“The shallow materialism of the western business brain, of which the man Saul Hartz is the prophet, is nothing less than that. Genius of a kind he has, no doubt, but he lacks the essential faculty, like others before him, of knowing when to stop. He sees World Power in front of him, and under present conditions he may be allowed to grasp it on terms easier than would have been exacted of Napoleon I and Wilhelm II.” John Endor had many questions to answer in the course of a long interview, but in the end he was able to convince Sir Josiah Munt that the Newspaper Ring was the writing on the wall not merely for Great Britain, not merely for America, but for civilization itself. The instance from his own experience the member for Blackhampton East was able to adduce of the U. P.’s power of manipulating news, and the worth of the news when it had been manipulated, proved a clinching argument for that honest citizen. “I must be up and doing.” That was the thought in the mind of Sir Munt as he shook hands with his visitor and ushered him to the door. So powerfully had the case against the Ring been urged by one whom the Mayor instinctively respected, that he felt already for once in his life the stern necessity of voting Yellow. Native caution prevented his letting the candidate know just what was in his mind; but as John Endor recrossed the Market Square to his committee rooms he was upheld by a feeling that he had gone some way towards getting a strong man on his side. Well it was to have this food for the spirit. The fight, envenomed already by a felon stroke, was bound to be severe. And the odds now massed against him were so heavy that a nature less warlike might have been overwhelmed. XXXVII As the Mayor of Blackhampton watched from his window at the City Hall the tall and striking form of John Endor merge itself in the welter of citizens below in Market Square, he knew that he was faced by a momentous issue. The case against the Government and the U. P., that unholy alliance which had caused such widespread misery in the land and which now was threatening once more the peace of the world, had been urged with a force that had given the good man a shock. A key was now his to many disconcerting events of recent years, and he could but marvel that long before this he had not had the wit to discern the truth for himself. The shameful graft of the new bureaucracy for which Government by Newspaper had much to answer, he now saw from his own experience, to be sapping the life and liberties of the State.