DEPARTURE OF THE COMMITTEE.
By the last election for President a man has been put in office who is
the acknowledged tool of the Trusts and Monopolies. He has avowedly
sealed his independence by accepting a nomination brought about by the
ring leader of a syndicate of Railroad Magnates and Steel and Oil Kings.
The people are in such a depressed condition that it is believed no
determined opposition to the dominant party can be conducted. So this
man is a candidate for re-election. The few intrepid men who succeed in
keeping the people's party in the field are derided and denounced as
anarchists. Their very lives are threatened, and in one instance a
Governor of the people being elected, he is immediately assassinated.
But for the certainty of the Plutocrats that their money will win them a
victory, all the leaders of the Independence party would be forcibly
done away with.
The prospects of the coming election look dubious for the people. On
August thirteenth the Committee of Forty determined to take the step for
re-emancipation. The time to strike the telling blow at monopoly is
approaching. The men all know what the work outlined will entail, and
they have brought themselves to look at the matter in much the same
light as the originator of the unparalleled expedient.
"We have been forced into adopting the plan of annihilation," Professor
Talbort declares to Henry Neilson, a fellow committeeman with whom he is
traveling to the Pacific coast.
"I agree with you," replies Neilson, "it is the only course open to us;
we have given every other proposal careful consideration. They would
only temporarily avert a conflict."
"I have pondered on the question of how our acts will be accepted by the
people," the Professor resumes. "I believe they will hail our acts as
those of deliverance."
"They will appreciate that we gave our lives for them," Neilson declares
unhesitatingly.
All of the Forty act with similar coolness.
Men of action are not as a usual thing great talkers; so it is with the
members of this committee. They waive much that would be deemed
essential by less resolute and active men. How the several annihilations
are to be effected is a matter left for each man to decide for himself.
He will have to carry out any plan he devises, and it is considered as
the best policy to let his method be known to no one else. This is the
surest way of avoiding a possible miscarriage of the plan.
The failure of one of the forty men will not then involve the remaining
thirty-nine. Every contingency is weighed. The chance of one or more of
the men going insane because of the frightful secret, is taken into
account and the idea that each man shall decide the details of the
course he is to pursue is adopted.
"I am glad that we parted without formality," Nettinger declares to the
group of committeemen who are his companions on a train that leaves
Chicago for the South.
"It would have unnerved us to speak of our meeting as '_the last_'" says
another of the group. "I have faced danger in my life, but I regard this
as the most astounding departure that has ever been made in the
interests of humanity."
"The future of the Republic is at stake," observes a third. "How will it
all end?"
This is the question that is uppermost in the minds of all.
"There is no time left to weigh the effects of defeat," Nettinger
asserts. "Each of us has but one thing to do, and to do this
successfully he has pledged his life. No man can do more."
The eleven disciples, as they separated after the crucifixion, each to
pursue a separate course, inaugurated the preaching of a great and
potential religion, and their work is the most momentous in history. So
it may prove that this Nineteenth Century aggregation of men united for
the purpose of benefiting their fellowmen, is of tantamount influence on
the human race.
From acting as component parts in a body that exists as a moral protest
against the wrongs of the world and the unrelenting hands of the
usurpers of the right of the people, these forty men go forth as an army
of crusaders.
On the committee of forty there is not a man who has not argued his
conscience into a state of appreciation of the worthiness of the action
he is to perform.
It is past midnight. Two months from this date, on October thirteenth,
the fulfillment of the vows the men have taken, must be made. In the
sixty days that are to intervene will any of these intrepid wills bend
under the pressure of mental anxiety? Will any of them prove a modern
Judas?
Nevins is the last to quit the store-room. He is nervous, almost
hysterical; his thin classical features are distorted and tense, as
though he were undergoing actual physical pain. And indeed to his
sensitive nature, the events of the night are sufficient to unnerve his
mind and body.
He is to meet Carl Metz and Hendrick Stahl in the morning, to start for
the East.
"The syndicate of annihilation is now incorporated," he observes, half
aloud. "I am no longer the promoter; now I assume a place as one of the
avengers of the people. God alone knows how repugnant this plan for
physical vengeance is to me, yet it is better than to permit a storm of
anarchy to come upon us. And the conditions that exist cannot long
continue."
Although every man has been called upon to make a personal sacrifice
there is none who makes a greater one than he. It is not alone the
relinquishment of his position in the world as a patient and industrious
worker; his sacrifice of love; the obliteration of his hope for
preferment, but the extinction of life itself at an age when all men
cherish it most highly.
Nevins is in the heyday of manhood; his forty years and six having been
spent in the perfection of his mental and physical forces. He is
equipped with a quick, perceptive brain that grasps the intricacies of a
problem almost intuitively; his logic is profound. Years of study have
made his mind a storehouse of knowledge.
To Nevins, in the allotment of the proscribed, has fallen the head of
the money trust, a multi-millionaire banker, a financial Magnate known
throughout the civilized world as the most rapacious miser on record.
This man has repeatedly shown that he has no regard for honesty of
purpose, and his moral appreciation is imperceptible. To recount the
deeds of cunning, of fraud, of gigantic robbery that he has committed in
his relentless quest for wealth, would be to retell the story of wrecked
railroads, enormously profitable bond issues and Wall street panics of
the past decade. The obituaries of the hundreds he has ruined afford the
best method of arriving at a partial conception of his power for evil.
"What a privilege to rid the world of this genius of evil!" is Nevins's
inward comment as he reads the fatal slip and sees that upon him has
fallen the lot to execute the sentence of annihilation upon James
Golding, the King of Wall street.