Yet in spite of their gloomy predictions of his speedy ruin, he had steadily grown in power and influence.
The work on which he had just entered was an investigation before an unusually intelligent Grand Jury of the criminal acts of a group of the most daring and powerful financiers of the world. These men controlled through their position as trustees of the treasuries of great corporations more millions than the combined treasuries of the governments of the Republic--State and National. The act was not only daring, it was extremely dangerous. Under certain conditions it might produce a panic--so daring and dangerous was the move that its first announcement was received as a joke by the press. The idea of a young upstart questioning the honesty and position of the men who controlled the treasuries of the great insurance and trust companies was ridiculous. When he realized the magnitude of the task he had undertaken, he at once put his house in order for the supreme effort. It was necessary that he give up every outside interest that might distract his attention from the greater task.
The one matter of grave importance to which he was giving his time outside his office was his position as advisory counsel to Dr. Woodman in his suit for damages against the Chemical Trust, which had been dragging its course through the courts for years. To his amazement he had just received an offer from Bivens's attorneys to compromise this suit for a hundred thousand dollars. He would of course advise the doctor to accept it immediately. He had never believed he could win a penny.
What could be Bivens's motive in making such an offer? It was impossible that the shrewd little president of the American Chemical Company had anything to fear personally from this attack. His fortune was vast and beyond question. His wealth had grown in the past nine years like magic. Everything his smooth little hand touched had turned to gold. Wherever an industry could pay a dividend, his ferret eyes found it. The process was always the same. He brought together its rival houses, capitalized the new combine for ten times its actual value and bound the burden of this enormous fictitious value as an interest-bearing debt on the backs of the consumers of the goods. The people and their children and their children's children would have to pay it.