Good men of wealth are even harder to find in this group of novels than good aristocrats. Disraeli’s magnates are the type who in modern America receive awards from chambers of commerce and engraved gold watches from deputations of employees. Elsewhere, the industrialist is a top-hatted advocate of _laissez-faire_ economics whose wealth is acquired more through the sweat of his underprivileged workers than by his own acumen. Millbank in _Coningsby_ and Trafford in _Sybil_ are rising merchant princes who are considerate of their workers and industrially progressive. But either they are ahead of their time or the industrialists who follow them in the novel are throwbacks to a more primitive industrial era. In _The New Machiavelli_ Dick Remington’s uncle is presented as a reactionary beast. His Newcastle pottery factory produces death as well as cups and saucers. He is as unwilling to install fans that will carry off the deadly fumes from the lead glaze as he is to concede any rights at all to his workers. The Rhondda Valley, where Pen Muff goes as the bride of union official Arnold Ryerson, has more than its share of Welsh women widowed by the coal mines. The management group remains in the background of this novel, but the miners’ efforts to obtain concessions which would now seem minimal are evidence of an attitude not dissimilar to that of Dick Remington’s uncle. In Conrad’s _Nostromo_ Charles Gould has justified his decisive intervention in Costaguanan politics by declaring that he was providing order which would benefit the natives as well as himself. Gould’s political commitment gives rise to one of the central problems of the novel--the extent to which his soul has been eroded to insure the undisturbed flow of the bright silver ingots from the San Tomas mine. Gould is not the only victim of his obsession. The other is his wife, who is all but shut out of vital areas of his life and thought. Early in the book he gives her his rationale: I pin my faith to material interests. Only let the material interests once get a firm footing, and they are bound to impose the conditions on which alone they can continue to exist. That’s how your money-making is justified here in the face of lawlessness and disorder. It is justified because the security which it demands must be shared with an oppressed people. A better justice will come afterwards. That’s your ray of hope.