On Saturday afternoon at 3.35 the Harlem contingent, carrying their armor under one arm, their tickets given into the conductor's own hand by the lieutenant, Fleming, entrained at the One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street station of the New York Central and Hudson River Railroad.

Ten minutes later they arrived at the Grand Central Station. And as the first pair of sandwiches descended, the waiting band burst into a joyous welcome.

The exits were crowded. Martial music and parading men always draw crowds. So long as there is no charge, gaping audiences automatically supply themselves in New York.

And so, along Forty-second Street, following the musicians, himself followed by his starving sandwiches, Hendrik Rutgers walked into Fifth Avenue and into history at one and the same time.

The procession turned southward. The band played Chopin's "Funeral March." Hendrik Rutgers at the head of his pauperized cohorts, anger in his heart, light in his soul, defiance in his eyes, marched down Fifth Avenue with an effect as of a man in armor treading on prostrate millionaires as over so many railroad-ties. Men who had money in their pockets for a minute felt the wind squeezed out of them by his foot. And as they saw the led sandwiches they looked thoughtful.

The first of Rutgers's infantry was an old man. His long, gray beard was dirty and ragged, like his clothes and the rest of him. In his eyes you saw the unutterable weariness of a man who has lived fifty suffering years too long. Underneath his eyes were dark rings; from the sidewalk his sockets looked finger-deep. On his cheeks was the pallor of death.

H. Rutgers, fighting for fairness and justice, had justly picked out the old fellow to be his Exhibit "A." Society must see what it did to human beings! Therefore the old man slid one foot along the asphalt and let the other follow it, with a spent, mechanical movement, as an engine, after the power is turned off, keeps on going from the momentum of years. The legs seemed to move from force of habit—a corpse on foot, with a concealed galvanic battery somewhere.

And on the breastplate and backplate of this armored corpse, printed in funereal black, beautiful women and intellectual men on Fifth Avenue, where the unforgivable crime is to be poor and show it, read:

Yesterday I walked 19 miles.

They paid me 35 cents cash

And 2 meal tickets.

He had been well coached as to his gait and, thrilled by the success he was making, the old chap became an artist and limped worse.

Behind him was our friend Mulligan, pale, thin to emaciation. He looked famished. It came from the possession of a tapeworm, as before stated. To him Hendrik Rutgers had given this standard to bear:

They call us Sandwich-men because:

We don't know what a Square Meal is!

He was followed by the raggedest human being that Anthony Comstock ever allowed to exhibit himself in public. On his boards the Fifth Avenue crowd on this fair spring day saw this:

Do you thank God you are alive?

So do we!

And notice the DIFFERENCE!

The shabby-genteel man, ex-Republican, with steel-rimmed spectacles, who now looked for all the world like a bookkeeper out of a job, had this:

I am the Result.

The Cause was not Drink.

It was HUNGER.

A young fellow who looked so much as if he had just left a hospital that thousands of spectators imagined they smelled iodoform carried this:

All men must die.

Knowing this, WE HOPE!

An octogenarian, not over four and one-half feet tall, very frail-looking, was next. To him H. Rutgers had assigned this banner:

If Society won't feed us

We'll feed the Society of Worms—

POTTER'S FIELD

Under a big foot—property of a popular chiropodist on lower Broadway; terms twenty-five cents per, five for a dollar—was this:

We are the World's Unfortunates:

BORN TO BE KICKED!

Then followed a haggard-faced man who looked like an exaggerated picture of poverty. He carried:

There are poorer than we.

HELP THEM!

A man with the stride of a conqueror bore a banner:

AND STILL WE BELIEVE IN GOD!

The crowd looked puzzled. What the dickens did believing in God have to do with anything? To end the bother of thinking they looked at the next one.

Look at Fifth Avenue!

WHY?

See what we are!

WHY?

They obeyed. They saw Fifth Avenue. Why? They did not know why. And then they saw what the sandwich-men were. And they wondered why the sandwich-men asked why. Why not? Pshaw! The placard that followed was:

If you wish to see

One hundred starving men

Follow us.

YOU WILL REMEMBER IT!

