That the world has always been troubled with the huge financial innovator and the self-seeker is of course a commonplace; the objection to him has been, as a rule, that he has too few human traits. Like the astronomer, the mathematician, the philosopher and the historian, his thoughts are more or less remote from the concerns of the ordinary individual, although his dealings are with him. To do anything which is to be of benefit to the individual it requires the mind that sees the individual en masse rather than in particular. Indeed, the thing that has always confronted the individual of ability since the beginning, aside from his own inner driving emotions, ambitions and needs, is this same organized need of the mass as represented in constitutions, governments, declarations, which in order to advantage himself he must flatter, satisfy or exploit--but which he must meet in some way or fail. And only when the organized sense of the mass becomes sufficiently intelligent for it to act in concert is it possible to sweep away or even curb the individual. For the individual and the mass are interdependent facts, and the one cannot escape the other, try as each may. But never, apparently, previous to the French Revolution, which was a revolt against centralized and hereditary constructive craft and ingenuity, had it occurred to the world, or rather the mass, to rout these individuals and make pariahs of them, although the world in recent days has developed an especial aptitude for it, one must admit. England, which is not so much a democracy as an ordered hierarchy of powers, largely financial in character, has never felt called upon to drive these gentlemen from their positions or quarrel with them for the often singular and fantastic manner in which they have achieved their success, or the indifference they may have displayed toward the millions below them. The gentlemen at the top may or may not have intentionally done anything for the peasants at the bottom in the past, but until very recent days they have not been asked to relinquish their control of the machinery. Yet now the world presents another angle to this proposition: the organizer and financier is being suspected and harried everywhere. Only in America, the home of anti-financial legislation, the multi-millionaire is apparently becoming safer than ever and more powerful. Yet to the economist, the historian, the student of politics, it is already a truism that economic reforms are not and never have been permanent; also that no one, however self-interested, ever succeeds wholly in working for himself. He must do something for the mass if he is to do anything for himself. It is a condition of life, not a theory.