For, strange and incongruous as it may seem, a plutocracy rarely if ever develops a real leader save in the crisis of its lifetime. In Rome, as Ferrero so well points out in his book, “The Greatness and Decline of Rome,” Sulla came into his leadership of the plutocracy only after the people in the person of Marius had seized from the hands of the plutocracy all the power of government. In France, the plutocracy absolutely failed to develop a leader. In England to-day, almost in the dawn of a revolution, the propertied classes lack a single person of commanding power. In America, no single man, no group of men, represent in their persons the power of the plutocracy. It is the tendency of the great and wealthy to divide into rival camps. For some years past, in the one single subdivision of the world of wealth that is represented by Wall Street finance, there have been at least two great leaders of the golden host, bitterly antagonistic, fiercely at odds, each striving to draw to himself new reinforcements, not with the idea of strengthening the world of money as a whole, but rather with the single idea of building up his own power to break down or destroy the power of other leaders in that world. To-day, in this single section of the world of business, there seems to be but one man who stands like a giant among pygmies. Far more nearly than any other in our history does he, in his magnificent personal power and his splendid executive wisdom, approach the magnitude of a real leader in a plutocracy. In the political world it is physically next to impossible that any man can arise in a country where the people vote who will be able to assume at once political power as a servant of the people and plutocratic rule as a representative of moneyed interests. In the never-ceasing conflict between the people and their exploiters no man by serving two sides can achieve greatness. Therefore, the wealthy classes of America have never sought, and are not seeking to-day, leaders from the political arena. In that arena, it is true, they have chosen to associate themselves, from time to time, with men who, through their ability or through the public confidence reposed in then, exercise great political authority. In that way, more than by any other, the plutocracy of America has maintained the _status quo_; but every citizen of the United States who in his own mind is persuaded that this is true of any one man who can be named in the political world despises that man, contemns his authority, and sets him down in the list of a nation’s traitors.