her to produce any influence on the labour market
as a whole, or to make that impression on the public imagination which
could alone raise the matter into a "question of the day." What is
wanted is simply that two or three dukes should try the experiment of
peasant co-operation on a whole county, and try it with a command of
capital which would give the experiment fair play. Whether it succeeded
or not, such an attempt would have a poetic and heroic aspect of a
different order from the usual expenditure of a British peer.

Or we may turn to a wholly different field, the field of art. We are
always ready to cry out against "pot boilers" as we wander through the
galleries of the Academy, and to grumble at the butchers' bills and
bonnet bills which stand between great artists and the production of
great works. But the butchers' bills and bonnet bills of all the forty
Academicians might be paid by a great capitalist without any deep dip
into his money bags, and a whole future opened to English art by the
sheer poetry of wealth. There are hundreds of men with special faculties
for scientific inquiry who are at the present moment pinned down to the
daily drudgery of the lawyer's desk or the doctor's consulting-room by
the necessities of daily bread. A Rothschild who would take a score of
natural philosophers and enable them to apply their whole energies to
investigation would help forward science as really as Newton himself, if
less directly. But there are even direct ways in which wealth on a
gigantic scale might put out a poetic force which would affect the very
fortunes of the world. There are living people who are the masters of
twenty millions; and twenty millions would drive a tunnel under the
Straits of Dover. If increased intercourse means, as is constantly
contended, an increase of friendship and of mutual understanding among
nations, the man who devoted a vast wealth to linking two peoples
together would rise at once to the level of the great benefactors of
mankind. An opportunity for a yet more direct employment of the
influence of wealth will some day or other be found in the field of
international politics. Already those who come in contact with the
big-wigs of the financial world hear whispers of a future when the
destinies of peoples are to be decided in bank parlours, and questions
of peace and war settled, not by the diplomatist and statesman, but by
the capitalist. But as yet these are mere whispers, and no E