Say, that was something that nobody had seen and therefore everybody could joke about. Every woman had the same remark and the same grin: "Haven't I seen my husband?"

Before the parade had gone half a square Fifth Avenue was blocked. Apart from the interference of the band and the sandwiches with vehicular traffic, there was the paralysis of the pedestrians. The Peacock Parade halted. Slim figures, half-naked, flat-bosomed, stalked swayingly to the curb and stared with eyes in which was the insolent sex challenge that New York males answer with furs and jewels. And as they looked the challenge of sex died in the eyes of the women: the marchers had no sex; anybody could see they had no money!

And the men, too, ceased to look stallion-eyed at the women and gazed on the parade of sandwich-men, who, in the middle of the street, with the machines and the horses, slouched on—almost rubbing valuable varnish on automobiles and carriages, careless beasts!

Presently the hurrying crowds slowed their gait and kept step to Chopin's dirge—slowly! slowly!—until all Fifth Avenue was a vast funeral procession; only the marchers could not have told you what it was that long since had died of gold on Fifth Avenue! Slowly! Slowly! And with the funereal gait other changes came—in the grimace of the over-red lips and the look of the over-bold eyes. But never the slightest change in the color of the cheeks, which was there to stay, in rain, shine, or snow.

"What is it? What is it?" whispered ten thousand people.

From the middle of the street it sounded like the whimper of ten thousand little foamy waves dying on a flat beach. It made the filthy bipeds who marched look at the thronged sidewalks.

They saw the usual Fifth Avenue crowd. They saw the full-fed, clock-hating faces of professional idlers; the drawn features of the busy money-maker with his perennial anxieties; the suddenly immobilized grimaces of millionaires intended to conceal the fear of God knew what; the contemptuous countenances of waiters from fashionable restaurants, who, like ordained priests, knew America at its worst, but, unlike priests, could not pity; healthy American boys with clean faces and the eyes of animals.

And the sexless marchers saw also healthy American girls with delicate features and dreadful, price-quoting eyes, and faces not clean and healthy, but dead-white and dead-crimson; they saw not women's faces, but marble tombstones on which the epitaphs were scarlet letters that told what the price was, so that the professional prostitutes no longer wasted time advertising with the same ink, but used downcast eyes as bait.

There was a gap of about thirty feet between the first detachment of Rutgers's marching advertisements and the next. The spectators, seeking explanations, saw a cadaverous-looking man, hollow-cheeked, sunken-eyed, white-lipped, who stepped as though the avenue were full of puddles of nitroglycerine—uncertainly, fearfully! And this death-on-foot carried a white-cloth board black-bordered like a funeral-card. And thereon money-makers and money-spenders, clubmen and waiters, shop-girls and millionairesses—all Fifth Avenue!—saw this:

HAIL, NEW YORK!

WE WHO ARE ABOUT TO DIE

SALUTE YOU!

There followed another gap of thirty feet, so that the valedictorian of the doomed might be seen of all. Then came eighty-odd sandwich-bearers, appositely legended. From time to time the valedictorian would stagger as you have seen horses do on their last trip to the glue-factory. Whereupon a couple of the non-descripts behind him would shuffle up and endeavor to uphold him. And the others slouched on, deep-eyed, gaunt, famine-stricken, rum-ravaged, disease-smitten—ex-bookkeepers, and superannuated mechanics, and disgraced yeggmen, and former merchants—and former men, too!

At Thirty-ninth Street a young woman dressed richly but in perfect taste stood on the very corner. Her hair had glints of sunshine and her eyes were like twin heavens, clean, and clear, and blue, and infinitely deep. And the Madonna face saw the Death face, looked at the thing that had been a man, and read his salutation. And in one of the pauses of the "Funeral March" a thousand people heard her laugh, and heard her exclaim with a contagious relish, spiced with undisguised admiration:

"If that ain't the limit!"

New York had spoken!

