What was that epoch? It was the round half-century that began in the midst of the Civil War, reached its apogee in the seventies and eighties and its climacteric in the nineties of the last century, with the beginning of the so-called "Progressive Movement," and came to an indeterminate conclusion, by the kindness of heaven, shortly before the war of 1914. It was the epoch of industrial pioneering, the Gilded Age, as Mark Twain called it in the title of his only novel, the age when presidents were business men and generals were business men and preachers were business men, when the whole psychic energy of the American people was absorbed in the exploitation and the organization of the material resources of the continent and business enterprise was virtually the only recognized sphere of action. One recalls the career of Charles Francis Adams. A man of powerful individual character, he was certainly intended by nature to carry on the traditions of disinterested public effort he had inherited from three generations of ancestors. Casting about for a career immediately after the Civil War, however, he was able to find in business alone, as he has told us in his Autobiography, the proper scope for his energies. "Surveying the whole field," he says, "instinctively recognizing my unfitness for the law, I fixed on the railroad system as the most developing force and largest field of the day, and determined to attach myself to it." And how fully, by the end of his life, he had come to accept the values of his epoch--in spite of that tell-tale "otherwise-mindedness" of his--we can see from these candid words: "As to politics, it is a game; art, science, literature, we know how fashions change!... What I now find I would really have liked is something quite different. I would like to have accumulated--and ample and frequent opportunity for so doing was offered me--one of those vast fortunes of the present day rising up into the tens and scores of millions--what is vulgarly known as 'money to burn' ... I would like to be the nineteenth century John Harvard--the John-Harvard-of-the-Money-Bags, if you will. I would rather be that than be Historian or General or President." Less than ever, then, after the Civil War, can America be said to have offered "a career open to all talents." It offered only one career, that of sharing in the material development of the continent. Into this one channel passed all the religious fervor of the race.