There were so many kinds of men—statesmen and business men, lawyers and clergymen, heroes and cowards; and I had to study them all, and see the thing through the eyes of each of them. And of course, I could only play at ignorance, for I knew the future; and I saw all their mistakes, and the reasons for them, and the pity and the folly and the tragedy of it all. Knowing, as I did, the great underlying forces which were driving behind the events, I saw all these people as puppets, moved here and there by powers of whose existence they never dreamed. And, of course, all the while I was also reading my morning newspaper, and watching the world of to-day; and inevitably I found myself testing the people of the present by these same methods. I would find myself seeking for the forces which were at work to-day, and striving to reach out to the future to which they were leading. I would find myself, by the way of helping in this interpretation, comparing and balancing the two eras, and transposing its figures back and forth. This famous educator or this newspaper editor of to-day—what would he have been saying had he lived in 1852? And this clergyman friend of mine, this politician—where would he fit into that period? Or if Yancey had been alive to-day, what would he have been doing? Where should I have found Seward—what parts would Edward Everett and Wendell Phillips and Jefferson Davis have been playing? It was really a fascinating problem in proportion. The men of fifty years ago stood thus and so to a known crisis; similar men of the present stand thus to an unknown crisis—and now find the crisis. When I had finished “Manassas” I took up the writing of “The Jungle”; which is simply to say that I was drawn on irresistibly to seek for this latter crisis, and to try to understand it—to get into the heart of it, and live it and follow it to its end, just as I had done with the earlier one. So now I feel that I have much the same sort of power as Cuvier, the naturalist, who could construct a prehistoric animal from a bit of its bone. I have far more than the bone of this monster—I have his tail, beginning far back in the seventies; and I have the whole of his huge body—the present. I have counted his scales and measured his limbs; I have even felt his pulse and had his blood under the microscope. And now you ask me—How many more vertebræ will there be in the neck of this strange animal? And what will be the size and the shape of his head? So it is that I write in all seriousness that the revolution will take place in America within one year after the Presidential election of 1912; and, in saying this, I claim to speak, not as a dreamer nor as a child, but as a scientist and a prophet. CONTENTS PAGE Introduction vii CHAPTER I. The Coming Crisis 3