But they are not to be wholly undone by them at any time, anywhere. Like the Lilliputians, the mass as often succeeds in binding Gulliver with their threads as Gulliver succeeds in tearing through their petty stays. The twain are ever being born side by side in nature; the giant and the pygmy, the shark and the bluefish, the whale and the minnow. “Look,” cry the minnows to their fellows, “this whale imagines he is better, wiser, greater, than we! He moves in larger ways, disturbs our great sea, taking his choice of the realms and pleasures of life. Why should this be? Are we not as good as he? And yet he does all these things which we cannot; he breaks the law which governs the average minnow, whereas we cannot. Therefore he must be evil. We will seize and bind him and so end his privileges, if not him.” Immediately and always, at this point, there arises an intermediate figure or group, the sophisticated “advocates of the people,” “tribunes of the people,” individuals less powerful than the giants, though shrewder than the pygmies, their employers, many of whom are sincere enough in their conviction of unselfishness; others self-seekers and charlatans purely, yet each and every one crying that he will deliver the mass from its bondage, and actually attempting, or pretending, to adjust the impossible demands of the people with the almost impossible individualism of the egoist. But, honest or dishonest as they may be, the mass is never made quite free; the financiers or individuals are never wholly curbed. Both merely proceed to develop new issues and new battlefields. Personally I believe that most of us would prefer that the mass should not sweep away the individual, for each of us would prefer to be somebody in however small a way rather than mere unrecognizable cogs in a machine or bees in a bee-hive. At best, we are little more than that; even our greatest individuals, individual as they may seem. They, too, are but minute factors in the total machinery, little able to forefend against disaster or the ultimate nothingness that swallows them. But one thing is sure: the individual in the course of the development of his dreams and ambitions does scheme out and construct or bring into organic operation functions which are valuable to mass prosperity, and on that score there is scarcely any fault to be found with him. The thing that might seriously concern a thinking American would be whether the American financial type, as contrasted with those of other lands and times, is more or less admirable. Greece had Crœsus; Rome, Lepidus, Hadrian; Italy, Lorenzo, the money-gathering Popes; France, Louis XIV, the Baron de Hirsch; England, the first Rothschild, the late Cecil Rhodes, Harmsworth, Strathcona; Japan, Shibusawa.