In _Mr. Crewe’s Career_ (1908), set twenty years later, Churchill described the power shift Bass had foreseen. The legislature is now owned by Augustus Flint, Worthington’s former “seneschal” who controls the Northeastern Railroad. His “captain-general” who rules from Bass’s old room in the Pelican is railroad counsel Hilary Vane. The star-crossed lovers in this novel are Victoria Flint and Austen Vane. Austen fights the railroads despite his father and foresees the day when a new generation, willing to assume its political responsibilities, will turn out the railroad group. After a quarrel, Hilary leaves Flint but agrees to stay on for the gubernatorial nomination battle. As Flint watches Vane stalk from his study he sees “the end of an era of fraud, of self-deception, of conditions that violated every sacred principle of free government which men had shed blood to obtain.” Out of loyalty to his father, Austen refuses to let his name go before the convention, but he says that it does not matter, for railroad power is doomed. The book closes with a purple passage in which Austen and Victoria tell their love to each other and watch the sunset over the river. Harvey Sayler relates his rise to boss of the Republican Party in David Graham Phillips’ _The Plum Tree_ (1905). His springboard is a combine, financed by a dozen companies forming the Power Trust in his own mid-western state, which will establish its own control over the state legislature rather than dealing through middlemen such as Bill Dominick, brutal saloonkeeper and politician. By placing his own men in key positions and corporation-control statutes on the state books, Sayler makes the combine completely his own. After using this combination to ruin a rebellious “robber baron,” Sayler’s rule is unquestioned. He becomes a president-maker, later allowing his creature to return to political obscurity as the price for revolt against his authority. A penitent widower at the book’s end, he is accepted by his scrupulous childhood sweetheart. =Jack London: Marxism v. Fascism, Early Phase=