ional matters. The American iron and
steel industries have been drawn together and developed in a manner that
is a necessary preliminary to the capture of the empire of the seas.
That end is declaredly within the vista of these operations, within
their initial design. These things are not the work of dividend-hunting
imbeciles, but of men who regard wealth as a convention, as a means to
spacious material ends. There is an animated little paper published in
Los Angeles in the interests of Mr. Wilshire, which bears upon its
forefront the maxim, "Let the Nation own the Trusts." Well, under their
mantle of property, the Trusts grow continually more elaborate and
efficient machines of production and public service, while the formal
nation chooses its bosses and buttons and reads its illustrated press. I
must confess I do not see the negro and the poor Irishman and all the
emigrant sweepings of Europe, which constitute the bulk of the American
Abyss, uniting to form that great Socialist party of which Mr. Wilshire
dreams, and with a little demonstrating and balloting taking over the
foundry and the electrical works, the engine shed and the signal box,
from the capable men in charge. But that a confluent system of
Trust-owned business organisms, and of Universities and re-organized
military and naval services may presently discover an essential unity of
purpose, presently begin thinking a literature, and behaving like a
State, is a much more possible thing....

In its more developed phases I seem to see the New Republic as (if I may
use an expressive bull) a sort of outspoken Secret Society, with which
even the prominent men of the ostensible state may be openly affiliated.
A vast number of men admit the need but hesitate at the means of
revolution, and in this conception of a slowly growing new social order
organized with open deliberation within the substance of the old, there
are no doubt elements of technical treason, but an enormous gain in the
thoroughness, efficiency, and stability of the possible change.

So it is, or at least in some such ways, that I conceive the growing
sense of itself which the new class of modern efficients will develop,
will become manifest in movements and concerns that are now
heterogeneous and distinct, but will presently drift into co-operation
and coalescence. This idea of a synthetic reconstruction within the
bodies of the English-speaking States may very possibly clothe itself in
quite ot