One of them, an old friend of mine, told me. They had been discussing a statement that had appeared as a news item during the afternoon. It was part of a speech made in the senate at Washington. It was an attack upon the concentration of wealth in the hands of the few. It was really a veiled denunciation of the principle upon which Society is founded. These men and women, all part and parcel of the social world, had spent most of their evening discussing that item of news. A very few years ago such an episode as this would have been dismissed by almost any group of men and women who belonged to Society, with hardly a single thought. Somebody might have introduced the subject; somebody else would have abusively called the senator a demagogue, or an agitator, or a Socialist--and the conversation would have drifted on into the latest sporting news or talk of somebody’s ball a month or so away. But now, the older men and women of Society know better. They have learned, in fact, to distinguish real news from mere sensation. They know a statesman from a demagogue and facts from sensations. I do not say that it is general, this tendency to take seriously the social, industrial, and economic questions of the day. In my own case, I do know that up to a very few years ago none of these problems bothered me very much. I know that very rarely did I hear the question raised as to the permanence of the conditions under which we lived within our social barriers. Nobody, in my world, considered the problem of industry his own; and every one drifted onward through the years secure in the conviction that in the end everything was going to be all right. To-day how different it is! To-day we are studying the sources of our wealth, finding out for ourselves the real price paid by humanity to give us the privileges of the social life which we and our fathers have enjoyed. Excited by curiosity, we go down to inspect the mines our fathers left to us. We watch the men at work, mere pitiful animals, risking their lives in terrible endeavour for a meagre wage, that we, the heirs of time and of eternity, may take our leisure in the palaces of wealth. In the mills of Pittsburg we watch the workers in iron and steel, toiling in the white hot blast of the furnaces that we, who never have toiled, may draw our dividends and spend them on the luxuries we love. All around and about us are millions of active, industrious human beings. How can we, the rich, longer remain idle? Is it possible that the heroism of the wealth-producing, life-preserving population of the world exerts no influence upon those who are not forced by circumstances to work? I know from my own experience that those who are worth while in the social and financial world have not only been influenced by the activity of the world’s workers, but I can positively state that mere pleasure-seeking idlers are disappearing so fast that it is a question of but a few years more before their extinction is complete.