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Our most conspicuous troubles to-day are economic. We have reached a stage of religious freedom where the growing power of the human brain is allowed to work unchecked toward higher perceptions of truth, and beautiful results have followed. We have reached a stage of political freedom where we can express the public will in public action, as far as the great majority of one sex is concerned, and are rapidly advancing to where the whole nation will share the same position. Here, too, beautiful results have followed. But in economic development we find that whereas there is a great extension and multiplication of economic processes, and commensurately of wealth, yet there is a mighty product of evil which seems to keep pace with the advance of civilisation.

So many of our troubles are patently due to economic sources that our rough-and-ready philosophy has accepted the statement, “the love of money is the root of all evil.” Some shorten the accusation to money itself.

This general observation is right in its direction, but not sufficiently accurate to be reliable. Money being a concrete fact, and in its function as representative of all purchasable goods of fascinating importance, we quite naturally attach to it directly the glaring evils we find in its company. We see the misery and sin caused by too little of it and the misery and sin caused by too much of it; we see the various villainies practised to get it, from robbery so small and direct that you catch the thief’s hand in your pocket, to robbery so large and indirect that the thieving hand filches uncaught from a million pockets, via hired railroads, hired legislators, and hired newspapers; we see all this, and attach our condemnation to money itself, or, at farthest, to the love of it.