Even his social life served subtly to confirm him, during this period, in the opinions he had brought to it. He mistrusted combinations of capital, because he thought they tended to restrain honest trade, but he believed such combinations could properly and effectively be curbed by legislation, and he had a fine respect for such of his acquaintances as had made their own money by building up their own industries. He doubted certain men in whose hands lay the administration of government, but he was sure that the cure for this was the election of honorable men. He brought to New York, and long retained, what he called a muscular Christianity (he had read Kingsley), and, under its control, he sought a remedy for the world’s evils that he could synthesize with, a respect for authority and an acceptance of the dogma that the individual man is nothing and the omnipotent Deity everything.
He used often to be invited to dinners at the Ruysdaels’ when there was no other guest, because Ruysdael liked this earnest lad and enjoyed long evening talks with him. On one such occasion, his host, little, sallow, with almond eyes that gave him a strangely Japanese appearance, fell to talking of these questions while the two men sat over a glass of port—for Ruysdael liked the old-fashioned English custom of after-dinner port—in the candle-lit, oak-paneled dining-room.
"I can’t understand," said Ruysdael, "the shortsightedness of these really honest men who call property a crime."
"They call it that," said Luke, "because it’s the result of profit."
"Selling dear what you buy cheap, I suppose."
"Yes, that’s one way of putting it, but it’s really wages. It’s the wages that the employer draws for his executive ability: he must be paid for his work if his employees are paid for theirs. It’s the fair return that he gets for the risk he’s run in starting his business, and it’s his reward for his years of saving up his money till he had enough to start that business."
"Of course," said he, "we don’t want the man that’s done these things to use his power so as to prevent other men from doing them, but we haven’t any right to take from him what he’s earned or to stop him from going on earning it."