“Now wealth is a great good thing; and what I mean by wealth is the general storehouse, free to us all, which we call the earth and the atmosphere round it. I don’t have to tell you that it’s a storehouse crammed in every crack and cranny with the things you and I need for our enjoyment. And it isn’t a storehouse such as you and I would fill, which has got only what we could put into it; it’s always producing more. Production is its law. It’s never idle. It’s incessantly working. The more we take out of it the more it yields. I don’t say that we can’t exhaust it in spots by taxing it too much; of course we can. Greed will exhaust anything, just as it’s exhausting, under our very eyes, our forests, our fisheries, and our farms. But in general there’s nothing that will respond to good treatment more surely than the earth, nor give us back a bigger interest on the labor we put into it.” “That’s so,” came from some one who had perhaps been a farmer. “And so,” Christian went on, “we’ve had a world that’s given us everything in even greater abundance than we could use. We’ve had food to waste; we’ve had clothes for every shade of temperature; we’ve had coal for our furnaces, and iron for our buildings, and steel for our ships, and gasolene for our automobiles. We’ve had every invention that could help us to save time, to save worry, to save labor, to save life. Childhood has been made more healthy; old age more vigorous. That a race of young men and young women has been growing up among us of whom we can say without much exaggeration that humanity is becoming godlike, any one can see who goes round our schools and colleges.” He took a step forward, throwing open his palms in a gesture of demand. “But, fellows, what good has all this prodigious plenty been doing us? Has it made us any better? Have we become any more thankful that we all had enough and to spare? Have we been any more eager to see that when we had too much the next man had a sufficiency? Have we rejoiced in this plenitude as the common delight of every one? Have we seen it as the manifestation of the God who expresses Himself in all good things, and Who has given us, as one of the apostles says, all things richly to enjoy? Has it brought us any nearer Him? Has it given us any increased sympathy with Him? Or have we made it minister to our very lowest qualities, to our appetites, to our insolence, to our extravagance, to our sheer pride that all this was ours, to wallow in, to waste, and to despise? “You know we have done the last. There isn’t a man among us who hasn’t done it to a greater or less degree. There is hardly a man in New York who hasn’t lived in the lust of the purely material. You may go through the world and only find a rarefied creature here and there who hasn’t reveled and rioted and been silly and vain and arrogant to the fullest extent that he dared.” The wee bye Daisy was sitting in the front row, looking up at the speaker raptly.