ty;
they fused, it was a council of genius. It struck boldly for riches,
for political influence, and the two subserved each other. With amazing
foresight it spent great sums of money on the art of flying, holding
that invention back against an hour foreseen. It used the patent laws,
and a thousand half-legal expedients, to hamper all investigators who
refused to work with it. In the old days it never missed a capable man.
It paid his price. Its policy in those days was vigorous--unerring,
and against it as it grew steadily and incessantly was only the chaotic
selfish rule of the casually rich. In a hundred years Graham had become
almost exclusive owner of Africa, of South America, of France, of
London, of England and all its influence--for all practical purposes,
that is--a power in North America--then the dominant power in America.
The Council bought and organised China, drilled Asia, crippled the Old
World empires, undermined them financially, fought and defeated them.

And this spreading usurpation of the world was so dexterously
performed--a proteus--hundreds of banks, companies, syndicates, masked
the Council's operations--that it was already far advanced before common
men suspected the tyranny that had come. The Council never hesitated,
never faltered. Means of communication, land, buildings, governments,
municipalities, the territorial companies of the tropics, every human
enterprise, it gathered greedily. And it drilled and marshalled its men,
its railway police, its roadway police, its house guards, and drain and
cable guards, its hosts of land-workers. Their unions it did not fight,
but it undermined and betrayed and bought them. It bought the world
at last. And, finally, its culminating stroke was the introduction of
flying.

When the Council, in conflict with the workers in some of its huge
monopolies, did something flagrantly illegal and that without even the
ordinary civility of bribery, the old Law, alarmed for the profits of
its complaisance, looked about it for weapons. But there were no
more armies, no fighting navies; the age of Peace had' come. The
only possible war ships were the great steam vessels of the Council's
Navigation Trust. The police forces they controlled; the police of
the railways, of the ships, of their agricultural estates, their
time-keepers and order-keepers, outnumbered the neglected little forces
of the old country and municipal organisations ten to one. And they
produced flyi