Am I wrong in suggesting that this is the true folk-Odyssey of our civilization? It is the pattern, one might almost say, of all the stories of modern America; and what distinguishes it from other national epopees is the fact that all its idealism runs into the channel of money-making. Mr. Lowes Dickinson once commented on the truly religious character of American business. "The Gilded Age" enables us to verify that observation at the source; for all the phenomena of religion figure in Philip's search for the coal-mine. He lives in the "faith" of discovering it; he sees himself as another "Adam," as a "hermit" consecrated to that cause; he thinks of money as the treasure you long for in your youth when the world is fresh to you; he invokes Providence to help him to find it; he speaks of himself, in his ardent longing for it, as a "visionary"; he speaks of "fighting his battle alone," of "another fight with fate." This is not mere zeal, one observes, not the mere zeal of the mere votary; it is, quite specifically, the religious zeal of the religious votary. And as Philip Sterling is to himself in the process, so he is to others in the event: "The words of a proprietor of a rich coal-mine have a golden sound, and his common sayings are repeated as if they were solid wisdom." The hero, in other words, has become the prophet. We can see now that, during the Gilded Age at least, wealth meant to Americans something else than mere material possession, and the pursuit of it nothing less than a sacred duty. One might note, in corroboration of this, an interesting passage from William Roscoe Thayer's "Life and Letters of John Hay": That you have property is proof of industry and foresight on your part or your father's; that you have nothing, is a judgment on your laziness and vices, or on your improvidence. The world is a moral world, which it would not be if virtue and vice received the same rewards. This summary, though confessedly crude, may help, if it be not pushed too close, to define John Hay's position. The property you own--be it a tiny cottage or a palace--means so much more than the tangible object! With it are bound up whatever in historic times has stood for Civilization. So an attack on Property becomes an attack on Civilization.