guilty of outrageous folly. If he argued from it that the German
doctor was selfish, or did not "live as in the sight of God," the
whole process would be a model of absurdity.

Foreigners have drawn, on the other hand, from the American
"diligence in business," conclusions with regard to American
character far more uncomplimentary than those the _Christian Union_
has expressed with regard to the Prussians. There are not a few
religious and moral and cultivated circles in Europe in which the
suggestion that Americans, as a nation, were characterized by
thoughtfulness for others and a sense of God's presence would be
received with derisive laughter, owing to the application to the
phenomena of American society of the process of reasoning on which,
we fear, the _Union_ relies. Down to the war, so candid and
perspicacious a man as John Stuart Mill might have been included in
this class. The earlier editions of his "Elements of Political
Economy" contained a contemptuous statement that one sex in America
was entirely given up to "dollar-hunting" and the other to "breeding
dollar-hunters." In other words, he held that the American people
were plunged in the grossest materialism, and he doubtless based
this opinion on that intense application of the men to commercial
and industrial pursuits which we see all around us, which no church
finds fault with, but which, we know, bad as its effects are on art
and literature, really coexists with great generosity, sympathy,
public spirit, and ideality.

Take, again, the matter of chastity, on which the _Union_
touched. We grant at the outset that wherever you have classes,
the women of the lower class suffer more or less from the men of
the upper class, and anybody who says that seductions, accomplished