The women are the most persistent and unreasonable offenders in this respect. Partly through idleness, partly through a craving to have occupation and a sense of usefulness, partly through a profound pity for their apparently unfortunate sisters, they pour out capital for pauper-plants and search diligently for “worthy poor” to pauperize. Among the long-very-rich there is notable shyness of the larger kinds of giving. No doubt at bottom this is due to increasing selfishness, increasing absorption in amusements of the wholly selfish kinds. It costs more and more every year to play the rich man’s part; more and more imagination is brought to bear in developing it, both by rich men eager to find new ways of showing off and by ingenious poor men inventing new ways of making a living out of the rich upon whose extravagance they thrive. The rich man, even where his income is huge, is often pinched. He hates to give--he may find that his giving has compelled him to forego a most attractive investment or has compelled him to abstain from some new expensive luxury or pleasure. He hoards, to be ready for such emergencies. Then if he has several children, he wants to leave each of them as rich as possible so that they can all live in the style to which they have been accustomed, the style in which their friends and associates live. For worship of wealth you must look among the long-very-rich. Those who pass Mammon’s statue with a nod or a half-ashamed crook of a reluctant knee will have the pleasure of seeing very, very many of the rich “old families” flat in the dust, noses plowing it, and not a bit ashamed. Is this drying up of the charity of “philanthropy” wholly a matter for regret? Several years ago a few young Americans from various parts of the country began to spend their summer vacations at Woods Hole, Massachusetts. They were young; they were poor; they were obscure; they were hard-worked and hard-working as well; they were profoundly indifferent to money or money gain; they were not even bothering especially about fame. They had as their common bond a passion for science. They had as their common aim the satisfying of that divine curiosity which makes the man who has it toil incessantly and unweariedly over ways more arduous and through wildernesses more dangerous than those that baffled the seekers after the Holy Grail. They longed--these earnest, poor, obscure young Americans--to penetrate to Nature’s innermost laboratory, her workshop of workshops, her temple of temples, there to surprise her supreme secret--the mystery of the origin of life.