Whitman when he told Traubel, "Whatever you do with me, don't prettify
me"; and if there were things in Mr. Morgan's career which he
imperturbably failed to see, Mr. Morgan himself would be the last man
not to try to help people to find out what they are. But living has been
to Mr. Morgan as it is to us (as I write these lines he is seventy-four
years old) a serious, bottomless business. He does not know which the
things are he has not seen. His eyes are magnificently set. They cannot
help us. We must do our own looking.

* * * * *

If I were called upon to speak very quickly and without warning; if any
one suddenly expected me in my first sentence to hit the bull's-eye of
Mr. Morgan's blindness, I think I would try socialism. When the Emperor
William was giving himself the treat of talking with the man who runs,
or is supposed to run, the economics of a world, he found that he was
talking with a man who had not noticed socialism yet, and who was not
interested in it. Most people would probably have said that Morgan was
not interested in socialism enough; but there are very few people who
would not be as surprised as Emperor William was to know that he,
Pierpont Morgan, was not informed about the greatest and, to some of us,
the most threatening, omnipresent, and significant spectre in modern
industrial life.

But when one thinks of it, and, when more particularly, one looks again
at that set look in his eyes, I cannot see how it could possibly have
been otherwise. If Morgan's eyes had suddenly begun seeing all sorts of
human things--the bewildering welter of the individual minds, the
tragedy of the individual interests around him; if he had lost his
imperious sense of a whole--had tried to potter over and piece together,
like the good people and the wonderers, the innumerable entangled wires
of the world, his eyes might have been filled perhaps with the beautiful
and helpless light of the philosophers, with the fire of the prophets,
or with the gentle paralysis of the poets, but he never would have had
the courage to do the great work of his life--to turn down forever those
iron shutters on his eyes and smite a world together.

There was one thing this poor, dizzied, scattered planet needed. With
its quarrelling and its peevish industries, its sick poets and its tired
religions, the one thing this planet needed was a Blow; it needed a man
that could hammer it together. To find fault