I sympathize with your feelings
on this matter, Dave, but what's a man to do? It's like war; we must
kill or be killed. Business is war, of a kind. Why, on the property
we are now holding the taxes alone will amount to twenty thousand
dollars a year. And I put it up to you; if we are going to stand on
sentiment, who's going to pay the taxes?"
"I know; I know," said Dave, whose anger over the treatment of the
Hardys was already subsiding. "We are in the grip of the System. As
you have said, it is kill or be killed. Still--in war they don't
usually kill women and non-combatants. That is the point I'm trying to
make. I've no sentiment about others who are in the game as we are.
If you limit your operations to them----"
"The trouble is, you can't. They're wise. They see the bottom going,
and they quit. Most of them have already moved on. A few firms, like
ourselves, will stay and try to fight it out; try, at least, to close
up with a clean sheet, if we must close up. But we can't wind up a
business without selling the stock on hand, and to whom are we to sell
it, if not to people who want it? That is what you seem to object to."
"You place me in rather an unfair light," Dave protested. "What I
object to is taking the life savings of people--people of moderate
circumstances, mainly--in exchange for property which we know to be
worth next to nothing."
"Yet you admit that we must clean up, don't you?"
"Yes, I suppose so.
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