if you’re going to get hair brushes or rubber coats or mattresses or what-not enough for humanity manufactured, the only way is to have the group engaged in it form a wolf-pack, hunting down the public to extract from it as much money as possible.  The salesmen and advertisers take care of this extracting.  Then this money’s to be fought for, by the people engaged in the process, as wolves fight over the carcass of the deer they have brought down together.  This is the fight between the directors of labor and the working-men.  It’s ridiculous to hold that such a wasteful and incoherent system is the only one that will arouse men’s energies enough to get them into action.  It’s absurd to think that business men . . . they’re the flower of the nation, they’re America’s specialty, you know . . . can only find their opportunity for service to their fellow-men by such haphazard contracts with public service as helping raise money for a library or heading a movement for better housing of the poor, when they don’t know anything about the housing of the poor, nor what it ought to be.  Their opportunity for public service is right in their own legitimate businesses, and don’t you forget it.  Everybody’s business is his best way to public service, and doing it that way, you’d put out of operation the professional uplifters who uplift as a business, and can’t help being priggish and self-conscious about it.  It makes me tired the way professional idealists don’t see their big chance.  They’ll take all the money they can get from business for hospitals, and laboratories, and to investigate the sleeping sickness or the boll-weevil, but that business itself could rank with public libraries and hospitals as an ideal element in the life on the globe . . . they can’t open their minds wide enough to take in that.”

Mr. Welles had been following this with an almost painful interest and surprise.  He found it very agitating, very upsetting.  Suppose there had been something there, all the time.  He must try to think it out more.  Perhaps it was not true.  But here sat a man who had made it work.  Why hadn’t he thought of it in time?  Now it was too late.  Too late for him to do anything.  Anything?  The voice of the man beside him grew dim to him, as, uneasy and uncertain, his spirits sank lower and lower.  Suppose all the time there had been a way out besides beating the retreat to the women, the children, and the gardens?  Only now it was too late!  What was the use of thinking of it all?

For a moment he forgot where he was.  It seemed to him that there was something waiting for him to think of it . . .

But oddly enough, all that presented itself to him, when he tried to look, was the story that had nothing to do with anything, which his cousin had told him in a recent letter, of the fiery sensitive young Negro doctor, who had worked his way through medical school, and hospital-training, gone South to practise, and how he had been treated by the white people in the town where he had settled.  He wondered if she hadn’t exaggerated all that.  But she gave such definite details.  Perhaps Mr. Crittenden knew something about that problem.  Perhaps he had an idea about that, too, that might be of help.  He would ask him.