Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/700

 686 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

doubt, the cause for all this is to be sought and found in what may be termed practical Nietzscheism. The gulf between the ideal and the real, between profession and practice, is apparently growing wider, though not many will acknowledge it. The general moral tone in literature is distinctly lower today than it was in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Bishop Potter, of New York ; Mr. Abram S. Hewitt (no vision- ary or sentimentalist), Mr. Frederic Harrison, Professor Goldwin Smith, are among those who have recently sounded a note of warning and rebuked the shallow optimism of the poet-laureates of commercialism and sham nationalism. Is it not true that, as an American correspondent of the London Times has expressed it, "the rising spirit of virile, uncompromising egotism is observable in all civilized nations, but nowhere has it gained vigor of late so swiftly as in the United States" ? Is it not true that, as this correspondent further says, "an unconscious discipleship to Friedrich Nietzsche is common in business, social, and military circles in America, where deeds of a type once denounced as criminal are now applauded as clever, and where Christianity, the golden rule of ethics, is for slaves" ?

It will not do to dismiss this language as extravagant and irrationally pessimistic. No American thinker is more just, fair- minded, and careful in his statements than Bishop Potter, pre- eminently an exemplar of "sweetness and light." Yet here is what he deliberately said in a recent lecture on " Wealth and Commonwealth" at a gathering of the Episcopal Church Club of the diocese of Connecticut :

The subject of this evening is my own choice. I choose it because of its paramount importance. Divorce, drunkenness, crime, corruption in cities, all have one root the lust of money. Our American disease, do I say ? Nay, an American madness.

For what is the one eager, dominant hunger which, in one form or another, is expressing itself through combination, conspiracy, or other ways from end to end of this broad land ? It is the passion, the hunger, the greed of gain. That it is that more than any other single influence determines our policies, shapes our manners, inspires our maxims

Is it any wonder, under such circumstances, that the average man in America turns to the business of accumulation and makes wealth the final