James C. Carter, one of the leading lawyers of the nineteenth century, asked his college classmates at their fifty year class reunion in 1900, "What has become of the spirit, the philosophy, the ideals, which held such firm control at the middle of the century?" These ideals had been discredited, if not dismissed, and replaced by "an enormous pressure of material interests which hold in disdain any appeals to the universal principles of truth and right." These material interests had not been established by appealing to reason, truth, science, or history, but by asserting that this impending materialism was an irresistible force. Anyone who questioned these trends were seen as either "impracticable theorists, or traitors to the interests of humanity."

Background and Training.

Born in Lancaster, Massachusetts, and educated at Harvard College, Carter tutored in New York and clerked occasionally in the Wall Street law...