is the growing materialisation of the mental outlook. It would
be needless to point to the evidence, amongst all classes in the
mercantile nations, of the feverish haste to be rich and to enjoy. For
to point to this has been common with the moralists of all ages. This
age like others--perhaps more than most--is strewn with the victims of
the struggle. But it can also boast a product largely its own--the new
race of victors who have emerged triumphant, with wealth beyond the
dreams of avarice of the past generation. Their interests make them
cosmopolitan; they are unrestrained by the traditional obligations of
ancient lineage; and the world seems to lie before them as something
to be bought and sold. Neither they nor others have quite realised as
yet the power which colossal wealth gives in modern conditions. And it
remains to be seen whether the multimillionaire will claim to figure
as Nietzsche's 'over-man,' spurning ordinary moral conventions, and
will play the _rôle_, in future moral discourses, which the ethical
dialogues of Plato assign to the 'tyrant,'

General literature, even in its highest forms, seems to reflect a
corresponding change of view as to what is of most worth in life.
Already the strong hold on duty and the spiritual world which Tennyson
unfalteringly displayed, even the deeper insight into motive and the
faith in goodness which are shown by Browning, are read by us as
utterances of a past age. We have grown used to a presentment of human
life such as Ibsen's in which the customary morality is regarded as
a thin veneer of convention which hardly covers the selfishness in
grain, or to the description of life as a tangled mass of animal
passions,--a description which, in spite of the genius of Zola, does
not fail to weary and disgust,--or perhaps as only a spectacle in
which what men call good and evil are the light and shade of a picture
which may serve to produce some artistic emotion. An attitude akin