To the Victors!

I'd like to make a toast, if I may. Gentlemen? A toast?

Thank you.

I'd like to toast the Captains of Industry gathered here. You are surely the champions of the Capitalist Ideal. You gentlemen are well-dressed, well-educated, and more than a little clever. You've made fabulous lives for yourselves and your families.

Here you and your wives sit, dining on such meals as the Princes of Maciavelli's era never saw, attired in sumptuous extravagences that would darken the eyes of the greatest misers in history. Mammon himself knew not the wealth you fine men have reaped.

Money. It is our god and our devil- benifactor and nemesis. And we great men, for whom nothing is beyond reach, we ever seek greater hights of dizzying power. Come what may, there will always be people making money.

And as you well-dressed gentlement and exquisite ladies sit, eating the finest sort of luxuries we know, take but a moment and look to the main window. All this joy and cheer, when you fine men and women are oblivious to the hungry stares of those urchins beyond that darkened pane. And while we cannot see them or hear them, I can assure you all, that the destitue without gaze with envy and rancor within.

But why should they? Is it not the nature of our buisness to reward the hard-working, to punish the lazy? That a poorer class exists at all is merely a testiment to the unwillingness of humanity to better itself.

And we should give another toast, while our glasses are still raised, to the apathy of the middle class and the submissiveness of the lower class; without these fine co-conspirators, our opulence would be utterly untenable. We've built empires as the Egyptians of old: on the broken backs of a thousand thousand slaves, mortaring each stone with the blood and tears of the facelss mass that crowds beyond that dark window. The Jew of Venice had it right: barren metal can be made fruitful if one feeds it but a little blood.

And so, Cheers! To you, brave Captains of Industry! To you, o paragons of Progress! Long health, dear Lords of Capitalism! You have made the mass of democracy your serfs and stamped out all mercy from religion. Yours are the Kingdoms of Commerce, and your reign shall be greater than any king ordained by State or God could ever hope to achieve.