Can it be that there is anything of more consequence in life than the great business in hand, which absorbs the vitality and genius of this age? Sure… - Charles Dudley Warner

There was never a nation great until it came to the knowledge that it had nowhere in the world to go for help.

We select and set aside as literature that which is original, the product of what we call genius.

The men who projected and are pushing on this enterprise, with an executive ability that would maintain and manoeuvre an army in a campaign, are not, however, consciously philanthropists, moved by the charitable purpose of giving employment to men, or finding satisfaction in making two blades of grass grow where one grew before. They enjoy no doubt the sense of power in bringing things to pass, the feeling of leadership and the consequence derived from its recognition; but they embark in this enterprise in order that they may have the position and the luxury that increased wealth will bring, the object being, in most cases, simply material advantages — sumptuous houses, furnished with all the luxuries which are the signs of wealth, including, of course, libraries and pictures and statuary and curiosities, the most showy equipages and troops of servants; the object being that their wives shall dress magnificently, glitter in diamonds and velvets, and never need to put their feet to the ground; that they may command the best stalls in the church, the best pews in the theatre, the choicest rooms in the inn, and — a consideration that Plato does not mention, because his world was not our world — that they may impress and reduce to obsequious deference the hotel clerk. This life — for this enterprise and its objects are types of a considerable portion of life — is not without its ideal, its hero, its highest expression, its consummate flower. It is expressed in a word which I use without any sense of its personality, as the French use the word Barnum — for our crude young nation has