that you will stand by me to put out of
existence the deadly foes of this country. I want you to swear that you
will not flinch when the moment comes for you to fight, even to the
death.

"Are any of you unwilling to swear that you would fight the foes of our
country to the bitter end?"

No one speaks. The excited condition of the speaker impresses the men
strangely. They do not know just how to take him.

"I shall at the next meeting name forty men, each of whom has been an
enemy of the United States; each of whom has seen the growth of his
private fortune built upon the ruin of homes; each of whom has opposed
every measure for the alleviation of the condition of the masses of the
people.

"Many of them are known to you as offenders of national notoriety. You
have mentioned them in your recital of grievances.

"You all know of the bloody history of the Czar of the Lakes, Anthony
Marcus. The graves of the murdered sailors and longshoremen are a
sufficient indictment against him.

"Need I tell you of the horrors that have been daily perpetrated by the
ruthless oil magnate, Savage, in my own State of Pennsylvania?

"Is the right to check competition by the use of the torch to be
conceded to him? Is murder for the sake of commercial advantage to be
sanctioned as our national policy?

"The ancients were never so free or so powerful as when their citizens
exercised the right to proscribe unworthy citizens.

"Let us constitute this meeting into a forum and issue our list of the
proscribed. When the list is read I shall be glad to substitute others
for the names I have selected.

"The people are too subservient to aid us in carrying out the edict; so
I propose that we each select a man from this list of forty, and that we
then see that the edict is enforced. _We shall thus rid the earth of its
chief transgressors_.

"When the French revolution was brought on, the world knew nothing of
the possibilities of combined wealth as an agency for the improvement of
the condition of t