He is a king in precisely the same way, and to precisely the same purpose, as Louis the Great was king. You know how Richelieu served the nobility of France—if they would not obey they simply lost their heads. If you have read Miss Tarbell’s “History of the Standard Oil Company,” or Henry D. Lloyd’s “Wealth Against Commonwealth,” you know how Mr. Rockefeller served the oil nobility; how he tricked them and crushed them; how sometimes, it is said, he blew up their refineries with dynamite, or burned them with fire. You know how Louis said he was the State; and you heard the president of one of the coal companies, who is doing business in flat defiance of the laws of the land, declare that God in His Infinite Wisdom had entrusted to him the property interests of the country. It is not necessary to pursue this analogy; if you do not see that in the due and inevitable course of evolution, our industrial organism has attained the monarchical stage, it is simply because you do not wish to see it, and no amount of exposition will avail. I have only to add, as before, that the purpose of _this_ process was to evolve an organism which should be capable of maintaining itself against all enemies, without and within. The task of King Louis was the aggrandisement of France; the task of Mr. Rockefeller is the keeping up of Standard Oil stock. Incidentally, Louis the Great gave the world a race-heritage and a civilisation; incidentally, Mr. Rockefeller furnishes the world with oil. Also—what is true in one case is true in the other—the Standard Oil Company is a marvellous piece of work. It has men graded into a thousand different classes and occupations, and all fitting perfectly and running like a clock. It has labourers to till the soil, lobbyists and salesmen to fight, factories to make all its necessaries, and railroads to handle them; and, rising tier upon tier, it has a whole pyramid of governing and administrative officials, up to the president. It has likewise the whole outfit of ideas necessary to its operation; it is complete and perfect and sublime—it is like a mighty vessel, defying the tempests. Is it any wonder that those who have constructed it are proud of it, and feel that there is nothing more to be done in the world but to keep it going? It is of course clear that the next step, according to my parallel, would be into an Industrial Republic. The reader differs from most Americans whom I meet if this idea is not startling to him. Let us go forward slowly.