“I have talked with all sorts of people besides,--people in Washington, on my way to New York, and here also. Nobody seems to know what is wrong. Some say it’s the tariff. Others say it’s something that has been done to money. Nearly everyone blames Wall Street more or less. What is the matter? Why is labor unemployed?” He passed his hand over his face, then leaned forward in his chair and spoke slowly: “Why are the seven-year locusts? Why do men have seasons of madness? Who knows?” After a pause, his thoughts absorbing him, he continued in a tone of soliloquy. The country was bewitched. The conglomerate American mind was foolishly persuaded to a variety of wistful and unverified economic notions,--that was to say, heresies, about such important matters as money, capital, prices, debts. People were minding things they knew nothing about and could never settle, and were neglecting meanwhile to be industrious. This had happened before in the world. In the Middle Ages Europe might have advanced, with consequences in this day not easily to be imagined, but for the time and the energy of mind and body which were utterly wasted in quest of holy grails and dialectical forms of truth. So now in this magnificent New World, the resources of which were unlimited, human progress had been arrested by silly Utopians who distracted the mind with thoughts of unattainable things. Take the railroads. With already the cheapest railroad transportation in the world, people were clamoring for it to be made cheaper. Crazy Populists were telling the farmers it ought to be free, like the air. Prejudice against railroads was amazing, irrational and suicidal. All profit in railroading had been taxed and regulated away. Incentive to build new roads had been destroyed. If by a special design of the Lord a railroad did seem to prosper the politicians pounced upon it and either mulcted it secretly or held it forth to the public as a monster that must be chained up with restrictive laws. Sometimes they practised both these arts at once. Result: the nation’s transportation arteries were strangling. No extension of the arterial system for an increasing population was possible under these conditions. What would the sequel be? Rome for all her sins might have endured if only she had developed means of communication, namely, roads, in an adequate manner. It was obvious and nobody saw it. Well, now he was trying to save people from a repetition of that blunder. He was trying to make them see in time that unless they allowed the railroads to prosper the great American experiment was doomed. I could not help thinking: people prophesy against Wall Street and Wall Street prophesies against the people. I was surprised that he gave me so much time until it occurred to me that he was thinking out loud, still working on his speech.