Wealth & Money Quote by Felix Adler

America’s youth is doing a lot of work here: “recent civilization” flatters the nation as fresh and unburdened, while quietly indicting it as unfinished, morally unseasoned, still easy to hypnotize. Adler, an educator and ethicist speaking from the Gilded Age’s long shadow, isn’t marveling at “limitless treasures” so much as diagnosing a civic vulnerability. When wealth feels infinite, attention becomes finite. The public’s gaze collapses onto what can be built, bought, and banked.

The syntax performs the argument. Those swelling phrases - “almost limitless,” “invite,” “industry” - mimic the seduction he’s describing, the way a booming economy can make acquisitiveness feel like destiny. But Adler then pivots: “it is but natural,” a line that sounds like forgiveness and functions as a warning. Calling it “natural” doesn’t make it good; it makes it predictable, and therefore urgent. He’s pointing to a social default setting: material opportunity doesn’t merely coexist with democratic life, it can crowd it out.

His most cutting move is comparative: “to a degree elsewhere unknown.” That’s not patriotic bragging. It’s cultural isolationism turned inside out, suggesting the United States has innovated not only in production but in obsession. The subtext is pedagogical: if a society’s attention is annexed by material interests, schools, institutions, and leaders must actively teach counterweights - ethics, civic duty, meaning - or the country will mature into something powerful, busy, and spiritually undereducated.