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I think this gross material tendency is strong in America, and more likely to get the mastery over the spiritual and the intellectual here than elsewhere, because of our exhaustless resources. Let us not mistake the nature of a real civilization, nor suppose we have it because we can convert crude iron into the most delicate mechanism, or transport ourselves sixty miles an hour, or even if we shall refine our carnal tastes so as to be satisfied at dinner with the tongues of ortolans and the breasts of singing-birds.

Plato banished the musicians from his feasts because he would not have the charms of conversation interfered with. By comparison, music was to him a sensuous enjoyment. In any society the ideal must be the banishment of the more sensuous; the refinement of it will only repeat the continued experiment of history–the end of a civilization in a polished materialism, and its speedy fall from that into grossness.

I am sure that the scholar, trained to “plain living and high thinking,” knows that the prosperous life consists in the culture of the man, and not in the refinement and accumulation of the material. The word culture is often used to signify that dainty intellectualism which is merely a sensuous pampering of the mind, as distinguishable from the healthy training of the mind as is the education of the body in athletic exercises from the petting of it by luxurious baths and unguents. Culture is the blossom of knowledge, but it is a fruit blossom, the ornament of the age but the seed of the future. The so-called culture, a mere fastidiousness of taste, is a barren flower.

You would expect spurious culture to stand aloof from common life, as it does, to extend its charities at the end of a pole, to make of religion a mere ‘cultus,’ to construct for its heaven a sort of Paris, where all the inhabitants dress becomingly, and where there are no Communists. Culture, like fine manners, is not always the result of wealth or position. When monseigneur the archbishop makes his rare tour through the Swiss mountains, the simple peasants do not crowd upon him with boorish impudence, but strew his stony path with flowers, and receive him with joyous but modest sincerity. When the Russian prince made his landing in America the determined staring of a bevy of accomplished American women nearly swept the young man off the deck of the vessel. One cannot but respect that tremulous sensitiveness which caused the maiden lady to shrink from staring at the moon when she heard there was a man in it.

The materialistic drift of this age–that is, its devotion to material development–is frequently deplored. I suppose it is like all other ages in that respect, but there appears to be a more determined demand for change of condition than ever before, and a deeper movement for equalization. Here in America this is, in great part, a movement for merely physical or material equalization. The idea seems to be well-nigh universal that the millennium is to come by a great deal less work and a great deal more pay. It seems to me that the millennium is to come by an infusion into all society of a truer culture, which is neither of poverty nor of wealth, but is the beautiful fruit of the development of the higher part of man’s nature.

And the thought I wish to leave with you, as scholars and men who can command the best culture, is that it is all needed to shape and control the strong growth of material development here, to guide the blind instincts of the mass of men who are struggling for a freer place and a breath of fresh air; that you cannot stand aloof in a class isolation; that your power is in a personal sympathy with the humanity which is ignorant but discontented; and that the question which the man with the spade asks about the use of your culture to him is a menace.