"Commercialism, thus defined, affects the character of our literature in a way that none of our students of the subject seems to have apprehended. We live in an atmosphere of material striving. Our great rewards are material successes. The extremely important consequence is that our business life through its greater temptations--through its being able to offer the rewards of wealth and mastery and esteem--robs literature and the kindred arts of our keenest minds. We have, it is true, eminent doctors and lawyers, but the complaint that commercialism has invaded these professions only proves that they depend directly on business prosperity for a substantial portion of their own rewards. "I am not forgetting the crust and garret as the traditional setting for the literary genius; but, when this state of affairs existed, the genius had no chance to become a business millionaire within ten years--or, for that matter, within a hundred. And while poverty provides an excellent foundation for a career, it is not so good as a superstructure--at least, not outside the ranks of the heroic few who renounce riches for spiritual things. "More than once," continued Mr. Spearman, "in meeting men among our masters of industry, I have been struck by the thought that these are the men who should be writing great books, painting great pictures, and building great cathedrals; their tastes, I have sometimes found, run in these directions quite as strongly as the tastes of lesser men who give themselves to literature, painting, or architecture. But the present-day market for cathedrals is somewhat straitened, and a great ambition may nowadays easily neglect the prospective rewards of literature for those of steel-making. "Business success--not achieved in literature and the arts--comes first with us; in consequence, the ranks of those who follow these professions are robbed of the intellect that should contribute to them. This is the real way in which commercialism--our pursuit of business--affects our literature. It depletes, too, in the same way, the quality of men in our public life. "Charles G. Dawes has called my attention more than once to the falling off in caliber among men from whose ranks our politicians and public men are drawn. It is not that our present administration is so conspicuously weak; go to any of the Presidential conventions this year and note the falling off in quality among the politicians. In one generation the change has been startling. The sons of the men that loomed large in public life twenty-five years ago to-day are masters of business. "Business takes everything. We have had really magnificent financiers, such as the elder Morgan, who should be our Michael Angelo. I have known railroad executives who might have been distinguished novelists, and bankers who would have been great artists were the American people as obsessed with the painting of pictures and the making of statues as those of Europe once were.