The speaker turned his attention to the “respectable gentlemen” with the full coffers, amongst whom I was by implication included.  We had simply succeeded under the rules to which society tacitly agreed.  That was our sin.  He ventured to say that there were few men in the hall who at the bottom of their hearts did not envy and even honour our success.  He, for one, did not deem these “respectable gentlemen” utterly reprehensible; he was sufficiently emancipated to be sorry for us.  He suspected that we were not wholly happy in being winners in such a game,—­he even believed that we could wish as much as any others to change the game and the prizes.  What we represented was valuable energy misdirected and misplaced, and in a reorganized community he would not abolish us, but transform us:  transform, at least, the individuals of our type, who were the builders gone wrong under the influence of an outworn philosophy.  We might be made to serve the city and the state with the same effectiveness that we had served ourselves.

If the best among the scientists, among the university professors and physicians were willing to labour—­and they were—­for the advancement of humanity, for the very love of the work and service without disproportionate emoluments, without the accumulation of a wealth difficult to spend, why surely these big business men had been moulded in infancy from no different clay!  All were Americans.  Instance after instance might be cited of business men and lawyers of ability making sacrifices, giving up their personal affairs in order to take places of honour in the government in which the salary was comparatively small, proving that even these were open to inducements other than merely mercenary ones.

It was unfortunate, he went on, but true, that the vast majority of people of voting age in the United States to-day who thought they had been educated were under the obligation to reeducate themselves.  He suggested, whimsically, a vacation school for Congress and all legislative bodies as a starter.  Until the fact of the utter inadequacy of the old education were faced, there was little or no hope of solving the problems that harassed us.  One thing was certain—­that they couldn’t be solved by a rule-of-thumb morality.  Coincident with the appearance of these new and mighty problems, perhaps in response to them, a new and saner view of life itself was being developed by the world’s thinkers, new sciences were being evolved, correlated sciences; a psychology making a truer analysis of human motives, impulses, of human possibilities; an economics and a theory of government that took account of this psychology, and of the vast changes applied science had made in production and distribution.  We lived in a new world, which we sought to ignore; and the new education, the new viewpoint was in truth nothing but religion made practical.  It had never been thought practical before.  The motive that compelled men to work for humanity in science, in medicine, in art—­yes, and in business, if we took the right view of it, was the religious motive.  The application of religion was to-day extending from the individual to society.  No religion that did not fill the needs of both was a true religion.