While it may be admitted that the organizing types developed in America have not had any too great charm or virtue (Astor I., Vanderbilt I., Gould, Sage, Harriman, Morgan), still they appear to compare favorably with most ancients and moderns. If they have done less for the arts, as many seem to think, socially, or at least economically, they have done as much if not more than their predecessors. Astor I. may have begrudged a washerwoman fifty cents, dunned his tenants for rent, debauched the Indians, but he opened up the most remote portions of America and laid the way for roads and railroads. The first Vanderbilt was no doubt a brutal, cruel and savage man, but he had the vision which made a transcontinental railroad possible. His greed and vanity made it possible. As much might be said for Gould, Russell Sage and Harriman, though the picture of Sage keeping apples in his desk to avoid buying lunches for his friends or well-wishers and using his old plug hats for umbrella stands in order to get a little more wear out of them could not be of much interest to the mass except in a Dickensian sense. Unless one accepts the subtleties of Nature as one finds them, sees in all an inexplicable and yet biologic or universally constructive plan, and in these riant and lawless individuals a scheme of hers to achieve something quickly, there is nothing very admirable or even explicable about the dark goings to and fro of such types as the late J. P. Morgan, H. H. Rogers, Thomas F. Ryan, William C. Whitney, or any of a score of other large fortune-builders so recently in control of stupendous matters here and elsewhere. They are not explicable save as motivating forces in the hands or will of higher powers--good, bad or indifferent. Seen at close range they are more suggestive of sharks and we of sniveling bluefish, and it is plainly to our best interests either to keep out of their way or unite firmly to oppose them in whatever way we can, unless we choose to be promptly eaten.