And the chauffeurs near her laughed in sympathy. And gray heads stuck out of limousine windows, and millionaires and their female stood up in their snail-moving touring-cars, and top-hatted coachmen turned impassive heads on neck-hinges long since rusted with the arrogance of menials. And upon their faces and along the ranks that lined both sides of the great avenue a slow grin spread—uncertain, hesitating, dubious! The great American sense of humor was trying to assert itself. Hendrik's joke was not labeled "Joke" plainly enough. Otherwise the spectators would have shown much earlier their ability to laugh at death, hunger, disease, misery, drunkenness, honesty, despair—anything, so long as it was the death, hunger, disease, misery, drunkenness, honesty, and despair of others.

But at Tiffany's corner the traffic policeman stopped the leader of the band; and he stopped the band; and the band stopped Rutgers; and Rutgers stopped his army; and that stopped all traffic on the Avenue up to Forty-second Street.

Hendrik Rutgers hurried forward and explained, calmly: "Here, officer. I am the secretary of the National Street Advertising Men's Association. We have a permit from the Mayor. Here it is."

"Oh, advertising! I see!" said the policeman, and smiled appreciatively. He had feared they might be starving men.

"Yes," said H. Rutgers, quite loudly, "advertising the fact that a man out of a job in New York, who is too proud to beg and too honest to steal, has to become a sandwich-man and make from twenty-five to forty-five cents for ten hours work—not in China or Mexico, but in New York, to-day; men who are willing to work, but are old or sickly or have no regular trade. You know how the Mayor feels about the rights of citizens who are not rich and the duty of paid officials of this city. He and I are opposed to too much law in the way of clubs. So kindly pass the word down the line, officer."

The big traffic policeman, far more impressed by the delivery than by the speech itself, touched his hand to his cap so very respectfully that the grinning crowd at once became serious. Each woman turned on her neighbor and frowned furiously the unuttered scolding for the other's unseemly levity.

"What does it mean?" asked hundreds. All looked toward Hendrik Rutgers for explanation, for official permission to laugh at a spectacle that was not without humorous suggestions. But he kept them guessing. This is called knowledge of stage effects; also psychological insight; also cheap politics. Historians even refer to it as statesmanship.

Something that makes one hundred thousand New-Yorkers gasp and stare is not necessarily news; an ingenius street-sign or a five-dollar-a-day Steeple Jack could do it. But that not one of one hundred thousand omniscient New-Yorkers knew whether to laugh, to curse, or to weep at what they saw made that sight very decidedly "news." An interrogation marker in one hundred thousand otherwise empty heads loomed gigantic before the hair-trigger minds of the city editors. They sent their star men to get answers to the multitudinous question; and, if possible, also the facts.

Just south of Thirty-fourth Street the Herald, Times, Sun, and Evening Journal reporters overtook H. Rutgers. He made the procession halt. That again made all Fifth Avenue halt. He waited until all the reporters were near him, and then he spoke very slowly, for he guessed that shorthand and literature do not necessarily coexist.

"The sandwich-men have formed a union. It includes sandwich-men from the five boroughs. We are going to have an annual dinner at six o clock—we are not fashionable folk, you know. There will be speeches. Did you ask why we should have a union? I'll tell you why: because we didn't have one; because employers have not thought of us as human beings, but as human derelicts. A starving man who doesn't want to steal and is ashamed to beg will sandwich for thirty cents a day ten hours; and he can't always collect his wages. And who is going to fight for him? When you think of the importance of all advertising, do you consider the peculiar picturesqueness of advertising through sandwiches? In the Middle Ages they had their heralds and their pursuivants—the sandwich-men of feudalism; and later the town criers; and later still, us. Do you know in what esteem sandwich-men are held in the south of France and in the Orient? Did you know that sandwich-men take the place of bells on Good Friday in Moldavia? Do you know why there are no commercial sandwich-men in Russia or in Spain? Did you ever read what Confucius wrote about 'Those men who with letters on their garments dispel the ignorance of buyers,' and a lot more? Did you? Did any clergyman ever tell you that sandwich-men are, beyond the shadow of a doubt, alluded to twice in the Old and five times in the New Testament? Don't you think that as intelligent investigators of industrial conditions and of the submerged tenth it would be worth your time to come to our annual dinner and hear our version of it? And also see how starving men eat the first square meal of the year?"

Of course it was pure inspiration and, as such, impressive.

