The truth is, steam and electricity have made the human race suddenly and acutely self-conscious as a race for the first time in its existence. They have constructed a mighty mirror wherein humanity sees itself, with all its faults and follies, and diseases and deformities. And the sudden, unprecedented spectacle is so startling, is in such abhorrent contrast with poetical pictures of the past, painted in school and popular text-books, that men of defective perspective shrink, and shriek: “Mankind has become monstrous!” But not so. Man, rising, rising, rising through the ages, is not nearer to the dark and bloody and cruel place of his origin than to the promised land toward which his ideals are drawing him. His diseases and deformities are of the past; and virtues that were, up to a few decades ago, almost unattainable ideals, are now so nearly a part of his natural adornment that hope of the nearness of the luminous penumbra of the Golden Age seems not unjustified. What our grandfathers regarded as the natural and just demands of employer upon employé are now regarded as rigorous and tyrannous exactions of a brute. And in trying still to continue such exactions men slink behind the lawyer-constructed shield of the corporation, that they may be easier in conscience by trying to believe they are not “personally” responsible. This brings us, naturally, to the charges against business men. Professor Veblen does not, in so many words, assert that there was a time when business men were in business with other motives--presumably idealistic--more potent than profits. But he forces his readers to infer that this was the case--and that lofty view is always taken by the assailants of our present civilization. That is, man used to be an altruistic animal; Democracy and the machine--for you will find that these assailants are always hitting at Democracy over the shoulders of the machine--have made him a selfish and cruel rascal.