Men, accustomed to habits of strife, pursuit of material gains, immediate and tangible rewards, have come to believe that strife is not only inevitable but desirable; that material gain and visible reward are alone worth coveting.

In this commercial age strife means business competition, reward means money.

Man, in the aggregate, thinks in terms of money profit and money loss, and try as he will, he cannot yet think in any other terms.
I have in mind a certain rich young man, who, when he is not superintending the work of his cotton mills in Virginia, is giving his time to settlement work in the city of Washington.

The rich young man is devoted to the settlement.

One day he confided to a guest of the house, a social worker of note, that he wished he might dedicate his entire life to philanthropy.
"There is much about a commercial career that is depressing to a sympathetic nature," he declared.