"Yes, sir," respectfully replied the Evening Journal man—a tall, dark chap with gold-rimmed spectacles and a friendly smile. "What's the name of the restaurant?"

"Caspar Weinpusslacher's Colossal Restaurant," said H. Rutgers.

"Spell it!" chorused the reporters; and H. Rutgers did, slowly and patiently. At once the Evening Journalist rushed on to telephone the caption of a story to his paper. That would enable the office to get out an extra; after which would come another edition with the story itself. He was the best head-line reporter in all New York.

Long before the National Street Advertising Men's Association reached the Colossal Restaurant, Caspar Weinpusslacher converted himself into a Teutonic hurricane and changed thirty short tables into three, long ones. On his lips was a smile, and in his heart a hope that glowed like an incandescent twenty-dollar gold piece, for Max Onthemaker had rushed in breathlessly and gasped:

"He is a smart feller, all right. What?" And he gave an Evening Journal to Caspar Weinpusslacher, wherein he read this:

SANDWICH PARADE

Pathetic Protest against Industrial Slavery

Paupers Who Will Neither Steal Nor Beg Forced by Society to Starve

Sandwich Wages, Two Cents an Hour

Men About to Die Salute New York

There the article abruptly ended.

"Weinie," said Max, exultingly, "this makes you. Be very nice to Mr. Rutgers. You'll have to pay him thousands of dollars—"

"Then, you vas in league mit him?"

"No. But he's a genius!"

"I thought he was German," said C. Weinpusslacher, controversially.

"Get busy, Weinie. The crowd will be here in a minute. And don't ask Mr. Rutgers to pay for his dinner."

"Why not?" growled Weinie. He was on his way to a sure million. That made the growl natural.

"What is thirty dollars for their dinner to thirty thousand dollars worth of free advertising?"

"Thirty dollars," observed C. Weinpusslacher, thriftily, "is thirty dollars!"

"Bah!"

"I tell you, it is, mister." C. Weinpusslacher frowned pugnaciously.

But Onthemaker knew his man. So he said: "I'll get Meyer Rabinowitz to give us an option on the property to-night before he reads the newspapers. As Rutgers said, once your place is a success, you'll have to pay any price the landlord wants. Meyer's got you! I can hear your squeals of agony already!"

Max shook his head so gloomily that C. Weinpusslacher actually began to tremble with joy. The thought of making money did not move him. The thought of losing the money he had not made, did. Oh yes; born money-makers!

By the time H. Rutgers arrived at the Colossal Restaurant Caspar Weinpusslacher, Esq., and the Hon. Maximilian Onthemaker had constituted themselves into a highly enthusiastic reception committee, for the crowd that came with H. Rutgers filled the street so that all you heard was the squealing and cursing of persons that were pressed against iron newel-posts of the old-fashioned stoops or precipitated into basements and cellars. Sixty policemen, impartially cursing the Mayor, Epictetus, and H. Rutgers, and yearning for the days of Aleck Williams, when clubs were made to be used and not to be fined for, endeavored to keep the crowd moving.

"You'll find everything ready, Mr. Rutgers," said M. Onthemaker. "Here is one of my cards. The name, you will see," he almost shouted, "is spelled with a k not h—O-n-t-h-e-m-a-k-e-r. Everything is ready, Mr. Secretary." He looked at the reporters out of a corner of his eye.

"And it won't cost you nothing, not one cent," interjected C. Weinpusslacher, eagerly and distinctly. "Any feller wot's smart like you, Mr. Rutchers—"

"And the poor starving men," quickly interjected M. Onthemaker, not wishing for character-analyses yet, "who are the victims of a ruthless industrial system—"

"Yah, sandwiches!" put in C. Weinpusslacher.

M. Onthemaker grimaced horribly, and C. Weinpusslacher was silent for a minute. Presently he told Rutgers, "They get enough to eat here, anyways, I bet you."

He glared with a sort of malevolent triumph at M. Onthemaker, until he heard the boss say in stern accents:

"That, of course, Weinpusslacher, includes a couple of beers apiece."

