Recently, when Mr. H. G. Wells was in this country, I had a long talk with him, and he asked me how I accounted for the saturnalia of corruption in our political life; he said that our people did not seem to him degraded or brutal, and he could not understand why things were so much worse here than in England. I said that in England the economic process had been modified by the existence of an hereditary aristocracy, holding over from old times and having high traditions of public service. By nature this aristocracy sympathised with capital, and to a certain extent fraternised with it; but it would not abdicate to it, and occasionally, to preserve its own power, it made concessions to the public, and so served as a check upon the forces of commercialism. On the other hand the American people had only themselves to rely upon and until they had been goaded into revolt, there was no limit whatever to the power of greed. I suppose it is unnecessary to offer any proofs of the existence of “government by special interests.” If there is anyone who has been out of the country for the past three years and has not read any of the magazines, it will be sufficient to refer him to the two books of Mr. Lincoln Steffens—“The Shame of the Cities” and “The Struggle for Self Government.” Steffens himself is a proof of the evil conditions: a man who has spent ten years studying our politics, who went to the task with no preconceptions, and only a passion for honesty and fair dealing—and who has been made into a thorough-going radical by the irresistible logic of facts. It was his particular service to the Republic to trace the stream of graft to its fountain-head, which is what he calls “big business”; and the series of papers in which he proved that thesis to our people will long be studied as models of the higher journalism—the journalism which is to ordinary newspaper writing what statesmanship is to politics. As I say, there is no need of proof; but simply by way of illustration, and to call the picture to the reader’s mind, let me quote a few paragraphs from one of these papers—“Pittsburg, a City Ashamed”: