So we struck out methods, manners, customs, and traditions all our own. We did it--this marvellous evolution--in half the lifetime of a man. In fact, in the industrial world one might almost say it was a process of twenty years--merely a moment of the nation’s history. Well may one say it is a rapid age in which we live. Madly we rush at our great problems. We did not know--we do not know yet--what the result is to be. There is no precedent to guide us; the road to to-morrow bears no sign-posts. Not yet has our new system been tried by a panic that disturbed the depths of the commercial and industrial seas. Only, we hope for the best, for optimism is the sign-manual of the true-born American. I dwell upon these matters not because I care to pose or dare to pose as an authority upon them, but because the principles and ideas upon which they rest underlie also the making of the Kingdom of Society of which I would write. For social evolution is, after all, but a part of this same evolution that has given us our own distinctive banking system--good as it is or bad as it may be--and our own industrial system--giant or weakling as it may prove to be. And if our banking system and our great industrial system were born in a day and a night, what may one say of the plutocracy that in this later day has been grafted upon and has grown to be a part of the American social world? Here, indeed, the traditions of the world of history flashed past us, in our forward rush, as dead leaves fly backward from a speeding train. We saw them as they flew--yet we did not clearly see them. We knew they were, but we could not distinguish them one from the other; and, after all, little we cared for them, and little we care now. Perhaps, as I write, my mind will carry me back to the days before these new phenomena transpired; and I shall be moved to write of social America in the days of its true glory, before the glitter of tinsel and the tawdry finery of mere wealth overlaid it. For that is the background against which stand out in all their hideousness the empty follies of the idle rich and the vapid foolishness of the ultra-fashionable in America to-day.