Page:The Works of H G Wells Volume 4.pdf/161

 and their public policy being directed towards financial ends. One of the common prophecies of the future of the United States is such a domination by a group of trust organisers and political bosses. But a man, or a group of men, so strong and intelligent as would be needed to hold an entire party machine within the confines of his—or their collective—mind and will, could at the most be but a very transitory and incidental phenomenon in the history of the world. Either such an exploitation of the central control will have to be covert and subtle beyond any precedent in human disingenuousness, or else its domination will have to be very amply modified indeed by the requirements of the second factor, and its proceedings made very largely the resultant of that second factor's forces. Moreover, very subtle men do not aim at things of this sort, or aiming, fail, because subtlety of intelligence involves subtlety of character, a certain fastidiousness and a certain weakness. Now that the garrulous period, when a flow of language and a certain effectiveness of manner was a necessary condition to political pre-eminence, is passing away, political control falls more and more entirely into the hands of a barristerish intriguing sort of person with a tough-wearing, leathery, practical mind. The sort of people who will work the machine are people with "faith," as the popular preachers say, meaning, in fact, people who do not analyse, people who will take the machine as it is unquestioningly, shape their ambitions to it, and—saving their vanity—work it as it wants to go. The man who will be boss will be the man