time Sir Sagramor would still be out grailing, so no
valuable time would be lost by the postponement; I
should then have been in office six or seven years,
and I believed my system and machinery would be so
well developed that I could take a holiday without its
working any harm.

I was pretty well satisfied with what I had already
accomplished. In various quiet nooks and corners I
had the beginnings of all sorts of industries under way
-- nuclei of future vast factories, the iron and steel
missionaries of my future civilization. In these were
gathered together the brightest young minds I could
find, and I kept agents out raking the country for
more, all the time. I was training a crowd of ignorant