re for. But when I looked at what he
thought men were for, at what the planet was for, there was practically
almost nothing. The nearest I came to it was a remark, apparently in a
magazine interview which I cannot quote correctly now, but which
amounted to something like this: "We will never have a great world until
we have some one great artist or poet in it, who sees it as a whole,
focuses it, composes it, makes a picture of it, and gives the men who
are in it a vision to live for."

* * * * *

Since then I have been trying to see what Messrs. Rockefeller, Carnegie,
and Morgan could do to produce and arrange what seemed to me the one
most important, imperative, and immediate convenience their planet could
have, namely, as Mr. Kipling intimated, some man on it, some great
creative genius, who would gather it all up in his imagination--the
beasts, and the people, and the sciences, and the machines--in short,
the planet as a whole, and say what it was for. It is from this point of
view that I have been drawn into writing the following pages on the next
important improvements--what one might call the spiritual Unreal-Estate
Improvements, for Messrs. Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Morgan's property
which will have to be installed. I have been going over the property
more or less carefully in my own way since, studying it and noting what
had been done by the owners, and what possibly might be done toward
arranging authors, inventors, seers, artists, or engineers or other
efficient persons who would be able to inquire, to think out for a
world, to express for it, some faint idea of what it was for.

CHAPTER III

MR. NOBEL TRIES TO MAKE PEOPLE WRITE

Not unnaturally, of course, I turned to see what had already been done
by the more powerful men the planet had produced, in the way of
arranging for the necessary seers and geniuses to run the world with,
and I soon found that by far the most intelligent and far-seeing attempt
that had been made yet in this direction had been made by an inspired,
or semi-inspired, millionaire in Sweden, named Alfred Nobel, an
idealist, who had made a large but unhappy fortune out of an explosive
to stop war with. His general idea had been that dynamite would make war
so terrible that it would shock people into not fighting any more, and
that gradually people, not having to spend their time in thinking of
ways of killing one another, would have more time tha