in its
relation to our politics (although it would be a fruitful subject for
moralizing), and confining ourselves strictly to the social side of life,
we soon see the results of this mammon worship.

In England (although Englishmen have been contemptuously called the shop-
keepers of the world) the extension and maintenance of their vast empire
is the mainspring which keeps the great machine in movement. And one
sees tens of thousands of well-born and delicately-bred men cheerfully
entering the many branches of public service where the hope of wealth can
never come, and retiring on pensions or half-pay in the strength of their
middle age, apparently without a regret or a thought beyond their
country's well-being.

In France, where the passionate love of their own land has made colonial
extension impossible, the modern Frenchman of education is more
interested in the yearly exhibition at the _Salon_ or in a successful
play at the _Francais_, than in the stock markets of the world.

Would that our young men had either of these bents! They have copied
from England a certain love of sport, without the English climate or the
calm of country and garrison life, to make these sports logical and
necessary. As the young American millionaire thinks he must go on
increasing his fortune, we see the anomaly of a man working through a
summer's day in Wall Street, then dashing in a train to some suburban
club, and appearing a half-hour later on the polo field. Next to wealth,
sport has become the ambition of the wealthy classes, and has grown so
into our college life that the number of students in the freshman class
of our great universities is seriously influenced by that institution's
losses or gains at football.

What is the result of all this? A young man starts in life with the firm
intention of making a great deal of money. If he has any time left from
that occupation he will devote it to sport. Later in life, when he has
leisure and travels, or is otherwise thrown with cultivated strangers, he
must naturally be at a disadvantage. "Shop," he cannot talk; he knows
that is vulgar. Music, art, the drama, and literature are closed books
to him, in spite of the fact that he may have a box on the grand tier at
the opera and a couple of dozen high-priced "masterpieces" hanging around
his drawing-rooms. If he is of a finer clay than the general run of his
class, he will realize dimly that somehow the goal has been missed in