I cannot express it, but I can only declare, living as I do in a day like this, that to me there is a kind of colossal naked poetry in what Pierpont Morgan has done which I cannot but acknowledge with gratitude and hope.  Though there be in it, as in all massive things, a brutality perhaps like that of the moving glaciers, like the making and boiling of coal in the earth, like death, like childbirth, like the impersonality of the sea, my imagination can never get past a kind of elemental, almost heathen poetry or heathen-god poetry in Pierpont Morgan’s Blow or shock upon our world.  There may be reason to doubt as to whether it is to be called a heaven-poetry or a hell-poetry—­something so gaunt and simple is there about it; but here we are with all our machines around us, with our young, rough, fresh nations in the act of starting a great civilization once more on this old and gentle earth, and I can only say that poetry (though it be new, or different, or even a little terrible) is the one thing that now, or in any other age, men begin great civilizations with.

* * * * *

I have tried to express the spirit of what Morgan’s genius seized unconsciously by the grim, resistless will of his age, has wrought into his career.

But in the background of my mind as I see Pierpont Morgan, there is always the man who will take his place, and if I did not see the man coming, and coming rapidly, who is to take Mr. Morgan’s place, I admit that Mr. Morgan himself would be a failure, a disaster, a closed wall at the end of the world.

No one man will take Mr. Morgan’s place, but the typical man in the group of men that will take his place will justify Mr. Morgan’s work, by taking this world in his hand and riveting his vision on where Morgan’s vision leaves off.  As Morgan has fused railroads, iron, coal, steamships, seas, and cities, the next industrial genius shall fuse the spirits and the wills of men.  The Individualists and the Socialists, the aristocracies and democracies, the capitalists and the labourers shall be welded together, shall be fused and transfused by the next Morgan into their ultimate, inevitable, inextricable, mutual interests.

The chief characteristic of the new industrial leader is coming to be social imagination or the power of seeing the larger industrial values in human gifts and efficiencies, the more human and intellectual energies of workmen, the market value of their spirits, their imaginations, and their good-will.  The underpinning and Morganizing work has been done; the power of instant decision which Mr. Morgan has had, has been very often based on a lack of imagination about the things that got in his way; but the things that get in the way now, the big, little-looking things—­are the things on which the new and inspired millionaires’ imagination will find its skill and accumulate its power.  It is men’s spirits that are now in the way; they have been piling up and accumulating