"Of course! Of course!" put in M. Onthemaker, hastily. "The representatives of the press will sit at their own table, at which I am to have the honor of presiding, Max Onthemaker—O-n-t-h-e-m—"

"We got it down," the Evening Journal man assured him, amiably.

C. Weinpusslacher was so angry that anybody should help him to make money, when half the pleasure is in making it yourself out of your fellow-men, that he said, spitefully, "There will be free beer!"

Hendrik Rutgers took an innkeeper's notion and made of it the most remarkable platform in the history of party government. He said, sternly, "Everything free for free men!"

A grunting murmur ran down the line of derelicts—the inarticulate tribute of great thirst to great leadership. In a hundred pairs of eyes a human hope kindled its fire for the first time in two hundred years!

Great indeed was Hendrik Rutgers!

His faithful sandwiches would go through fire for him! A man who can get free beer for Sahara throats could put out the fire—with more beer.

The boards were hung around the great hall in plain sight of the reporters, who copied the legends, that all America might read. While they were writing, Caspar was hiring thirty extra waiters and turning people away. Hendrik went from man to man, sternly warning that no one must begin to eat until he gave the order. A violation of his order would entail the loss of the dinner and most of the scalp. He also said they must not linger over their victuals, and told them that two extra beers apiece would be awarded to the ten men who finished first.

He had made up his mind that the cold and callous world should be told how starving men eat.

What do people who get enough to eat know about starving men?

Nothing!

They impede the world's progress by being content. Human pigs!

In a surprisingly short time one hundred complete dinners were in front of one hundred starving men. Six bartenders were busy filling schooners—in plain sight of the starving men. But the boss's awful frown held them in check. Each man began to tremble in advance—fearing he might not be one of the ten to win the extra schooners.

The reporters looked at the hundred faces and began to write like mad.

Hendrik rose. There was an awed silence. The reporters stopped writing. One hundred inferior maxillaries began to castanet away like mad. The boss held up a hand. Then he said in measured tones:

"May God be good to us sandwich-men again this year! Eat!"

When he said eat, men ate. Don't forget the moral effect of commanding and being obeyed!

They flung themselves on the food like wild beasts, and made animal noises in their throats. They disdained forks, knives, and spoons. They used claws and jaws on meat, coffee, bread, potatoes, soup, or pie whichever was nearest.

No man wanted to be the last to finish.

"My God!" exclaimed the Evening Post man. "This is absolutely horrible!"

"Pippin!" said the creative artist from the Sun.

All of them would treat it as a Belasco production. That is, they would impart to it all the dignity and importance of a political convention.

At 8 p.m. Hendrik Rutgers, man of destiny, rose to speak. He never even glanced at the reporters. He said, very earnestly, to his tattered cohorts:

"Comrades! Ours is beyond question the only labor union in the United States, and, for all I know, in the entire world, that is not monopolistic in its tendencies. We are individualists because advertising is not a science nor a trade, but an art, and we are artists. When the advertisers' greed saw the artists' hunger, the result was that!" He pointed to five score dehumanized faces before him.

"Great!" murmured the Sun man.

"Hereafter watch the sandwich-man, and in one corner of the sign look for the union label—a skeleton carrying a coffin, to remind us that no matter what a man is when he is born, he goes to his Maker between boards. In death all men are equal, and in his coffin a man is the Ultimate Sandwich!"

"That's literature!" muttered the serious young man from the Journal.

"We refuse to be thieves. Therefore we decline to do any sandwiching for patent medicines, banks, quack cures, fraudulent stores, immoral books, coal-dealers, fake doctors, suburban real estate, bum chiropodists, or disreputable people of any kind, class, or nature whatsoever. We start with professional ethics, which is where most professions end. We who have been the lowest of the low class that work for their daily bread are now the S.A.S.A.—the Society of American Sandwich Artists. All we ask is permission to live! Our headquarters will be in the Allied Arts Building on Fifth Avenue."

His speech had quotable phrases. A country that once cast the biggest vote in its history for the square deal, that makes minions of dollars out of asking you if you see that hump, and from promising to do the rest if you push the button, and boasts of the thorn that made a rose famous, is bound to be governed by phrases. The only exceptions are the Ten Commandments. They are quotable, but not memorable.

