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Bidwell by a big business man of some city. Big business men did strange, mysterious things; they put wires out in all directions, controlled a thousand lit- tle avenues for the creation of wealth. Just starting out on his own career as a man of affairs, Steve had an overpowering respect for what he thought of as the subtlety of men of affairs. With all the other American youths of his generation he had been swept off his feet by the propaganda that then went on and is still going on, and that is meant to create the illusion of greatness in connection with the ownership of money. He did not then know and, in spite of his own later success and his own later use of the machinery by which illusion is created, he never found out that in an industrial world reputations for greatness of mind are made as a Detroit manufac- turer would make automobiles. He did not know that men are employed to bring up the name of a poli- tician so that he may be called a statesman, as a new brand of breakfast food that it may be sold; that most modern great men are mere illusions sprung out of a national hunger for greatness. Some day a wise man, one who has not read too many books but who has gone about among men, will discover and set forth a very interesting thing about America. The land is vast and there is a national hunger for vastness in in- dividuals. One wants an Illinois-sized man for Illi- nois, an Ohio-sized man for Ohio, and a Texas-sized man for Texas. To be sure, Steve Hunter had no notion of all this. He never did get a notion of it. The men he had already begun to think of as great and to try to imi- tate were like the strange and gigantic protuberances