Summer Meeting. 79 



and go out some Avliere and find a place where mammon is less, and man 

 is infinitely more than he seems to be in this hurrying, crowding, unsat- 

 isfactory existence ? The growing grass, the fresh, green foliage of the 

 trees and shrubs, above all, the nuiltitudinous variety of beautiful 

 blossoms, have a moral value beyond the power of words to compute. 

 The practical also has its place, and its distinct valuation, but it appeals 

 more to the physical than to the moral part of man's nature. The prac- 

 tical man does not care for the beauty of a flower as beauty merely but 

 regards it for the commercial value of its loveliness. A rose, to him, is 

 so much possible coin. An Easter lily means to his mind fifty cents or 

 one dollar's worth of material comfort. Such flowers as he can not sell 

 he pulls up and destroys. He almost hates them be<?ause they have 

 failed to fulfill his sordid ambitions. The ethical man is like a child in 

 that simple spirit which makes him love all flowers. He revels in the 

 beauty and perfume of a clover field as joyously as he does in a conser- 

 vatory of the choicest exotics. He haunts the places where the mid 

 flowers riot, and joins in their revels. From the time the first violet and 

 spring beauty smile up from the sod until the last purple aster withers 

 on its stem, he is a companion of the field flowers. The difference be- 

 tween the ethical and the practical value of flowers is merely the differ- 

 ence between the spiritual and physical nature of man. The ethical 

 man, as I have said, loves all flowers; the practical man thinks of their 

 commercial value. Xor is it always the florist who does this. It is more 

 likely to be the chemist, the distiller of subtle perfumes, or the practical 

 student of Itotany who is considering plants solely on account of their 

 medicinal worth. Whatever the practical object, there is always that 

 distance between them which exists between spirit and matter, a strong 

 difference, but a union which makes the one necessary to the other and 

 valueless to this world without the other. 



It is the practical man who has discovered the grand possibilities of 

 floral development. The ethical man would have gone on worshiping 

 the rose in its modest, wild state, but would not have dreamed of a 

 Marechal Niel or an American Beauty, l)ut when these glorious roses 

 were evolved it was the ethical man who most exulted over their loveli- 

 ness, and who was most willing to bankrupt himself to possess them. 

 The Vanderbilt dinner, where twenty thousand dollars was expended for 



