494 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Commercialism, leading to such broad results for all, has a marked 

 influence upon those who have led in the advance. American men 

 of commerce, be they lawyers, merchants, manufacturers, bankers or 

 railroad managers, acknowledge the community of interest and seek 

 fame or immortality as philanthropists. They cherish hospitals, they 

 endeavor to improve the condition of the poor, they found universities, 

 they endow public libraries, they establish vast museums. A Howard, 

 a Shaftesbury was a strange phenomenon. There are many Howards 

 and Shaftesburys in our great cities, who, having acquired or inherited 

 great wealth, spend their hours not in selfish indulgence but in devoted 

 efforts to make the world better and happier. 



One cannot ignore the fact there are many, whose only enjojnnent 

 apparently is found in flaunting their wealth in the face of the poor, 

 but they are no longer objects of admiration on the one hand or of 

 fear on the other; the community looks upon them with mingled pity 

 and contempt. Selfish employers are not unknown, oppression has 

 not ceased, poverty, suffering and crime are on every side; in many 

 respects, the evil more than counterbalances the good ; all this we know ; 

 but we know also that, in all that makes for good, the condition in 

 the two great commercial nations to-day is far, far beyond that existing 

 in the golden age of Eome or Greece or in the Elizabethan age 

 of England. The very anxiety to relieve the oppressed makes us 

 familiar with the prevailing sorrow and leads those, who under former 

 conditions would have been ignorant or unobserving, to their gloomy 

 pessimism respecting the future. 



As for the fires of creative imagination, one may say only that they 

 are as brilliant now as at any previous time — with this difference, 

 creative imagination is about better business now than formerly — it no 

 longer wastes itself in cultivating merely the esthetic side of man, it 

 works for his uplifting, physically, morally, intellectually. 



