Do not let us stand in too great awe of our ancestors. They also trafficked and junketted in Vanity Fair. The prosecution lay stress upon the universal custom and experience of mankind The world has never ordered its life by rules of wisdom and understanding. It has paid more court to the rich than to the good, and more heed to the noisy than to the wise. The world has imprisoned as many honest men as rogues, has slain more innocent than guilty, has decorated more criminals than heroes, has believed a thousand times less truth than lies. Is it not so, men and women? Does not common experience support the charge? Let us, then, understand each other, before we go any farther. The glory of manhood and womanhood is not to have something, but to be something; is not to get something, but to give something; is not to rule but to serve. The greatness of a nation does not lie in its wealth and power, but in the character of its men and women. With greatness in the people all the rest will follow, as surely as when the greatness of the people wanes the rest will be quickly lost. The history of all great empires tells us this: Japan is just now repeating the lesson. What is it most men strive for? Wealth and fame. These are prizes for little men, not for big men. They are prizes that often inflict untold misery in the winning, and are nearly always a curse to the winner. Vice and crime are fostered by luxury and idleness on the one hand, and by ignorance and misery on the other hand. The poor are poor that the rich may be rich; and the riches and the poverty are a curse to both. Consider all the vain pride and barbaric pomp of wealth and fashion, and all the mean envy of the weakly snobs who revere them, and would sell their withered souls to possess them. Is this decorative tomfoolery, are this apish swagger and blazoned snobbery worthy of _men_ and _women?_ The powdered flunkeys, the gingerbread coaches, the pantomime processions, the trumpery orders and fatuous titles: are they any nobler or more sensible than the paint, the tom-toms, and the Brummagen jewels of darkest Africa? And the cost! We are too prone to reckon cost in cash. We are too prone to forget that cash is but a symbol of things more precious. We bear too tamely all the bowing and kow-towing; all the fiddling and fifing, all the starring and gartering, and be-feathering and begemming, all the gambling and racing, the saluting and fanfaring, the marching and counter-marching, all the raking in of dividends, and building up of mansions, all the sweating and rackrenting, all the heartless vanity, and brainless luxury, and gilded vice: we should think of them more sternly did we count up what they cost in men and women and children, what they cost in brawn and brain, and honour and love, what they cost in human souls--what they cost in Bottom Dogs.