Under the shade and fallen needles of the pine forest, no other vegetation can grow. Under the absorption, the exhaustion, of the fierce business competition of America, little else than business shrewdness, business insight, business knowledge can grow. A thousand seeds of culture, art, music, philanthrophy, religion, human fellowship, home happiness die permanently or fail to germinate at all in the American business man. The struggle, like a remorseless machine, seizes him as a young man and works its way with him till it flings him off at the other end of the process, a failure with a dreary old age of dependence and uncertainty, or a successful man broken in health at fifty, to spend the rest of his days in search of health, or with the leisure and the means to develop the old tastes but the tastes themselves atrophied by long and enforced neglect. In the name of the brotherhood of Christianity, in the name of the richness and variety of the human soul, the Church must declare a truceless war upon this sterilizing and dehumanizing competition and upon the source of it, an economic order based on profit-seeking. With profits not merely as an inducement but as the absolutely essential condition, the _sine qua non_ not merely of success but of a livelihood, competition, even desperate competition, is inevitable. There is not usually the direct personal clash, the bloody or deadly combat, though these may be, but it is a life and death struggle none the less. In business competition, men are fighting with halters around their necks. They are fighting as wolves fight who know that the beaten one will be devoured by the pack. How unfair and how futile under such conditions to heap reproaches upon the men who make what are called excessive profits! The risks are great. Should not a man make provision for them when he can? When, too, a man is immersed from boyhood in an atmosphere of profit-seeking, when in the talk around the meal-table and the conversation of his father with other men he gathers that profits are the measure of success, when in business he finds the whole energy and ingenuity and influence of men concentrated on profits, and men largely estimated by the amount of their profits, what capacity will be left after twenty years of such a life to distinguish between legitimate and excessive profits? A profit-seeking system will always breed profiteers. It cannot be cleansed or sweetened or ennobled. There is only one way to Christianize it, and that is, to abolish it. That is, it may well be believed, the distinctive task of the age that is now beginning, as the abolition of the liquor-traffic was of the age that is closing, and the abolition of slavery of a still earlier age.