To the first of these two facts may justly be attributed the unquestionably large amount of dishonesty--dishonesty clearly and generally recognized as such. To the second of these two facts is undoubtedly due the most of the wrong-doing by men who in their private relations are above reproach. These statements are not put forward to justify men for yielding to temptation to dishonesty and to justify men in acts, approval of which can be got from conscience by sophistry only, if at all. They are put forward simply to explain why it is that, when there are actually more honesty and conscientiousness, and they of a higher quality, than ever before in human history, there should be a seeming of more dishonesty and consciencelessness. Further in support of the same view, while wrongdoers of the past were hidden or veiled by the imperfect means of publicity, wrongdoers of to-day are at once searched out and pilloried by the press and by public opinion. Up to the middle of the last century men knew little of the large evil done them, and that little imperfectly; now, knowledge of individual acts of uprightness, once scattered everywhere by being immortalized in tradition, rhymed and prose, is lost in the vast revelations of huge and ancient wrongs persisting. It is no new thing for a man to be admired and envied for wealth and station, regardless of how he got them. But it is a new thing in the world for the public conscience to be so sensitive that a man in possession of wealth or station, got not by outright and open robbery--methods not long ago regarded without grave disapproval--but by means that are questionable and suspicious merely, should be in an apologetic attitude, should feel called upon to defend himself and to give large sums in philanthropy in the effort to justify and to rehabilitate himself. Steam and electricity have given to man a sudden, vast power. It is not strange that he should commit errors and crimes in working out its unfamiliar possibilities. It is not strange that abuses, as old as the selfish struggle for existence, should succeed in adapting themselves to the new conditions, should contrive to persist. But is it not strange that professors of political economy, supposedly familiar with the truth about the past, should be so narrow and twisted in historic and psychological perspective as to misunderstand these simple phenomena? And what must we think of them if, in support of their pessimistic and unwarranted jeremiads, they conjure the fantastic and preposterous and long-exploded myth of humanity’s past Golden Age?