He sent in an order for these books, and many others referred to. His mind was in a glorified glamor of dynamic thinking. Was it possible that people could still be unaware of these vast truths? In college he had had two courses in classical economy; but the subjects had left his mind more bewildered than before. Now a vast searchlight cut apart the darkness; the hazy night was as definite as day. He tried to simplify to himself what he had learned. Wealth--all wealth--was the product of labor. That, and nothing else. Rent, interest, profit--labor, human labor, produced them. It was not the land, or money, or factories; it was the toilers, sweating at their tasks, who made all of these, and who received for their toil a miserly fragment. Land, left idle, produced nothing; even natural products were worthless until man's fathering work gave them value. Money--gold calved no golden offspring, bills spawned no further bills as interest. Factories and machines produced nothing, until man's sweat and blood were poured out over them. Labor was the producer of everything; in justice, all should belong to labor. War itself, modern, "civilized" war, was a poison exuded by world-greedy capitalism. The withheld product of labor could not be obtained by the needy toilers, nor consumed by the overfed masters; thus backward foreign markets were a necessity, to get rid of the product the system confiscated and prohibited at home. Out of this grew clashing imperialisms, and wars ... like this present one. And here was a vast body of men--he reread Jack London's "Revolution" to get the marvelous figures again--throughout every country in the world, with a future planned upon unchangeable, irresistible economic laws, striving everywhere to bring about economic justice and permanent peace. And he had stayed out of it so long! Slaves had gone, and serfs had gone, but the wage-slaves, the slaves of the machines, these remained. They must be their own Lincoln, and free themselves; their own Christ, redeeming their posterity.... Kings had gone; money kings must go. He had called himself a Democrat: by God, he would be a real one! Some intuition sent him again to "The Food of the Gods"; after rereading it, the inner excitement drove him out of restricting walls to the ampler stretches of the night.... This, then, the flash came, was the key to Wells' cryptic symbolism! The food of Hercules--the Heraklaphorbia--this was an intellectual food, an idea, that raised men to a height eight times higher than their fellows. He felt his own head in the clouds. He had tasted of the food; he felt a sense of bodily elation, as he pondered in the starry silence of the crest, high above the sleeping city--a sensation of physical magnificence, as if his body towered already above his father's, his mother's, the miners'.