It is well we call it the golden era, for it is an era of commercialism, when men are trampling literature and art and music under their feet in the mad rush for gold and the gilded glory that it buys. To be a millionaire is greater in the estimation of modern worshipers of mammon than to be a Goldsmith; and a multimillionaire is greater in their gold-jaundiced eyes than a William Shakespeare. The highest aspiration of these nervous and strenuous generations is the acquirement and hoarding of gold. Religion is tinged with it. Politics is its ally—and alloy in the ratio of sixteen of gold to one of Patriotism. And most of the business and social relations of this enlightened age are purely golden and measured only by the circumference of a dollar. The English poet sounded the keynote of true philosophy when he sang: “Ill fares the land to hastening ills a prey Where wealth accumulates and men decay.” The true wealth of a nation rests not so much on bricks of gold as upon golden thought—the riches of brain and heart—the treasures of truth and the pure and beautiful sentiments of life. In the wild scramble for sordid gain and the golden reins of power in these wing-footed days of avarice and materialism, the angels of happiness no longer beckon from the landscape and the stream nor call from the sweet solitudes of the forest; but they stand tip-toe on the burnished domes and glittering towers of the city and the town, with crowns of gold in their hands. And the brain and brawn of the land gather there from the hills and hollows to climb after them on a thousand ladders of dreams. But the environments of domes and towers, while they stimulate the brain to grasp great financial problems and to weave the web of glory around the thrones of money kings, contract the nobler and better ideals and impulses of the heart to the gilded forms of artificial pleasure.