ocracy which already so largely sways American economic and
political development. The first impression is one of extravagant and
aimless expenditure, of a class irresponsible and wasteful beyond all
precedent. One gets a Zolaesque picture of that aspect in Mr. Upton
Sinclair's "Metropolis," or the fashionable intelligence of the popular
New York Sunday editions, and one finds a good deal of confirmatory
evidence in many incidental aspects of the smart American life of Paris
and the Riviera. The evidence in the notorious Thaw trial, after one has
discounted its theatrical elements, was still a very convincing
demonstration of a rotten and extravagant, because aimless and
functionless, class of rich people. But one has to be careful in this
matter if one is to do justice to the facts. If a thing is made up of
two elements, and one is noisy and glaringly coloured, and the other is
quiet and colourless, the first impression created will be that the
thing is identical with the element that is noisy and glaringly
coloured. One is much less likely to hear of the broad plans and the
quality of the wise, strong and constructive individuals in a class than
of their foolish wives, their spendthrift sons, their mistresses, and
their moments of irritation and folly.

In the making of very rich men there is always a factor of good fortune
and a factor of design and will. One meets rich men at times who seem to
be merely lucky gamblers, who strike one as just the thousandth man in a
myriad of wild plungers, who are, in fact, chance nobodies washed up by
an eddy. Others, again, strike one as exceptionally lucky half-knaves.
But there are others of a growth more deliberate and of an altogether
higher personal quality. One takes such men as Mr. J.D. Rockefeller or
Mr. Pierpont Morgan--the scale of their fortunes makes them public
property--and it is clear that we are dealing with persons on quite a
different level of intellectual power from the British Colonel Norths,
for example, or the South African Joels. In my "Future in America" I
have taken the former largely at Miss Tarbell's estimate, and treated
him as a case of acquisitiveness raised in Baptist surroundings. But I
doubt very much if that exhausts the man as he is to-day. Given a man
brought up to saving and "getting on" as if to a religion, a man very
acquisitive and very patient and restrained, and indubitably with great
organising power, and he grows rich beyond the dreams of