"Inspector Bradlaugh was telling me, the other night, that there
were easily a thousand men in the slums of the East Side who could be hired
to kill a man for five hundred dollars."
I suppose Schilling, as the directing spirit of a corporation that
hid poison by the hogshead in low-priced foods of various kinds,
was responsible for hundreds of deaths annually, and for misery of
sickness beyond calculation among the poor of the tenements and cheap
boarding-houses. Yet a better husband, father and friend never lived. He,
personally, wouldn't have harmed a fly; but he was a wholesale poisoner for
dividends.
Murder for dividends. Poison for dividends. Starve and freeze and maim for
dividends. Drive parents to suicide, and sons and daughters to crime and
prostitution--for dividends. Not fair competition, in which the stronger
and better would survive, but cheating and swindling, lying and pilfering
and bribing, so that the honest and the decent go down before the dishonest
and the depraved. And the custom of doing these things so "respectable,"
the applause for "success" so undiscriminating, and men so unthinking in
the rush of business activity, that criticism is regarded as a mixture of
envy and idealism.
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