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So we struck out methods, manners, customs, and traditions all our own. We did it—this marvellous evolution—in half the lifetime of a man. In fact, in the industrial world one might almost say it was a process of twenty years—merely a moment of the nation’s history. Well may one say it is a rapid age in which we live. Madly we rush at our great problems. We did not know—we do not know yet—what the result is to be. There is no precedent to guide us; the road to to-morrow bears no sign-posts. Not yet has our new system been tried by a panic that disturbed the depths of the commercial and industrial seas. Only, we hope for the best, for optimism is the sign-manual of the true-born American.

I dwell upon these matters not because I care to pose or dare to pose as an authority upon them, but because the principles and ideas upon which they rest underlie also the making of the Kingdom of Society of which I would write. For social evolution is, after all, but a part of this same evolution that has given us our own distinctive banking system—good as it is or bad as it may be—and our own industrial system—giant or weakling as it may prove to be.