Through these and other periods characterized by their own especial aims and ideals, we have come to an age when commercialism is the all-absorbing thing; and we are told by pessimists that these dominant conditions are hopelessly incompatible with academic idealism or with the maintenance of high ethical standards, whether for the guidance of the individual himself or for the acceptance and control of the community. It is precisely this state of affairs, then, that I desire briefly to consider. And I shall keep in mind those bearings of it that might seem to have some relation to the views and aims of students who are soon to go out from the sheltered life of the university,--under the necessity, whether they shrink from it or not, of becoming part and parcel of this organism of business and trade that has invaded almost every sphere of modern activity. I have only recently heard a great and eloquent teacher of morals, himself an exponent of the highest and finest culture to which we have attained, speak in terms of the utmost doubt and anxiety regarding the drift of the times. To his mind, the evils and dangers accompanying the stupendous developments of our day are such as to set what he called commercialism in direct antagonism to all that in his mind represented the higher good, which he termed idealism. The impression that he left upon his audience was that the forces of our present-day business life are inherently opposed to the achievement of the best results in statecraft and in the general life of the community. He could propose no remedy for the evils he deplored except education, and the saving of the old ideals through the remnant of the faithful who had not bowed the knee in the temple of Mammon. But he pointed out no way by which to protect the tender blossoms of academic idealism, when they meet their inevitable exposure in due time to the blighting and withering blasts of the commercialism that to him seemed so little reconcilable with the good, the true, and the beautiful. To all this the practical man can only reply, that if, indeed, commercialism itself cannot be made to furnish a soil and an atmosphere in which idealism can grow, bud, blossom, and bear glorious fruit,--then idealism is hopelessly a lost cause. If it be not possible to promote things ideally good through these very forces of commercial and industrial life, then the outlook is a gloomy one for the social moralist and the political purist.