wondering if you won't
have to take that boy out of school and put him to work. Isn't that so?"

Welkie made no answer.

"All right. But before I go any farther, let me say that I want you, Mr.
Welkie, for our new job."

"What's wrong with the man you've got?"

"He won't do. You're the one man we want, and if there's money enough in
our strong box, we're going to get you. And now that I've got that off,
let me show you where it is for your higher--I say your higher, not
alone your moneyed--interests to come with us, Mr. Welkie. There's that
boy of yours--you'd surely like to see him a great man?"

"I surely wouldn't dislike it."

"Good. Then give him a chance. Get rid first of the notion that a poor
boy has as good a chance as another. He hasn't. I know that all our old
school-books told us different--along with some other queer things. No
wonder. Nine times out of ten they were got up by men born poor and
intended for children born poor. It is a fine old myth in this country
that only the poor boy ever gets anywhere. As a matter of fact, the poor
boys outnumber the comfortably born boys ten to one, yet run behind in
actual success. Even history'll tell you that. Alexander--son of a king.
Caesar? Frederick the Great? Oh, loads of 'em! You don't seem to think
much of that?"

"Not a great deal," smiled Welkie. "If you're going to call the long
roll of history, it looks to me like it's a mistake to name only three,
or twenty-three, or thirty-three men. You cast your eye along that
little book-shelf there and----"

"Oh, I've been looking them over--Dante and Michael Angelo and Homer and
Shakespeare and that knight-errant Spaniard and the rest of 'em. But I'm
not talking of poets and philosophers and the like. I'm talking of the
men who bossed the job when they were alive."

"But how about those who bossed it after they were dead?"

"But, damn it, Welkie, I'm talking of men of action."

"Men of action or--ditch-diggers?"

"What!"

"That's what I call most of 'em, Necker--ditch-diggers. If your man of
action hasn't himself thought out what he's doing, that's what he looks
like to me--a ditch-digger, or at best a foreman of ditch-diggers. And a
ditch-digger, a good ditch-digger, ought to be respected--until he
thinks he's the whole works. Those kings of yours may have bossed the
world, Necker, but, so long's we're arguing it, who bossed them?"

"You mean that the man who bosses the world for thirty or forty ye