Whatever my private beliefs may be as to ghosts and the activities of departed spirits, I am assuming that this old party in the tower is in a spiritual state, and that you did have the visit with him that you have written about, for I have always considered you perfectly truthful.
This old ghost’s continued association with that renowned sea faring gang of phantoms, and his contact with the unholy shade of Waters, probably excluded him from the society of the departed spirits of those who helped to build up the world during the period of his story. Undoubtedly even in spirit realms the line must be drawn some where. Had he enjoyed the advantages of proper ghostly companionship in New York he might have learned that he was haunting a region where some of the great constructive problems of the age are being worked out--where, if he had been alive, he might have felt the financial pulsations of a continent. He would have learned that, outside of the tricky stock manipulators, iniquitous combinations, blue-sky schemers, and hosts of other parasites and pests that always flourish in centers of financial activity, great forces there have helped to lay the foundations upon which the prosperity of the nation rests. Many millions have gone forth from this great financial center that have webbed the map of our country with railway lines, encircled its sea borders with prosperous docks, established mammoth industrial enterprises, erected and endowed universities, libraries and benevolent institutions, founded innumerable charities and movements for the investigation and control of disease, and done hundreds of other things that humanity would never have done for itself without the initiative of individuals with power to give form and effect to ideas for the good of mankind.
The hue and cry against what is called “big business” is the turbulent protest of the untutored mob--the yelp of the Bolshevik. In our modern social structure certain concentrations of wealth are inevitable and seem necessary to our economic life. The physical expression and realization of great individual ideas are impossible without them. Such ideas have developed the potential and latent resources of this country so that it has become a world power. The savages, who at one time owned the entire continent, could not have done this, any more than Captains Teach, Morgan and Kidd, and the rest of that destructive crew would have done it if they could. They would never have made it possible to transport a ton of freight a mile for less than a cent and a quarter, which is now done in America as a result of intelligent organization, co-operation and cumulative effort. In the absence of such highly perfected co-ordination a Chinese coolie, working for twenty cents a day, with two baskets suspended from a yoke on his shoulders, with the greatest physical effort, transports commodities at a rate which would be the equivalent of one ton per mile per day, or twenty cents per ton.