I have tried to express the spirit of what Morgan's genius seized unconsciously by the grim, resistless will of his age, has wrought into his career.
But in the background of my mind as I see Pierpont Morgan, there is always the man who will take his place, and if I did not see the man coming, and coming rapidly, who is to take Mr. Morgan's place, I admit that Mr. Morgan himself would be a failure, a disaster, a closed wall at the end of the world.
No one man will take Mr. Morgan's place, but the typical man in the group of men that will take his place will justify Mr. Morgan's work, by taking this world in his hand and riveting his vision on where Morgan's vision leaves off. As Morgan has fused railroads, iron, coal, steamships, seas, and cities, the next industrial genius shall fuse the spirits and the wills of men. The Individualists and the Socialists, the aristocracies and democracies, the capitalists and the labourers shall be welded together, shall be fused and transfused by the next Morgan into their ultimate, inevitable, inextricable, mutual interests.
The chief characteristic of the new industrial leader is coming to be social imagination or the power of seeing the larger industrial values in human gifts and efficiencies, the more human and intellectual energies of workmen, the market value of their spirits, their imaginations, and their good-will. The underpinning and Morganizing work has been done; the power of instant decision which Mr. Morgan has had, has been very often based on a lack of imagination about the things that got in his way; but the things that get in the way now, the big, little-looking things—are the things on which the new and inspired millionaires' imagination will find its skill and accumulate its power. It is men's spirits that are now in the way; they have been piling up and accumulating under Morgan's régime long enough, and it is now their turn. Perhaps men's spirits have always been beyond Mr. Morgan, and perhaps his imagination has been worked largely as a kind of cerebellum imagination: it is a kind of imagination that sees related and articulated the physical body of things, the grip on the material tools, on the gigantic limbs of a world. The man who succeeds Mr. Morgan, and for whom Mr. Morgan has made the world ready, is the man who has his imagination in the upper part of his brain, and instead of doing things by not seeing, and by not being seen, he will swing a light. He will be himself in his own personality, a little of the nature of a searchlight, and he will work the way a searchlight works, and will have his will with things by seeing and lighting, by X-raying his way through them and not by a kind of colossal world-butting, which is Morgan's way, both eyes imperiously, implacably shut, his whole being all bent, all crowded into his vast machine of men, his huge will lifted ... and excavating blindly, furiously, as through some groping force he knew not, great sub-cellars for a new heaven and new earth.
The Crowd gets its heroes one at a time. Heroes are the Crowd's tools. Some are dredges, some are telescopes. The Crowd, by a kind of instinct—an oversoul or undersoul of which it knows not until afterward, takes up each tool gropingly—sometimes even against its will and against its conscience, uses it and drops it.
Then it sees why, suddenly, it has used it.
Then God hands it Another One.