The chief output of mines is miners and mine operators; the chief product of factories is operatives, managers, and absentee shareholders; the goods mainly dealt in by department stores are salespeople and customers; the outstanding contribution of finance in the modern world does not appear in the profit-and-loss account of any bank, for it is the banker himself and his clients. If we would estimate the efficiencies of the industrial age, we must study the men, women and children all about us, and among other things we must take account of what they think of one another. Some of the things that are happening to us can readily be discerned. This high-strung humanity of ours is awake on some sides of its mind if not on others; it is highly organized, industrially focalized, scientifically managed, psychologically analyzed; it is rich in things, but it is distracted and ethically upset. At the moment when enormous power to work our will is added to us, we become partly unsure as to what we want, but mostly a sense of disillusionment pervades our powers. Disillusionment, that is, with respect to the genuine worth of all our motives and all our straining and striving and organizing. The signs of this depression are unmistakable. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century our youth were nurtured upon Tennyson’s smooth confidence that “Nothing walks with aimless feet”; upon Browning’s morning song, “All’s well with the world”; upon Emerson’s apothegm that when two neighbors converse across a fence, “Jove nods to Jove over the head of each.” A divinity within man seemed to be attested by his conquest of nature, by his place in the system of evolution, by the progress of knowledge, by the developmental character of religions, and by the growth of philanthropy. Under the widely-heralded doctrine of divine immanence all creation was meaningful, and the human mind, in particular, was taken to be the point at which the otherwise hidden meanings of the universe blossomed forth. Even in the strain of economic life there was a certain lushness of belief in human capacity. Corresponding to the feeling that our natural resources were exhaustless, there was a prevalent assumption that success was within the reach of anyone who chose to be industrious and enterprising. An enormous increase of immigration was welcomed. Having purged ourselves of slavery, we believed that the United States had reached its political maturity, and that it was destined to be the political light of the whole world. The capacity of men to govern themselves was taken for granted. Thus, in America, at least, human kind felt itself to be young, growing, destined to high achievement; and these were taken to be simply human qualities that manifest themselves wherever environmental conditions are favorable.