Part 26 (1/2)
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-emanc.i.p.ation. 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 a.s.serts. ”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 cla.s.sical 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 a.s.sume a place as one of the avengers of the people. G.o.d 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.