If actual desertion is thinning the ranks of the idle rich, there is another and even greater cause which will tend in the future, as it is tending to-day, to limit the number of this class. It lies much deeper than the mere phenomenon of desertion. It is, in fact, nothing more nor less than the removal of the means of making gigantic fortunes through the exploitation of men. I do not intend to dwell upon this phase of the passing of the idle rich to any great extent, because its effects are necessarily slow. Indeed, they will not be felt for many years to come. Yet I would point out one or two phases of this question that seem to me to be intensely interesting and vastly important. In the first place, the opportunities for the making of gigantic fortunes are being limited more and more by the world-embracing activities of those who already possess gigantic wealth. Let any man discover in the mountains of Mexico, in the forbidding ridges of Alaska, or on the plains of the Yukon, great new deposits of iron, or coal, or oil, and immediately, almost before the news of such discovery has reached the world at large, a dozen secret agents rush to investigate. They represent the Pearsons, of London; the Guggenheims or Morgans, of New York; the Rockefellers or the Rothschilds, of New York or Germany. They are the first in the field; they preëmpt, for fortunes already far beyond competition, the opportunity of making a tremendous fortune out of the new discovery. Think of the raw materials of commerce--sugar, meat, oil, iron, coal, copper, cotton, wheat, corn, lumber--is it not absolutely true that in the manufacture and exploitation of this tremendous mass of the raw material of wealth the possibility of amassing enormous fortunes is almost hopelessly limited by the activities and the world-girdling power of capitalist groups already far beyond the reach of competition? The free land of America is gone. All these great staples that have been in generations past the vehicles in which men have been carried upon the road to lordly fortunes are already in the hands of a few hundred families. This fact, sinister as it undoubtedly is in its broader aspect upon the economic conditions of the country, must certainly tend to eliminate more and more the possibility for the creation of additional gigantic industrial fortunes in this country. In so far as this is true it is a very important item indeed among the forces that tend toward the elimination of the idle rich.