Page:The stuff of manhood (1917).djvu/167

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the title-deeds of all his greatest treasures, a precisely contrary tendency is acting in commerce and politics, in the field of man's lower values. While men are busy on the one hand in the effort to materialize the spiritual wealth which Christianity has produced, other men are seeking with a new earnestness to spiritualize our material wealth. As education, science, philanthropy, surrenders the spiritual vision and ideal, trade and politics clutch after it. Never before in the history of the world has there been such an effort as there is to-day to idealize nationalism, to build up spiritual conceptions behind the State, to make racial feeling a religion. If some men think that religious values and spiritual ideas and so-called "metaphysical" notions can be spared from charity and social service, other men are striving with all their might to secure all this rejected mass of vitality and power for patriotism and the national life.

And the same spiritualizing and idealizing tendency is even more evident in commerce and finance. Wealth becomes less and less material. In primitive times riches consisted in flocks and herds and land and in actual gold and silver bullion or coins which their owner put in a crock and buried in his house. Now wealth consists in credit and securities, in figures written on a ledger in a bank, or in scraps of paper in a tin box. The world's work is done with little visible