Page:Plunder (Perlman).djvu/18

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12
HOUSELIGHTS ON

AMONG AUDIENCE

DARIUS STARK

If I hadn't seen what an unexplored gold mine the foreign market was, I'd still be salesman for the firm I started with. But I quickly saw what I was missing out on.

HAROLD

Father, don't you see the light this casts us in?

DARIUS STARK

How else do you think I got a start? Think you'd be where you are now if I hadn't gone there? I didn't have a father who could set me up in a plush office before I'd proved what I was made of.

HAROLD

You put people out of their jobs because you thought they were superstitious and then their money was good enough to buy your pots?

DARIUS STARK

I don't see what's gotten into you! When did you start sentimentalizing about how we spoiled the traditional ways of natives? Ignorance and superstition were the only traditions they had. Everything I did was for their own benefit, and don't you forget who else benefitted from it! If it wasn't for men like me, our own American continent would today be nothing but another dark continent. It was men like me, not university lawyers like you, who fought the Red Indians and put them on reservations and made it possible for men to live here and build the most powerful nation there ever was! Don't you talk to me about traditional ways until you go and fight the traditional ways as I had to.

PRETORIA

These things must happen every day in every part of