nd adroitness. We still punish those who gain property
by violence; those who get it by smartness and cleverness, we try to
imitate, and sometimes we reward them with public office.

It appears, therefore, that speed,-the ability to move rapidly from place
to place,--a disproportionate reward of physical over intellectual
science, an intense desire to be rich, which is strong enough to compel
even education to grind in the mill of the Philistines, and an inordinate
elevation in public consideration of rich men simply because they are
rich, are characteristics of this little point of time on which we stand.
They are not the only characteristics; in a reasonably optimistic view,
the age is distinguished for unexampled achievements, and for
opportunities for the well-being of humanity never before in all history
attainable. But these characteristics are so prominent as to beget the
fear that we are losing the sense of the relative value of things in this
life.

Few persons come to middle life without some conception of these relative
values. It is in the heat and struggle that we fail to appreciate what in
the attainment will be most satisfactory to us. After it is over we are
apt to see that our possessions do not bring the happiness we expected;
or that we have neglected to cultivate the powers and tastes that can
make life enjoyable. We come to know, to use a truism, that a person's
highest satisfaction depends not upon his exterior acquisitions, but upon
what he himself is. There is no escape from this conclusion. The physical
satisfactions are limited and fallacious, the intellectual and moral
satisfactions are unlimited. In the last analysis, a man has to live with
himself, to be his own companion, and in the last resort the question is,
what can he get out of himself. In the end, his life is worth just what
he has become. And I need not say that the mistake commonly made is as to
relative values,--that the things of sense are as important as the things
of the mind. You make that mistake when you devote your best energies to
your possession of material substance, and neglect the enlargement, the
training, the enrichment of the mind. You make the same mistake in a less
degree, when you bend to the popular ignorance and conceit so far as to
direct your college education to sordid ends. The certain end of yielding
to this so-called practical spirit was expressed by a member of a
Northern State legislature who said, "We