," he meant Mr. Watling's distinguished associates in the
Senate....

Mr. Watling and I dined together at a New York club. It was not a dinner
of herbs. There was something exceedingly comfortable about that club,
where the art of catering to those who had earned the right to be catered
to came as near perfection as human things attain. From the great,
heavily curtained dining-room the noises of the city had been carefully
excluded; the dust of the Avenue, the squalour and smells of the brown
stone fronts and laddered tenements of those gloomy districts lying a
pistol-shot east and west. We had a vintage champagne, and afterwards a
cigar of the club's special importation.

"Well," said Mr. Watling, "mow that you're a member of the royal council,
what do you think of the King?"

"I've been thinking a great deal about him," I said, and indeed it was
true. He had made, perhaps, his greatest impression when I had shaken his
hand in parting. The manner in which he had looked at me then had puzzled
me; it was as though he were seeking to divine something in me that had
escaped him. "Why doesn't the government take him over?" I exclaimed.

Mr. Watling smiled.

"You mean, instead of his mines and railroads and other properties?"

"Yes. But that's your idea. Don't you remember you said something of the
kind the night of the election, years ago? It occurred to me to-day, when
I was looking at him."

"Yes," he agreed thoughtfully, "if some American genius could find a way
to legalize that power and utilize the men who created it the worst of
our problems would be solved. A man with his ability has a right to
power, and none would respond more quickly or more splendidly to a call
of the government than he. All this fight is waste, Hugh, damned waste of
the nation's energy." Mr. Watling seldom swore. "Look at the President!
There's a man of remarkable ability, too. And those two oughtn't to be
fighting each other. The President's right, in a way. Yes, he is, though
I've got to oppose him."

I smiled at this from Theodore Watling, though I admired him the more for
it. And suddenly, oddly, I happened to remember what Krebs had said, that
our troubles were not due to individuals, but to a disease that had
developed in industrial society. If the day should come when such men as
the President and the great banker would be working together, was it not
possible, too, that the idea of Mr. Watling and the vision of Krebs might
coinc