e if it weren't for you fellows."

By "you fellows," he meant Mr. Watling's distinguished associates in the
Senate....

Mr. Watling and I dined together at a New York club. It was not a dinner
of herbs. There was something exceedingly comfortable about that club,
where the art of catering to those who had earned the right to be
catered to came as near perfection as human things attain. From the
great, heavily curtained dining-room the noises of the city had been
carefully excluded; the dust of the Avenue, the squalour and smells of
the brown stone fronts and laddered tenements of those gloomy districts
lying a pistol-shot east and west. We had a vintage champagne, and
afterwards a cigar of the club's special importation.

"Well," said Mr. Watling, "mow that you're a member of the royal
council, what do you think of the King?"

"I've been thinking a great deal about him," I said, and indeed it was
true. He had made, perhaps, his greatest impression when I had shaken
his hand in parting. The manner in which he had looked at me then had
puzzled me; it was as though he were seeking to divine something in
me that had escaped him. "Why doesn't the government take him over?" I
exclaimed.

Mr. Watling smiled.

"You mean, instead of his mines and railroads and other properties?"

"Yes. But that's your idea. Don't you remember you said something of
the kind the night of the election, years ago? It occurred to me to-day,
when I was looking at him."

"Yes," he agreed thoughtfully, "if some American genius could find a way
to legalize that power and utilize the men who created it the worst
of our problems would be solved. A man with his ability has a right to
power, and none would respond more quickly or more splendidly to a call
of the government than he. All this fight is waste, Hugh, damned
waste of the nation's energy." Mr. Watling seldom swore. "Look at the
President! There's a man of remarkable ability, too. And those two
oughtn't to be fighting each other. The President's right, in a way.
Yes, he is, though I've got to oppose him."

I smiled at this from Theodore Watling, though I admired him the more
for it. And suddenly, oddly, I happened to remember what Krebs had said,
that our troubles were not due to individuals, but to a disease that had
developed in industrial society. If the day should come when such men as
the President and the great banker would be working together, was it
not possible, too, that the ide