Morgan’s career which he imperturbably failed to see, Mr. Morgan himself would be the last man not to try to help people to find out what they are.  But living has been to Mr. Morgan as it is to us (as I write these lines he is seventy-four years old) a serious, bottomless business.  He does not know which the things are he has not seen.  His eyes are magnificently set.  They cannot help us.  We must do our own looking.

* * * * *

If I were called upon to speak very quickly and without warning; if any one suddenly expected me in my first sentence to hit the bull’s-eye of Mr. Morgan’s blindness, I think I would try socialism.  When the Emperor William was giving himself the treat of talking with the man who runs, or is supposed to run, the economics of a world, he found that he was talking with a man who had not noticed socialism yet, and who was not interested in it.  Most people would probably have said that Morgan was not interested in socialism enough; but there are very few people who would not be as surprised as Emperor William was to know that he, Pierpont Morgan, was not informed about the greatest and, to some of us, the most threatening, omnipresent, and significant spectre in modern industrial life.

But when one thinks of it, and, when more particularly, one looks again at that set look in his eyes, I cannot see how it could possibly have been otherwise.  If Morgan’s eyes had suddenly begun seeing all sorts of human things—­the bewildering welter of the individual minds, the tragedy of the individual interests around him; if he had lost his imperious sense of a whole—­had tried to potter over and piece together, like the good people and the wonderers, the innumerable entangled wires of the world, his eyes might have been filled perhaps with the beautiful and helpless light of the philosophers, with the fire of the prophets, or with the gentle paralysis of the poets, but he never would have had the courage to do the great work of his life—­to turn down forever those iron shutters on his eyes and smite a world together.

There was one thing this poor, dizzied, scattered planet needed.  With its quarrelling and its peevish industries, its sick poets and its tired religions, the one thing this planet needed was a Blow; it needed a man that could hammer it together.  To find fault with this man for not being a seer, or to feel superior to him for not being an idealist, or to heckle him for not being a sociologist, when here he was all the time with this mighty frenzy or heat in him that could melt down the chaos of a world while we looked, weld it to his will, and then lift his arm and smite it, though all men said him nay—­back into a world again—­to heckle over this man’s not being a complete sociologist or professor is not worthy of thoughtful and manful men.