bowmen of Crecy, it ended
when marching infantry, when common men in masses ceased to win the
battles of the world, when costly cannon, great ironclads, and strategic
railways became the means of power. To-day is the day of wealth. Wealth
now is power as it never was power before--it commands earth and sea and
sky. All power is for those who can handle wealth. On your behalf.... You
must accept facts, and these are facts. The world for the Crowd! The
Crowd as Ruler! Even in your days that creed had been tried and
condemned. To-day it has only one believer--a multiplex, silly one--the
man in the Crowd."

Graham did not answer immediately. He stood lost in sombre
preoccupations.

"No," said Ostrog. "The day of the common man is past. On the open
countryside one man is as good as another, or nearly as good. The earlier
aristocracy had a precarious tenure of strength and audacity. They were
tempered--tempered. There were insurrections, duels, riots. The first
real aristocracy, the first permanent aristocracy, came in with castles
and armour, and vanished before the musket and bow. But this is the
second aristocracy. The real one. Those days of gunpowder and democracy
were only an eddy in the stream. The common man now is a helpless unit.
In these days we have this great machine of the city, and an organisation
complex beyond his understanding."

"Yet," said Graham, "there is something resists, something you are
holding down--something that stirs and presses."

"You will see," said Ostrog, with a forced smile that would brush these
difficult questions aside. "I have not roused the force to destroy
myself--trust me."

"I wonder," said Graham.

Ostrog stared.

"_Must_ the world go this way?" said Graham with his emotions at the
speaking point. "Must it indeed go in this way? Have all our hopes
been vain?"

"What do you mean?" said Ostrog. "Hopes?"

"I come from a democratic age. And I find an aristocratic tyranny!"

"Well,--but you are the chief tyrant."

Graham shook his head.

"Well," said Ostrog, "take the general question. It is the way that
change has always travelled. Aristocracy, the prevalence of the best--the
suffering and extinction of the unfit, and so to better things."

"But aristocracy! those people I met--"

"Oh! not _those_!" said Ostrog. "But for the most part they go to their
death. Vice and pleasure! They have no children. That sort of stuff will
die out. If the world keeps to one road, th