All the newspapers spread themselves on that story. In their clubs the managing editors heard their fellow-members talk about the parade, and this made each M.E. telephone to the city editor to play it up. It was too picturesque not to be good reading, and since good reading is always easy writing, both reporters and editorial writers enjoyed themselves. That made them artists instead of wage-earners.

Hendrik Rutgers possessed the same quality of political instinct that nearly made the luckiest man in the world President of the United States. By blindly following it, young Mr. Rutgers jumped into the very heart of a profound truth. And once he landed, the same sublimated sagacity impelled him to stamp with both feet hard. Then, unemotionally perceiving exactly what he had done, he proceeded very carefully to pick out his own philosophical steps, in order to be able later on to prove that he had been coldly logical. Impulsive humanity always distrusts impulsiveness in others. Leaders, therefore, always call them carefully considered plans.

In all irreligious countries, as Hendrik Rutgers, astutely arguing backward, told himself, the people who buy, sell, and vote are alive only to To-day and therefore dare not take heed of the Hereafter. This has exalted news to the dignity of a sacred commandment.

In such communities success is necessarily a matter of skilful publicity.

Who is the greatest of all press agents, working while you sleep and even when you blunder?

The People!

The front page of the newspaper is therefore the arena of to-day!

To live in that page, all you have to do is to become News.

Once you become News all the king-making reporters of all the nation-making newspapers become your press agents. The public does the rest and pays all salaries.

Thrilled by his discovery, Hendrik called Max Onthemaker to one side and, with the air of a man risking one hundred and two millions of cash, said to him: "I have decided to make you chief counsel of my society. Your services will entitle you to represent me."

Never had man been so lavishly overpaid for breathing since the dawn of historical time. Hendrik went on, still imperial in bounty:

"I have in mind some great things. Every one of them will be worth as much space as the newspapers will give to this dinner. Do you see your chance?"

"I can't live on newspaper articles," began Max, elated but dissembling.

"You can die without them. Chronic obscurity; acute starvation," said Hendrik Rutgers in his clinical voice. "I not only do not propose to pay you a cent, but I expect you to pay all necessary expenses out of your privy purse without a murmur—unless said murmur is intended to express your legal opinion and your gratitude. I shall give you an opportunity to represent my society"—you would have sworn he was saying my regiment—"in actions involving the most famous names in America."

"For instance?" asked M. Onthemaker, trying to speak skeptically, that his eagerness might not show too plainly.

Hendrik Rutgers named six of the mightiest.

"You're on, Mr. Rutgers," said Max, enthusiastically. "Now, I think—"

"Wait!" interrupted Hendrik, coldly. "Never forget that I am not your press agent. You are mine."

"There will be glory enough to go around," said Max Onthemaker in his police-court voice. "When do we begin?"

"To-morrow."

"Yes, sir. And now—"

"My now is your when! Your job is to find the legal way of helping the Cause."

"I will!" promised Onthemaker, heartfully. The Cause would be his Cause. He'd fix it so they couldn't leave out his name.

But Hendrik saw the gleam in the lawyer's eye.

That's the worst of all thoughts of self. They invariably are undisguisable.

"The Cause, Onthemaker," said Hendrik, sternly, "is the cause of the Society of American Sandwich Artists. We are not associated to make money for ourselves, but for our employers. This is revolutionary. Moreover, we are not working-men, but artists. Therefore our men not only love their work, but are law-abiding. This will make the employers helpless to retaliate. We shall never do anything without invoking the aid of the law, for I believe that the law will help the poor not less than the rich if properly—"

"Advertised," prompted Max. "I get you. In the forum of the people's liberties—the daily papers—is the place to try—"

Hendrik held up a hand. He had chosen the right lawyer. The interpretation of the law depends exclusively upon the tone of voice. All reporters are trained to be judges of elocution. They have to be, in republics.

"To-morrow—" Here Hendrik paused.

Max's face paled slightly as he waited. What was coming?

Hendrik finished: "I shall telephone to you!"

Max drew in his breath sharply.

Hendrik then nodded. It meant, "You have my permission to retire!"

"Thank you, Mr. Rutgers," said Max, respectfully, and withdrew from the presence on tiptoe.

