Here, surely, we have one of those supremely characteristic utterances that convey the note of whole societies. That industry and foresight are the cardinal virtues, that virtue and vice are to be distinguished not by any intrinsic spiritual standard but by their comparative results in material wealth, that the institution of private property is "bound up" with "whatever in historic times has stood for Civilization," barring, of course, the teachings of Jesus and Buddha and Francis of Assisi, and most of the art, thought and literature of the world, is a doctrine that can hardly seem other than eccentric to any one with a sense of the history of the human spirit. Yet it was the social creed of John Hay, and John Hay was not even a business man; he was a poet and a man of letters. When Tolstoy said that "property is not a law of nature, the will of God, or a historical necessity, but rather a superstition," he was expressing, in a somewhat extreme form, the general view of thinkers and poets and even of economists during these latter years, a view the imaginative mind can hardly do other than hold. It is very significant, therefore, to find American men of letters opposing, by this insistence upon the supremacy of material values, what must have been their own normal personal instinct as well as the whole tendency of modern liberal culture--for John Hay was far from unique; even Walt Whitman said: "Democracy looks with suspicious, ill-satisfied eye upon the very poor and on those out of business; she asks for men and women with occupations, well-off, owners of houses and acres, and with cash in the bank." Industry and foresight, devoted to the pursuit of wealth--here one has at once the end and the means of the simple, universal morality of the Gilded Age. And he alone was justified, to him alone everything was forgiven, who succeeded. "The following dialogue," wrote Pickens, in his "American Notes," "I have held a hundred times: 'Is it not a very disgraceful circumstance that such a man as So-and-so should be acquiring a large property by the most infamous and odious means, and notwithstanding all the crimes of which he has been guilty, should be tolerated and abetted by your citizens? He is a public nuisance, is he not?' 'Yes, sir.' 'A convicted liar?' 'Yes, sir.' 'He has been kicked, and cuffed, and caned?' 'Yes, sir.' 'And he is utterly dishonorable, debased and profligate?' 'Yes, sir.' 'In the name of wonder, then, what is his merit?' 'Well, sir, he is a smart man.'" Smartness was indeed, for the Gilded Age, the divine principle that moved the sun and the other stars.