One single man with enough money and enough religions skill in human nature, who would get into the Sugar Trust with some good, fighting, voting stock, who could make the Sugar Trust do as it would be done by, would make over American industry in twenty years.

He would have thrown up as on a high mountain, before all American men, one great specimen, enviable business.  He would have revealed as in a kind of deep, sober apocalypse, American business to itself.  He would have revealed American business as a new national art form, as an expression of the practical religion, the genius for real things, that is our real modern temperament in America and the real modern temperament in all the nations.

Of course it may not need to be done precisely with the Sugar Trust.

The Meat Trust might do it first, or the Steel Trust.

But it will be done.

Then the Golden Rule, one great Golden Rule-machine having been installed in our trust that knew the most, and was most known, it could be installed in the others.

Religion can be expressed much better to-day in a stock-holder’s meeting than it can in a prayer-meeting.

Charles Cabot, of Boston, walked in quietly to the Stock-holder’s Meeting of the Steel Trust one day and with a little touch of money—­$2,900 in one hand, and a copy of the American Magazine in the other, made (with $2,900) $1,468,000,000 do right.

PART THREE

NEWS AND GOVERNMENT

CHAPTER I

OXFORD STREET AND THE HOUSE OF COMMONS

Every now and then when I am in London (at the instigation of some business man who takes the time off to belong to it), I drop into a pleasant but other-worldly and absent-minded place called the House of Commons.

I sit in the windows in the smoking-room and watch the faces of the members all about me and watch the steamships, strangely, softly, suddenly—­Shakespeare and Pepys, outside on the river, slip gravely by under glass.

Or I go in and sit down under the gallery, face to face with the Speaker, looking across those profiles of world-makers in their seats; and I watch and listen in the House itself.  There is a kind of pleasant, convenient, appropriate hush upon the world there.

Wisdom.

The decorous, orderly machinery of knowledge rolls over one—­one listens to It, to the soft clatter of the endless belt of words.

Every now and then one sees a member in the middle of a speech, or possibly in the middle of a sentence, slip up quietly and take a look (under glass) at The People, or he uses a microscope, perhaps, or a reading glass on The People, Mr. Bonar Law’s, Mr. Lloyd George’s, Ramsay MacDonald’s, Will Crook’s, or somebody’s.  Then he comes back gravely as if he had got the people attended to now, and finishes what he was saying.