Is it true, either in whole or in part, that our industrial civilization is degrading the masses into mere appurtenances of the machine, mere mechanical aids to the heaping up of vast profits in the treasuries of the few? Is it true, either in whole or in part, that our business men, whether great or small, whether captains of industry or sub-officers, are degenerating into dishonesty and the short-sighted selfishness of the slave-master? A surface survey of our time reveals much that seems to compel a reluctant affirmative answer. To glance at a newspaper is to read of the cynical tyrannies of beef, oil, coal, iron, grain, railway magnates, who make their infamies nauseating by ardent professions of patriotism and piety. And from time to time the shameless adulterations of food and drink culminate in some sensational slaughter of people wholesale, suggesting vastly greater slaughters effected quietly from day to day. And we see persons grown enormously rich upon stolen privileges of various kinds exhibiting themselves in luxurious ostentation, offering tempting rewards to sycophancy and pauperizing those fighting on the poverty line by supercilious gifts and condescensions. We see rascality rewarded with wealth and honors, success bought with self-sale. We see corruption, conspicuous and hideous, everywhere upon the surface of the social body. And we turn away heartsick, convinced that the Veblens have stated the truth with moderation. But if we turn away to read history--not the fables and fancies, the poetical romances and romantic poems from which the Veblens draw their “facts,” but the true story of the mankind that was--if we read that painful recital, we turn again to the mankind of our day, and it is like a landscape from which the storms of winter are rolling away. The corruption which revolted us is still there, just as hideous as before; but we now see that it is the poison which was working in the veins and arteries of the patient and is now at the surface, on its way out of the body before the victorious legions of health.