Hendrik then beckoned to his sandwich lieutenant. "Fleming!" he said, sternly.

Fleming threw up an arm defensively from force of habit—the slave's immemorial salute. Then he grinned sheepishly. Then he said, eagerly, "Yes, boss!"

"I'm going to make you chief of the Meal Ticket Department, and I expect you to maintain discipline. But if I ever hear of any graft, such as accepting bonuses—" He closed his jaws and his fists. When you close both at the same time you inevitably win the debate. It is, however, difficult.

"Honest, b-boss," stammered Fleming, his eyes on Hendrik's right fist. "Honest, I—"

The boss's right unclenched itself. Fleming drew in a deep breath.

"Get the names and addresses of all the men here—in their own writing. Ask Onthemaker for a blank-book, and when the men have signed give the book back to him. They've got to sign!"

Fleming's face was pale but resigned. Signatures are lethal weapons in all industrial democracies. Ask the note-teller in any bank. But the boss had said, "Sign!"

Kismet!

"And you keep a book of your own so that when I want ten or twenty men of a certain type and appearance you will know where to find them. I hold you responsible!"

Poor Fleming almost collapsed. Responsibility in a republic really means accountability. Our entire system of law, as a great psychologist has pointed out, is based upon the same confusion of definitions.

Hendrik saw the fear of statutory punishment seep into his lieutenant's soul. He stopped it at exactly the right point.

"Fleming," he said, kindly, "I trust you!"

Fleming felt himself decorated with the Grand Cross of the Order of Unearned Food. It made him into an active citizen.

"I'll get the men when you shout, boss!" he promised, proudly, realizing the meaning of the duty of a voter.

However, it would never do to have your creatures think they also have the power to create. Therefore Hendrik said, "If you don't—"

"I'll get 'em for you, b-boss. Honest, I will!" meekly promised Fleming, taking his place in the ranks. He was an ideal cabinet officer.

Hendrik Rutgers did not know men. He guessed them. He thus saved himself the fatigue of thinking.

Weinpusslacher swaggered by, counting his millions. He had begun to feel haughty. Hendrik stopped him by lifting his right forefinger and then smartly moving it Hendrikward.

"Weinie, I guess you're famous. You give the free meal tickets to Onthemaker. And don't try to cheat!"

"I never do such—" began Caspar, angrily.

"You never will to me," interrupted Hendrik, making Weinie's unuttered words his own. It took away from Weinie all sense of proprietorship in his own property.

This also is called genius. Such men should be tax-collectors instead of railroad bankers.

Hendrik glanced toward the reporters and saw that Mr. Onthemaker was talking to them and looking at him—looking at him both ingratiatingly and proudly. He therefore knew that Max was being quoted by the newspaper men, and the only subject on which they would quote him was Hendrik Rutgers. He also knew that the desire for reflected glory, in all newspaper-reading countries, is so strong that Max would be a great political historian. The best way to blow your own horn is to lend it to an obscure friend.

Hendrik Rutgers left the Colossal Restaurant certain that he was News, and that his job consisted of continuing to be News.

To become News and then to continue to be News a man must be plausible, persistent, and picturesque.

There was no altitude of success to which he might not climb, provided he lost six-sevenths of his name and mutilated his surname in like degree.

He must become two letters: H.R.

He thus would become an immortal during his own lifetime, which was immortality enough for any man who merely wished to acquire fame, wealth, and one wife in his own country.

So brightly lighted was his road that he knew exactly where to plant each foot—in the front page!

He must do it all. Therefore he must make others do the work. But this man who now was a million miles beyond all bank clerks knew exactly what he needed, which made it easy for him to know exactly whom he needed. This knowledge would establish the basis on which the workers must work.

He sought a newspaper-advertising agency; ordered the manager to insert in all the morning papers the same advertisement, in large type, with triple spacing, to show that money was no object.

This always impresses people who wish to make money.

The advertisement read:

WANTED—first-class advertising canvassers. i am anxious to pay 50 per cent. more than is customary to such men. this does not mean you, my hungry and hopeful friend! Apply between 9 and 10 a.m. to