The effect of this upon a generation habituated to the profit-making temper has been to set up the multi-millionaire as the type of perfection toward which aspiring youth should be encouraged to strive. We go into business not to feed and clothe each other, but to make money; and since from the nature of the case only comparatively few of us have the capacity and the opportunity to become commercial supermen, the rest of us remain in business to feed and clothe ourselves, or (as we say) to “make a living.” Commerce, which owes its origin to social need, has almost wholly lost the social motive. If we are not making money ourselves, we hire ourselves out as the money-making tools of others; and while some of us aim at larger profits, the rest of us hope for larger wages. The economic motive is universal, and it expresses itself exclusively in the pecuniary standard. “The Almighty Dollar” is more than a gratuitous exercise in satire, it describes the spirit of an age. Much has been heard since the war began of the profiteer, on both sides of the Atlantic, and on both sides of the quarrel. But the profiteer is not a phenomenon peculiar to war-time. Like the poor, he is always with us; the war has but served to reveal him more vividly in his proper character. His peculiar crime is that he makes the extremity of his country the opportunity of private gain. But what he does in time of war, he does no less sedulously in time of peace. His sin takes a deeper dye in war-time because the national need is greater, and his opportunity is much enlarged. Yet the story of how “big business” has endeavoured, and has largely succeeded in the endeavour to control the legislative machinery of the nations in its own interests in normal times, is a very deplorable and shameful chapter in modern history. It is, of course, no new thing that legislatures should show themselves tender to economic interests; there is even yet no legislature in the world which is not more careful of the rights of property than of the welfare of men—except, perhaps, in Russia. By a curious paradox, those who most jealously guarded the sanctities of property, were once the implacable critics of commercial enterprise, but that phase has passed away. Landed aristocracies, no less than bourgeois manufacturers, have been so seduced by the lure of large and swift gain that the old line of demarcation has disappeared; and the doctrine of property rights has been invoked to secure the sanctity of the capitalist system of industry. The “governing classes” in Europe and America, who to-day are the economically powerful, have become an unholy alliance which exploits the state in the interests of trade. It is not the English brewers and publicans only who say, “our trade, our politics,” though these particular people may be the only ones who have the effrontery to say so in public. It is always the profiteer’s cry; and whenever in the past a