alist or for a mere
Individualist, was really rather reasonable. We admitted great tracts of
things to one another, and we always felt as if by this one next
argument, perchance, or by one further illustration, we would convince
the other and rescue him like a brand from the burning.

The last time I saw him he started in at once at the station as we
climbed up into the car by telling me what he was doing. He was studying
up the heroes of the American Revolution, and was writing something to
show that they were not really heroes after all. All manner of things
were the matter with them. They had always troubled him, he said. He
knew there was something wrong, and he was glad to have the matter
settled. He said he did not, and never had believed in heroes, and
thought they did a great deal of harm--even dead ones. Heroes, he said,
always deceived the people. They kept people from seeing that nothing
could be done in our modern society by any one man. Only crowds could do
things, he intimated--each man, like one little wave on the world,
wavering up to the shore and dying away.

As the evening wore on our conversation became more concrete, and I
began to drag in, of course, every now and then, naturally, an inspired
or semi-inspired millionaire or so.

I cannot say that these gentlemen were received with enthusiasm.

Finally, I turned on him. "What is it that makes you so angry (and
nearly all the Socialists) every time you hear something good, something
you cannot deny is good, about a successful business man? If I brought a
row of inspired millionaires, say ten or twelve of them one after the
other, into your library this minute, you would get hotter and hotter
with every one, wouldn't you? You would scarcely speak to me."

---- intimated that he was afraid I was deceived; he was afraid that I
was going about deceiving other people about its being possible for mere
individual men to be good; he was afraid I was doing a great deal of
damage.

He then confided to me that not so very long ago he dropped in one
Monday morning into his guest-chamber just after his guest had gone and
found a copy of "Inspired Millionaires," which his guest had obviously
been reading over Sunday, lying on the little reading-table at the head
of the bed.

He said that he took the book back to his library, took out two or three
encyclopaedias from the shelf in the corner, put my inspired millionaires
in behind them, put the encyclopaedia