It is but five years since the white light of the noon-day sun beat down upon the hitherto deeply buried roots of America’s industrial and social life, and eighty-five millions knew whence the social fruitage of our age draws its sustenance. Just what, in this connection, has been the effect of these five years upon American opinion? When the nineteenth century closed, America worshipped great wealth. It sanctified its possessors. It deified the hundred-millionaire. In five years’ time America has learned to hate great wealth. Plutocracy is disgorging, but public opinion is relentless. Never before in the history of the world has there been anything analogous to the campaign of the American muck-rakers. The progressive forces of French society raged at the monarchy and the Church before the French Revolution. But their propaganda took thirty years to gain power, and fifty years to accomplish its purpose. The work of destruction here seemed to be done in a night. The “pillars of Society” tumbled. From official statements of the President of the United States down to the output of ten dollar a week hack-writers, our publications teemed with the products of the popular trade of exposure. Great commercial and industrial institutions were analyzed. National and municipal governments were dissected. Universities and churches did not escape the busy seeker for sin. After submerging itself in the story of its shames, the nation turned in disgust to more pleasing visions. But it had answered the question “How?” And the answer is by no means forgotten. Some day, perhaps in the twenty-first century, some Carlyle, sitting in the shade of elms before an old country house, will head another chapter, “Printed Paper,” and describe the war made with words upon the crumbling ideals and ideas of an age. He will tell how a nation from worshipping wealth on Monday learned to hate it on Saturday. He will relate how it came that myriads of poor, blessing the alms giver as they fell asleep in low hovels and crowded tenements, awoke with their hearts full of bitterness and hatred for those whom they had worshipped. He will humorously describe how the plutocracy itself, alarmed beyond power of expression, sought to disgorge its ill-gotten gains upon the multitude; its primal virtue, acquisition, transformed to the crime, possession. He will recall for the amusement of students of history the frantic endeavour of the demagogue to raise himself in public esteem through decrying the idle rich. To us, who, through the heyday of our popularity, simply sat in the sunshine and throve and grew fat in happiness, it came as a terrible shock, this change of the popular attitude. At first we laughed at it; then we preached little sermons about it, half jesting, half serious; then we began to talk about it among ourselves; and we held indignation meetings every time we met our friends, and called down the wrath of heaven on these sharp-eyed and glib-tongued investigators.