and a thing desirable. Its desirability was an THE PHIhonor-you could use it so seldom and with so LISTINE few ✰✰

Education in the science of war, which is the science of inflicting death and carrying desolation, is still considered an honorable acquirement. So everywhere we have Military Schools where the martial spirit is instilled and encouraged, and where patriotism-the detestation of other countries—is inculcated.

That these schools do good, there is no doubt, but they minister largely to this habit of selfdeception so common in the Superior Class. The people who patronize these academies joyously believe they are fitting their boys to protect the toilers. Anyway, they unfit the boy for becoming a toiler.

Thus we hark back to the savage idea, which was that the best men should be set apart to protect the tribe.

"In England," Gladstone once said, "there are only two honorable walks open to young men, the Army and the Church." It is still the Warrior and the Priest, guised and glossed by a complacent make-believe, carried out and refined by higher personal potencies.

Visit Old Point Comfort, Saratoga, Newport and Point of Pines and you will see the premium paid to ineptness and futility.

The inability and the disinclination to partake in useful effort is considered a virtue in that it proves the prowess of the person-his power to make others do for him. This was surely so in the beginning-the Roman soldiers who stole women made them work, and later when they

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stole men they made them do things, too. We are told that the pyramids of Egypt were built by slaves; we know that it was wisely directed slave labor that made Athens great; that it was slave labor that evolved Venice.

So power and prowess really have a certain virtue. Those old time warriors were just what they pretended to be.

And that brings us up to another phase, Meritorious Substitution, or Salvation thru a Vicarious Pecuniary Atonement.

The Superior Class at Newport, Saratoga and Asheville have no power and reveal no prowess, but they take to themselves the credit of prowess and parade their ability in killing time and following the aniseed trail, poetically speaking. The men of power who exploited labor or monopolized good things thru force of arms or force of cunning and intellect, were the ancestors of these men. And by a strange paradox these descendants of men of power scorn a genuine, living man of power, and take to themselves credit on being one or two removes from a sure-enough person of prowess.

If Captain Kidd were alive to-day, he would not be considered Respectable, altho no doubt he was in the circle in which he moved. But I am told there are lineal descendants of Captain Kidd who are very proud of the name.

So we have many descendants of Captain John Smith who was no less an outlaw. There are well authenticated pedigrees of persons tracing a line direct to Pocahontas, and these take much pride in saying they trace to a genuine American. But if Pocohontas were alive to-day

they would hardly have the old lady in their THE PHI

homes and call her Gran'ma.

It is somewhat like Anton Seidl who claimed to be a natural son of Franz Liszt. When asked as to the truth of this claim, Phillip Hale yawned and said, "Oh, but it is no mark of distinction-there are so many claiming the honor, you know!"

Liszt is dead and removed from us by both time and distance, but by a curious metamorphosis we evolve a bar sinister into a virtue, and multiply honors by the square of the distance. Almost anybody traces back to William the Conqueror, and that he was a Natural Son of Nobody makes no difference.

Thus we have Societies of gentlewomen whose sole badge of distinction lies in that they had certain ancestors who fought in a certain war. No inquiry is made into this man's character or as to why he fought. So we have had the curious spectacle of a woman at Reading, Pennsylvania, knocking for admittance to this Society and on proving that she had two ancestors who were with Washington at Yorktown, was duly admitted with appropriate rites and ceremonies. It has since transpired that her ancestors were Hessians, but the woman refuses to abdicate.

This story really has little to do with the argument, but the truth may be stated that this descendant of the Hessians had just as much to do with the Revolutionary War as the somewhat unreasonable women who now shrilly demand her resignation.

Just how Respectability may be rightly claimed

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THE PHI- by people who have done nothing, because they
LISTINE had ancestors who did, will be shown later, and

at the same time will be revealed why men
pride themselves on being different from their
ancestors, in whom they take much pride.
This idea of Respectability thru Vicarious
Virtue is a most interesting subject for the
psychologist, involving as it does the pretty
make-believe of a histrionic benefit, where we
play to the gallery of our own self-esteem.

HE idea of Respectability is a phantasmagoria contrived and created by the people that it controls. The desire is not to be, but to seem. The intent of life is to make an impression upon other people, and this, and this alone, is the controlling impulse in what is called Good Society.

And so to a great degree we are all play-actors, and make-believe runs thru the entire fabric of our lives. To the man who can get off at a little distance, so as to get the perspective, the whole thing is a comedy. But not wholly a comedy of errors, for it is all evolution-slow, perhaps, but necessary and very sure.

"That churches and institutions exist is proof that they are needed, for everything is its own excuse for being," said John Ruskin. However, things do exist after the use for which they were created has passed. And then they may become a nesting place for disease. And the Superior Class-the class that sets the standard of Respectability-is the class that clings to the dead and outworn. It resists all thought of

change and improvement, and fights progress THE PHIwith a bitterness that shows no relenting. LISTINE Do away with Ancestor Worship in China, and convert the Musselman to the truth that if he prays to the South it will be just as effective as toward the East, and your task will be no greater than to show some men that the fact of Dr. Edward Everett Hale's partaking of the communion in Trinity Church is a matter of really no importance to anybody.

Such trivial things as the privilege of a man to marry his deceased wife's sister has set the world by the ears. And suggestions to do away with the death penalty, to introduce the single tax, to bring about arbitration in place of war, have all been hotly denounced and their promulgators vilified. Suggest social changes such as these named and you will hear talk about "the dissolution of society," "a reign of terror," "pulling out the keystone of society," "destruction of the hearthstone," "a return to savagery," etc.

Yet changes occur and the morning stars still sing together. Within twenty-five years sensible men have abandoned the idea of hell, and a personal devil is now even in orthodox churches only a joke. "Spare the rod and spoil the child," was once a great and vital truth, but now we spare the rod to save the child. Love, patience and kindness answer the purpose much better than the rod. Capital punishment has been done away with in some states and will ere long in all; the dark cell has everywhere been abolished, and the time will surely come when jails and penitentiaries will have to