So it was that he had come this far, and the roadway to his present height was marked by the cripples he had left behind him, without compunction, without mercy, without compassion. Bankrupts strewed his way, broken men of purpose higher than his own, useful factors in the progress of human life, builders and creators who had advanced the interest of the commonwealth, but who had been more brilliant in construction than they had been in reaping the rewards of their building. It was for Allison to do this. It had been his specialty; the reaping of rewards. It had been his faculty to permit others to build, to encourage them in it, and then, when the building was done, to wrest it away from the builders. That marked him as the greatest commercial genius of his time; and he had much applause for it.
Women. Yes, there had been women, creatures of a common mould with whom he had amused himself, had taken them in their freshness, and broken them, and thrown them away; this in his earlier years. But in his maturity, he had bent all his strength to a greater passion; the acquirement of all those other things which men had wanted and held most dear, among them acquisition, and power, and success. Perhaps it had been bad for him, this concentration, for now it left him, at the height of his maturity, with mistaken fancies, with long pent fires, with disproportionate desires. Bringing to these, he had the tremendously abnormal moral effect of never having been thwarted in a thing upon which he had set his mind, and of believing, by past accomplishment, that anything upon which he had set his wish must be his, or else every victory he had ever gained would be swept aside and made of no value. He must accomplish, or die!
He was without God, this man; he had nothing within him which conceded, for a moment, a greater power than his own. In all his mental imagery, which was rich enough in material things, there was no conception of a Deity, or of a need for one. To what should he pray, and for what, when he had himself to rely upon? Worship was an idealistic diversion, a poetic illusion, the refuge of the weak, who excused their lack of strength by ascribing it to a mysterious something beyond the control of any man. He tolerated the popular notion that there must be a God, as he tolerated codes of social ethics; the conventions which laid down, for instance, what a gentleman might or might not do, externally, and still remain a gentleman. In the meantime, if a man-made law came between him and the accomplishment of his ends, he broke it, without a trace of thought that he might be wrong. Laws were the mutual safeguard of the weak, to protect themselves against the encroachment of the strong; and it was in the equally natural province of the strong to break down those safeguards. In the same way he disregarded moral laws. They, too, were for the upholding of the weak, and the mere fact that they existed was proof enough that they were an acknowledgment of the right of the strong to break them.