g you can put over in baseball, anything the umpire
can't catch you at. And it's not 'the thing' in tennis. Most of the time
you don't even have any umpire. That's it: that's not such a bad way to
put it. My wife and I wanted to run our business on the tennis standard
and not on the baseball one. Because I believe, ultimately you know, in
fixing things,--everything,--national life as well, so that we'll need
as few umpires as possible. Once get the tennis standard adopted . . ."

Mr. Welles said mournfully, "Don't get started on politics. I'm too old
to have any hopes of that!"

"Right you are there," said Mr. Crittenden. "Economic organization is
the word. That's one thing that keeps me so interested in my little
economic laboratory here. Political parties are as prehistoric as the
mastodon, if they only knew it."

Mr. Welles said, "But the queer thing is that you make it work."

"Oh, anybody with a head for business could make it work. You've got to
know how to manage your machine before you can make it go, of course.
But that's not saying you have to drive it somewhere you don't want to
get to. I don't say that that workman back there who was making such a
beautiful job of polishing that maple could make it go. He couldn't."

Mr. Welles persisted. "But I've always thought, I've always _seen_ it,
or thought I had . . . that life-and-death competition is the only
stimulus that's strong enough to stir men up to the prodigious effort
they have to put out to _make_ a go of their business, start the machine
running. That, and the certainty of all they could get out of the
consumer as a reward. You know it's held that there's a sort of mystic
identity between all you can get out of the consumer and the exact
amount of profit that'll just make the business go."

Mr. Crittenden said comfortably, as though he were talking of something
that did not alarm him, "Oh well, the best of the feudal seigneurs
mournfully believed that a sharp sword and a long lance in their own
hands were the strongholds of society. The wolf-pack idea of business
will go the same way." He explained in answer to Mr. Welles' vagueness
as to this term, "You know, the conception that if you're going to get
hair brushes or rubber coats or mattresses or what-not enough for
humanity manufactured, the only way is to have the group engaged in it
form a wolf-pack, hunting down the public to extract from it as much
money as possible. The salesmen and advertis