uared himself to
a stenographer to dictate:--

"Dear Sir: I spend a million dollars a year advertising grain
products; you and the packers doubtless spend that much advertising
your products and by-products; the railroads spend as much more, and
the Oil people probably half as much more. Add the steel products
and the lumber products, and we have ten million dollars going into
the press of this country. In a crisis we cannot tell how these
newspapers will treat us. I think we should organize so that we will
know exactly where we stand. Therefore it is necessary absolutely to
control the trade advertising of this country. A company to take
over the five leading advertising agencies could be formed, for half
as much as we spend every year, and we could control nine-tenths of
the American trade advertising. We could then put an end to any
indiscriminate mobbing of corporations by editors. I will be pleased
to hear from you further upon this subject."

A day or two later, when the idea had grown and ramified itself in his
mind, he talked it all out to Jane and exclaimed, "How will old Phil
Ward's God manage to work it out, as he says, against that
proposition? Brains," continued Barclay, "brains--that's what counts
in this world. You can't expect the men who dominate this
country--who make its wealth, and are responsible for its prosperity,
to be at the mercy of a lot of long-nosed reformers who don't know how
to cash their own checks."

How little this rich man knew of the world about him! How
circumscribed was his vision! With all his goings up and down the
earth, with all of his great transactions, with all of his apparent
power, how little and sordid was his outlook on life. For he thought
he was somebody in this universe, some one of importance, and in his
scheme of things he figured out a kind of partnership between himself
and Providence--a partnership to run the world in the interests of
John Barclay, and of course, wherever possible, with reasonable
dividends to Providence.

But a miracle was coming into the world. In the under-consciousnesses
of men, sown God only knows how and when and where, sown in the
weakness of a thousand blind prophets, the seeds of righteous wrath at
greed like John Barclay's were growing during all the years of his
triumph. Men scarcely knew it themselves. Growth is so simple and
natural a process that its work is done before it