes; but it fell back before the leader that it no longer obeyed in anything else, until he, followed by Luke with Betty in his arms, came to the line of soldiers at the battered factory door. ”

“ Her hat had fallen to the floor; her golden hair tossed above her head like licking tongues of flame; her eyes were bright coals; her cheeks were scarlet; her white upper teeth bit deep into the vermilion of her lower lip. As if to give freer play to a breast that panted, she had torn open her dress at the base of her splendid throat. The revolver was in her hand. It was cocked and smoking. She looked like Bellona invoked and materialized from the fire and smoke of that roaring inferno of the street.
"How many?" she gasped. "How many have we killed?"
Luke stopped at the door. ”

“ Luke was sure that it could and would. He was sure that Leighton, and the honest men associated with him, had begun a movement that must end by restoring the nation's lost ideals. Government would govern, honest property would be protected, religion would again open man's eyes to his own littleness and the omnipotence of the Deity. There would be legislation that would be the end of industrial combinations, of the crushing of the small manufacturer and the grinding of the faces of the poor. ”

“ When Luke found Porcellis again, he asked him about this.
"Who's that girl with the broad, low forehead," he inquired, "and the expression of a stained-glass saint?"
"You're aiming high," said Porcellis; "that's one of the richest girls in New York."
"Who's her uncle?"
"Ah, she's been talking of him, has she? Well, I don't blame her. Her uncle is the man I call the American Shakespeare. She'll get a lot of his money, too, for he has no children of his own." ”

“ In the United States the people could rule; the means were provided; if they failed now and then, it was for a brief time only. To Mr. Huber the majority was as infallible in matters of government as, in matters of faith, the Pope is to a devout Catholic, and the hope of the majority lay in that party which had freed the negro from slavery and saved the country from disruption.
To these ideals Luke was true. He saw the rottenness of Tammany rule in New York and knew it for a symptom of the disease that made a national danger of the entire rank and file of the Democrats ”

“ What mattered its benefactions, its colleges for the ignorant, its hospitals for the ill? As Luke saw them now, these were only dust for the eyes of the public, cheap peace-offerings for intricate wrongs. The good could be counted on the fingers of the hand, the evil was as the sands of the sea. ”

“ Too much power over others and too little over himself, both states a result of a system based upon compulsion, had made the man in russet brown all that the man in russet brown had been; it made Luke a potential murderer and ravisher. He saw all life as endlessly creating and no two hours the same. Seeing this, he understood why it was that, when authority was laid upon any one, that one rebelled in proportion to his vitality. He saw the present wrong and the future impotence of churches and laws, of politics, governments, and property. ”

“ If I had been, I'd have turned tail when your friends tried to ruin a business I am interested in, or when they tried to have me caught in a police-raid." Luke spoke as if he were mentioning incidents in the lives of people dead these thousand years. "The raiders didn't find me, as you, of course, know. What you don't know is that the business move has failed just as badly."
If he had not known it, the Judge's face betrayed no surprise.
"Really, Mr. Huber, I told you at our last interview that I had no professional interest in this matter." ”

“ The elder Huber raised his thick brows.
"You know," said he, and he mentioned the name of one of the richest men in America; not a man that had made his wealth even through the building of a great industry, but one that had, by "editing" money and combinations of money much in that manner in which a news-desk copy-reader edits the reporters' "copy," made himself a member of the triumvirate—rumor said made the triumvirate and made himself its head—which had for years controlled alike the labor and capital of the country.
"What's he been saying?" asked Luke. ”

“ Luke shrugged his lean shoulders. He turned to the waiting stenographer. "Take this," he said:
"In conclusion, I wish to say that my recent experience in the service of the city has convinced me of the crying need of a new movement for civic improvement: a non-partisan movement in which the one object shall be the purification of municipal government and the fearless administration of the law, all of its supporters working together not for any man or party, but for the good of New York. Such a movement is that now started by the conscientious men who compose the Municipal Reform League. ”

“ Suppose he were discredited and unable to win back the public confidence: somebody, without party and without politics, a larger and better man than he had been, would assume a national leadership, where his had been small and local, and would now bring the whole country back to the simple political faith and the plain, honest financial and industrial policies of the nation's founders. The mercenaries of darkness that had served the evil mind could not now, with the evil mind in perdition, stand for one day against the Army of Light. ”

“ Luke was not listening. He was saying to himself:
"What is it I am to do next? There is still a little money left to my account at the bank. It will keep me for a year and mother for a year—and then? I'm making Forbes hold out against the trust, and if he does hold out his mill is doomed. No hope there! Can I go back to the Law? I can't, because the Law is just what the Church is. The Law was made by the powerful, it is interpreted by their paid servants and administered by their slaves. It is a game devised by the crafty powerful to cheat the simple weak. ”

“ It oughtn't to be allowed in politics."
"There you go again!" sighed Porcellis. "Allow? How are you going to allow or disallow a force? It simply is. This man can give the big politicians certain large advantages if they pass laws that suit him. The big politicians can give the little politicians certain lesser advantages if they furnish the votes. The lesser politicians can get the votes if they let the police charge the criminals for protection in crime. Each man seizes his opportunity, and that's all there is about it."
"You think so?" said Luke. ”

“ There are too many lawyers at Albany and Washington; they know all about law and nothing about Man, so when the public conscience turns over and whines in its sleep, these fellows think they can cure it of what ails it by passing a few more laws. They pass a law against dance-halls, and they breed brothels. That's the way it goes all down the line. They pass a lot of such laws and then say: 'Now, let the District-Attorney do the rest.' I wish they had my job for one day! People have got to understand that other people don't indulge their tastes out of mere love of law-breaking. ”

“ Luke shut the door.
Leighton came forward and brought his hand down on Luke's shoulder with a resounding smack.
"Do you know what this means?" he cried. His mouth was wide with laughter; the whole man exulted. "This re-elects me! Nothing can keep us out now, Huber—not a thing on God's green footstool. All we've got to do is use these letters and then sit back and fold our arms and attend to office business. Politics? These two pieces of paper will play all the politics we need, and more besides. I could shout, Huber; I could sing a regular Song of Deborah. What about Mr. Timothy Heney, now? ”

“ Think of Betty——"
Luke winced.
"Don't begin that," he commanded.
"But what have you to gain?" asked Forbes.
"Nothing. I've nothing to gain. I've only something to keep: my self-respect."
"Your self-conceit, you mean. Be reasonable, Huber. These people won't give in."
"So I must?"
"They won't give in, and you can't get back to politics and can't get any paper to take up your case."
"Oh,"—Luke could have laughed—"so Stein told you that, too, did he?"
"Never mind what he told me. The point is: his people can help you if you'll only acknowledge defeat, now that you're defeated. ”

“ Good?" Yeates laughed angrily. "What are you talking about? You're talking as if these men were pirates. You're talking like one of those fellows that make speeches on a soap-box on the corner. It's all right to fight police-graft, and it's all right to run the crooks out of town—that's what the League's for and why I'm for the League—but I'm not going to keep on with an organization that's mixing up the biggest men in America with that sort of cattle. I won't stand for having my personal friends called thieves. I can't stand for it, and I won't!"
Luke looked at his watch. He rose. ”