You will be utterly terrified at the state of affairs. Credit will be failing, and the business of the country will be holding its breath. You will subscribe a campaign fund of ten—fifteen—twenty millions of dollars—but there will be Mr. Hearst with his extras in a dozen cities, and his twenty million free copies a day, and he will tell how much you are raising and a whole lot more. So there will be committees of safety to guard the ballot—and a few more good campaign cries. There will be frenzied conferences among our political millionaires, and a week or two before election day Mr. Hearst’s opponent—quite probably ex-President Roosevelt—will come out favouring nearly all of his radical proposals, but declaring that they ought not to be carried into effect by a Socialist like Mr. Hearst. Mr. Hearst will reply with his ten thousand and tenth declaration that he is not a Socialist, and has no sympathy with Socialism—a statement which the Socialists, who will not understand in the least the meaning of events, will cordially substantiate. Mr. Hearst will declare that he stands upon a platform of Americanism, and that he seeks only equal rights for all—and therefore Federal ownership of all criminal monopolies. So election day will come, and Mr. Hearst will be elected; and within the next week the business of the country will have fallen into heaps. Banks will have closed, mills will be idle—there will be no freight, and railroads will be failing. The people of New York will be reminded that if the railroads stop the city will starve to death in a couple of weeks; and so, perhaps even before Mr. Hearst takes office, government ownership of the railroads will be realised. How will it be accomplished? It is a charmingly simple process—I could do it all myself. Have you ever heard the inside story of how the last coal strike was settled? The operators were standing upon their rights as the persons to whom God in His infinite wisdom had entrusted the care of the property interests of the country; and all winter long the people had been lacking coal. Then suddenly President Roosevelt, who is a master of the art of feeling the public pulse, made the discovery that government ownership of coal mines was about to crystallise into an issue of practical politics. So he sent Secretary Root to see Morgan, and tell him that the coal operators must give in. Morgan saw the operators, and they insisted upon their rights, and so Root went back to Washington, and came again to say that, as Mr. Morgan well knew, the coal roads were doing business in flat violation of the law; and that unless within twenty-four hours they gave their consent to the appointment by the President of a board of arbitration, the whole power of the United States Attorney General’s office would be turned upon an investigation of their business methods. And so the strike was settled in a day.