Sometimes an honest man of my class, reading the news of the day, awakes to a sudden realization of the grim political truth. During the time of the public discussion over the late tariff readjustment I remember such an incident. We were three men, sitting together in the smoking-room of an up-town club. One of us had brought in a copy of a sane and honest afternoon paper, containing a quiet, dignified, careful but powerful analysis of the results brought about under the tariff reform measure. He had been struck by the article. He called it to the attention of the third member of the group, who sat down to read it. He read it through, while my friend and I talked about trivial things. After quite a long period of silence he handed the paper back to the giver. “What do you think of it?” he was asked. His cigar had gone out. He lit it before he replied. Then he said, gravely: “America needs a Marius, a Pitt, and a Peel. Before long it must get one or all of them, or it will surely breed a Danton and a Robespierre.” It may have been mere epigram, but the two of us who heard it were startled. For the man who said it was a leader of the world of fashion, powerful in the world of business, and descended from four generations of the purest-blooded aristocracy this country owns. Think, then, of the meaning of this sentiment from such a man at such a time! Marius, a plebeian, led the slaves of Rome to the seats of political power, broke down the age-old barriers of an aristocratic plutocracy, and wrote into the history of the world one of its earliest chapters on the revolt of a subjugated nation held in chains for the benefit of a few. Pitt, Lord Chatham, the “Great Commoner,” hurled from office by the combined power of a king, a plutocratic class, and a subservient political machine, was forced back into office by the will of the people, unorganized, in the face of all the banded powers against him, and in spite of a condition of political corruption that made his return seem a miracle. Peel gave the people of England free corn against the banded powers of commercial greed. And to-day, in America, an aristocrat and a member of the plutocratic class, sitting in a great city club of fashion, reading an editorial from a paper that is published and edited to meet the demands of that very class, gives it as his opinion that in this country we must raise a Marius, a Pitt, and a Peel! And the alternative--the days of the Terror, the bloody hands, the brutish mob, the wild-eyed, frantic leaders of the hosts that stormed the Bastile, set up the guillotine--so runs the mind of an aristocrat and a plutocrat, reading the _Evening Post_ in a rich man’s club on upper Fifth Avenue!