If happiness of the kind our ancestors of the world’s aristocratic days dreamed had been the objective of the human race, man would have retained his hairy coat, his taste for raw meat, his pleasure in cave-dwelling. Every once in awhile we see in America people whose object is happiness. Sooner or later they arrive at the bottom. Sometimes they are happy there. But, happy or not, they are not to be envied or imitated. The dominant note of the real slums is happiness. Don’t be deceived by the squalor and rags into thinking it misery. The unhappy slum-dwellers do not remain, but restlessly and resolutely fight against the bestial stupor, fight their way back to the light and the joy of life. The joy of life is the exaltation that comes through a sense of a life lived to the very limit of its possibilities; a life of self-development, self-expansion, self-devotion to the emancipation of man. Whoever you are, this joy of life can be yours. Money has nothing to do with it, either in aiding or retarding. Money cannot buy the essentials--health and love. It cannot avert the essential evils--illness, bereavement. The world keeps finding this out from generation to generation--and forgetting as soon as it rediscovers. Solomon mentioned the matter many centuries ago, when he wrote: “I made me great works; I builded me houses; I planted me vineyards; I made me gardens and orchards, and I planted trees in them of all kinds of fruits; I made me pools of water to water therewith the wood that bringeth forth trees; I got me servants and maidens, and had servants born in my house; also I had great possessions of great and small cattle above all that were in Jerusalem before me; I gathered me also silver and gold, and the peculiar treasure of kings and of the provinces;.... “Then I looked on all these works that my hands had wrought and on the labour that I had laboured to do; and, behold, all was vanity and vexation of spirit, and there was no profit under the sun.” Our rich men are largely responsible for the misconception that the American people have no ideal higher than that of money-making. The following remarks once made by a rich philanthropist are interesting because they are typical of the thought of a great number of persons who speak in public to-day: “In contributing to the education of the suffrage the rich are but building for their own protection. If they neglect so to build, barbarism, anarchy, plunder will be the inevitable result. If the spirit of commercialism and greed continues to grow stronger, then the Twentieth Century will witness a social cataclysm unparalleled in history.” Is all this true? Does the future of civilization depend upon the generosity of rich men? If the rich men do not awaken as a class and give more largely to the uplifting of their fellow-men, shall we have a carnival of barbarism, anarchy and plunder?