A
traveller in the highways of history looked out of the club
window on the turmoil of Fifth Avenue, and felt himself in Rome,
under Diocletian, witnessing the anarchy, conscious of the
compulsion, eager for the solution, but unable to conceive whence
the next impulse was to come or how it was to act. The
two-thousand-years failure of Christianity roared upward from
Broadway, and no Constantine the Great was in sight.
Having nothing else to do, the traveller went on to Washington
to wait the end. There Roosevelt was training Constantines and
battling Trusts. With the Battle of Trusts, a student of
mechanics felt entire sympathy, not merely as a matter of
politics or society, but also as a measure of motion. The Trusts
and Corporations stood for the larger part of the new power that
had been created since 1840, and were obnoxious because of their
vigorous and unscrupulous energy. They were revolutionary,
troubling all the old conventions and values, as the screws of
ocean steamers must trouble a school of herring. They tore
society to pieces and trampled it under foot. As one of their
earliest victims, a citizen of Quincy, born in 1838, had learned
submission and silence, for he knew that, under the laws of
mechanics, any change, within the range of the forces, must make
his situation only worse; but he was beyond measure curious to
see whether the conflict of forces would produce the new man,
since no other energies seemed left on earth to breed.
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