The English ruling class had taken upon itself the task of colonizing and exploiting the rest of the world, and the American ruling class was following suit, and Richard Harding Davis became the prophet of both. Throughout Central America and the West Indies the process is invariable: American capitalists bribe the governments of these countries and get enormously valuable concessions, then they send in engineers and other handsome young heroes clad in khaki and puttees and with automatics in their belts. These heroes engage the natives of the country to exploit the natural resources and ship out the wealth of the country, to be spent upon monkey dinners at Newport and champagne suppers in Broadway lobster palaces. Sooner or later the natives become irritated at the sight of their natural resources being exported for such purposes, so they revolt against the native government which has sold them to the Yankees. Then the handsome young Yankee heroes draw their automatics and bring up machine guns, and gloriously defend the native government which they have bought and paid for. The ending comes triumphantly with a Yankee gunboat in the harbor, and some marines charging up the slope of a hill waving Old Glory, while the audience leaps from its seats and cheers for five minutes. “Soldiers of Fortune” was “Dick” Davis’s biggest success. It brought him reservoirs of money, first as a serial, then as a novel, then as a drama, and finally as a movie. His other novels were like it, in that they dealt with members of the ruling class gloriously making or marrying fortunes. The next was called “The Princess Aline,” and told about a young, wealthy, handsome and aristocratic artist--so many elements of good fortune!--who falls in love with the photograph of a German princess. The model for this exquisite heroine was the future Empress of Russia; but Davis did not live to write a sequel, showing the final destiny of his heroine, her mangled body dumped into a well along with her husband and four exquisite daughters. Recalling these novels at the present hour, I see the international plutocracy with all its exquisite wives and daughters, crouched trembling upon the top of a mountain of gold and jewels, while all around them the handsome young hired heroes peer out over the sights of machine guns at the massed fury of the exploited millions of mankind--white, black, yellow, brown, red, and mixed.