It might be thought that with a really high standard, the extra nerve strain of life would be compensated for by extra opportunity for rest, leisure, and quiet, but exactly the reverse is the case. There is less leisure, except perhaps for the old poor and the new very rich, than there was twenty years ago. It is also infinitely harder than it was to find any quiet spot in the country at possible cost to which one can retire to rest one’s tired mind and soul. The automobile offers an instructive example of how an end can be defeated by its apparent means. When there were few cars they afforded people a chance to get away into the peace of the[Pg 57] country, but now their very numbers have ruined the quiet of the countryside. People motor out of the big cities for quiet, only to find that they themselves, multiplied by thousands, have killed the very thing they sought. Recently I inquired of a surgeon who had gone to his house in the country a hundred miles from New York if he had come back rested. He replied emphatically that he had not, and that his place was ruined by people who raced their motor boats with engines unmuffled and made it noisier than even his house in town. As to what will be the condition when aeroplanes become really common, one shudders to think. Is it any wonder that as other by-products the statisticians tell us that the age of marriage is steadily being postponed, with all that that implies physiologically and psychologically, that the birth rate is falling, that heart disease, divorce, and insanity are all increasing? As we contemplate these and other by-products we may well ask, what makes a high standard of life rather than of living? Granted that we now have billionaires where even millionaires were relatively scarce a generation ago, that labor has risen a little farther above the subsistence level, and that science has given us innumerable toys and conveniences, has not the gulf in comfort widened infinitely between rich and poor? Are the great mass of professional and intellectual workers and of moderate-salaried people as well off in the things that really count as they were a generation ago? For the common fund of our civilization has the advance, such as it is, in the condition of the laboring class offset the comparative decline in the great and almost forgotten middle class? Has the nation as a whole gained or lost in contentment, peace of mind, assurance of the future, rational enjoyment, and[Pg 58] spiritual as well as material comfort? Is it worth while to be continually driven to meet the rent, life insurance, the installments on one’s purchases, in order that big business may declare its billions in stock dividends?