Without admitting that he intended to demand a period of liberty, his imagination in the past weeks had toyed with many plans. At first, when he learned of the more than thousands in his father’s employ, he had been fired with the desire to ameliorate the lot of the working-man; and in his enthusiasm had awakened his father from his afternoon nap on deck and talked to him for an hour. Mr. Abbott, who revelled in the very sound of Fessenden’s voice, and would have attempted to give him the North Pole had he wanted it, listened indulgently; but when his turn came to speak he was smiling grimly. “My dear boy,” he had said, “what reason have I given you to think me a fool? There are those who will tell you that the day must come when the streets of our great cities will run red with blood, when not one stone on Fifth Avenue will remain upon another; that, in short, the great civil war between capital and labor can be delayed only until a strong leader of organized labor arises who cannot be bought. I do not go so far as to say that I--or you--can avert that calamity, for our rotten municipal governments have destroyed the respect of the thinking laboring man for authority, and these tremendous aggregations of capital I have in hand, which will make the United States strong and feared among nations, may be carried to an excess which will lessen the chances of individual achievement and curtail personal liberty. If rich men--that is to say, the manipulators--make fools of themselves, and in their greed for wealth and power reduce wages and sow further seeds of discontent, there is no telling what may happen. But although I make no denial of my own greed for wealth and power, and although these concentrations of many small industries into one huge enterprise will double my fortune, I make no such mistake as that. I have always maintained that a man may get rich and still share a certain portion of his gains with his assistants; and my working-men all receive good salaries, perquisites, heavy Christmas presents, and pensions in their old age. I make no pretence at philanthropy. There is no man who needs friends as the rich man does; there are no friends so valuable as an army of employés. I know many of mine personally; at some time or other I have managed to come into contact with most of them. They like me. They are content. They never go on strike. They are the one formidable bulwark against united labor in the country. When you return, I wish you to go about among those men, show them your personal interest in them as human beings, make them love you as much as they like me; then, if an industrial war ever comes, you will make yourself their leader and take whichever side you think wisest. But the thing to do is to avert war and use that great following for another purpose. Either with or without civil war the time must come for the reform of municipalities, the reduction of state power, and, possibly, an interval of benevolent despotism.