Mr. Welles considered this in unconvinced silence.  Mr. Crittenden went on, “Why, sometimes it looks to me like the difference between what’s legitimate in baseball and in tennis.  Every ball-player will try to bluff the umpire that he’s safe when he knows the baseman tagged him three feet from the bag; and public opinion upholds him in his bluff if he can get away with it.  But like as not, the very same man who lies like a trooper on the diamond, if he went off that very afternoon to play tennis would never dream of announcing ‘out’ if his opponent’s ball really had landed in the court,—­not if it cost him the sett and match,—­whether anybody was looking at him or not.  It’s ‘the thing’ to try to get anything you can put over in baseball, anything the umpire can’t catch you at.  And it’s not ‘the thing’ in tennis.  Most of the time you don’t even have any umpire.  That’s it:  that’s not such a bad way to put it.  My wife and I wanted to run our business on the tennis standard and not on the baseball one.  Because I believe, ultimately you know, in fixing things,—­everything,—­national life as well, so that we’ll need as few umpires as possible.  Once get the tennis standard adopted . . .”

Mr. Welles said mournfully, “Don’t get started on politics.  I’m too old to have any hopes of that!”

“Right you are there,” said Mr. Crittenden.  “Economic organization is the word.  That’s one thing that keeps me so interested in my little economic laboratory here.  Political parties are as prehistoric as the mastodon, if they only knew it.”

Mr. Welles said, “But the queer thing is that you make it work.”

“Oh, anybody with a head for business could make it work.  You’ve got to know how to manage your machine before you can make it go, of course.  But that’s not saying you have to drive it somewhere you don’t want to get to.  I don’t say that that workman back there who was making such a beautiful job of polishing that maple could make it go.  He couldn’t.”

Mr. Welles persisted.  “But I’ve always thought, I’ve always seen it, or thought I had . . . that life-and-death competition is the only stimulus that’s strong enough to stir men up to the prodigious effort they have to put out to make a go of their business, start the machine running.  That, and the certainty of all they could get out of the consumer as a reward.  You know it’s held that there’s a sort of mystic identity between all you can get out of the consumer and the exact amount of profit that’ll just make the business go.”

Mr. Crittenden said comfortably, as though he were talking of something that did not alarm him, “Oh well, the best of the feudal seigneurs mournfully believed that a sharp sword and a long lance in their own hands were the strongholds of society.  The wolf-pack idea of business will go the same way.”  He explained in answer to Mr. Welles’ vagueness as to this term, “You know, the conception that