Let us begin by considering what constructive forces may exist in this new plutocracy 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 avarice.  And having done so, there he is.  What is he going to do?  Every step he takes up the ascent to riches gives him new perspectives and new points of view.