Potter frowned at the thought. The huge machine of government was made up of such parts, of common councils, of mayors, of state legislatures, of national legislatures, differing only in degree, but wrought of kindred materials. It was this machine with which the country would make war. "It won't work," Potter said to himself. "It hasn't the stroke or the bore...." He stood still looking at the teeming Campus, following its currents and cross-currents and eddies with eyes darkened by thought. It was a current worthy to pass between magnificent banks. The sidewalks eddied with never-motionless men and women; with human beings whose errands hurried them on. Potter studied them with interest. Their faces were mobile, alert, intelligent, forceful. There was a capability about each individual; there was something distinct about each atom in the crowd.... Here, after all, was the great machine of government. Here was that from which government derived; here was that which would make war, which would _fight_ the war. Walking down that street was a potential army, and the mothers of a potential army. It was these who had made possible, who had created, the terra-cotta sky-scrapers; it was these who had made possible that marvelous procession of automobiles which taxed the width of Woodward Avenue; it was these who had made possible the building up of that miracle of industrial life that stretched around the town like fortifications around some European city--but fortifications holding the city safe, not from a foreign invader, but from an economic invader. Factory-fortresses preserving the prosperity of the town. He continued to eye the crowd, and his eyes became less deep and dark. He raised his head without knowing that he raised it. A feeling of pride was upon him. "Here's the thing--the real thing," he said within himself. "This is the machine; the stroke is there and the bore is there ... if they can be made to see and to understand." Potter stepped into his car and drove out Woodward Avenue, and thence down a side-street to that mammoth, unbelievable mass of buildings which all the world, through advertisements, would recognize as the plant of the Waite Motor Car Company. Since the day the first brick was laid, a dozen years before, building had never ceased. The plant had never caught up with itself, had never been able to produce the number of automobiles required of it by the public. As far as the eye reached were clean, splendid structures; the ragged outline at the end, dimly seen, was caused by steel not yet covered by brick, by brick walls rising to wall in new space in which to manufacture yet more thousands of the Waite motor-car.