honor.

Some one has written: "It was a great day for fools when modesty was made
a virtue." I heartily subscribe to that. Life means action; action means
self-assertion; self-assertion rouses all the small, colorless people to
the only sort of action of which they are capable--to sneering at the doer
as egotistical, vain, conceited, bumptious and the like. So be it! I have
an individuality, aggressive, restless and, like all such individualities,
necessarily in the lime-light; I have from the beginning lost no
opportunity to impress that individuality upon my time. Let those who have
nothing to advertise, and those less courageous and less successful than
I at advertisement, jeer and spit. I ignore them. I make no apologies for
egotism. I think, when my readers have finished, they will demand none.
They will see that I had work to do, and that I did it in the only way an
intelligent man ever tries to do his work--his own way, the way natural to
him!

Wild Week! Its cyclones, rising fury on fury to that historic climax of
chaos, sing their mad song in my ears again as I write. But I shall by no
means confine my narrative to business and finance. Take a cross-section
of life anywhere, and you have a tangled interweaving of the action and
reaction of men upon men, of women upon women, of men and women upon one
another. And this shall be a cross-section out of the very heart of our
life to-day, with its big and bold energies and passions--the swiftest and
intensest life ever lived by the human race.

To begin: