To this day, ancient Asiatic, Egyptian and European art forms continue to pour in on us in a brilliant phantasmagoric stream, until we threaten, or did, to drain the world of its treasures. Our private mansions groan with the antiquated skill of Asia and other continents, but of these other matters, or the cultivation or preservation of a single living personality, not a word. It is possible to go forth and raise any reasonable or even unreasonable sum for any number of useless or surplus charitable organizations or hospitals or churches, whereas if it were a question of cash for a truly civilizing movement of some kind, or a personality, the obstacles would prove well nigh insurmountable. Some of the trashiest homes I have ever had the misery of beholding have been those of men of tremendous wealth and alleged refinement, stuffed to overflowing with bogus furniture and art. Yet, when all is said and done, are they to blame? Are they not specialized machines sent here for a purpose? And should one expect more? Verily we have our reward in their practical achievements.... Yet, also, when one looks at them one cannot help remembering that Walt Whitman lived in a back street in Camden and depended upon a friendly admirer to bring him a fish for his supper; that Poe lived in a hut in the woods, unable to achieve or afford a more suitable abode. I am not quarreling; I cite these as interesting facts. * * * * * An interviewer once questioning me in regard to the significance of the American financial type (it was just after I had published “The Financier”), raised the question as to whether the American financial type, then so abundant and powerful, had ethically the right to be as it was or do as it was doing, seeing that it was being and doing about as it pleased. My answer was, and I still see no reason for changing it, that, in spite of all the so-called laws and prophets, there is apparently in Nature no such thing as the right to do or the right not to do, if you reach the place where the significance of the social chain in which you find yourself is not satisfactory. The murderer has under the written law no right to murder anybody. It is perfectly plain that he has the right if he is willing to pay the penalty, or if he can evade it. Conscience, this thing called conscience to which people repeatedly appeal, is, as I have pointed out elsewhere, little more than a built-up net of social acceptances and agreements in regard to society or the agreed state of facts in which we all find ourselves when we arrive here; in other words all the things which we wish to do and be, or avoid. It is not anything save an inherent condition of balance in Nature which desires and achieves a very rough equation, but nothing which works exact justice to any individual anywhere. The so-called “still, small voice,” ever present at one’s inner or spiritual ear, is,