Reserving this issue for subsequent discussion, certain general features of the reaction of industry against state regulation must be noted as of immense importance. Black as it is corruption after all is a mere incident in this struggle. The broad lines of development which the Republic will follow in the near future would seem to depend largely upon the outcome of this great process. Certain social prophets tell us insistently that there are but two possibilities: if the state wins the upper hand the inevitable result will be socialism; if on the other hand business triumphs we must resign ourselves to a more or less benevolent financial oligarchy. Imagination is not lacking to embellish or render repulsive this pair of alternatives. From Plato to Herbert George Wells all social prophets have been thus gifted with the power of depicting finely if not correctly the minutiæ of the world as it is to be. Time, the remorseless confuter of all earlier forecasters of this sort, has shown them to be singularly lacking in the ability to anticipate the great divergent highways of development,—sympodes in Ward’s phrase,—which have opened up before the march of human progress and determined the subsequent lines of movement. So it may well be in the present case. The social futures, one or the other of which we are bidden by present day prophets to choose, are like two radii of a circle. They point in very different directions, it is true, but between them are many possible yet uncharted goals. And if social development may be likened to movement in three instead of only two dimensions the lines open to the future are enormously more divergent than our seers are wont to conceive. Employing a less mathematical figure, prophecy usually proceeds from the assumption that cataclysmic changes are immediately impending. Otherwise, by the way, the prophets would utterly fail to attract attention. But this presupposes an extremely plastic condition of society. If social structures, however, really are so plastic, they may then be remoulded not into one or two forms merely, but into many other forms conceivable or inconceivable at the present time. Current and widely accepted forecasts to the contrary, therefore, one may still venture to doubt that our through ticket to 1950 or 2000 A.D. is inscribed either “socialism” or “financial oligarchy,” and stamped “non-transferable.”