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wholesale way of conducting affairs. The railroad, the telegraph, telephone, and cable, the stenographer, steam, and electricity, have made this concentration possible, this separation between the directors and the agents. The absence of personal relations easily gives an unsocial twist to the thought. Most failures in morality are due primarily to a lack of imagination. Men and women who concern themselves with children's aid societies, and vacation schools, and newsboys' homes, and humane enterprises generally that happen to come under their own eye, do not hesitate to burn coal that has been freed from slate by pale-faced children down in Pennsylvania coal-breakers, or to accept fat dividends from the coal companies and coal-carrying railroads. These humane men and women do not hesitate to wear fabrics made in part by child-labor in noisy Southern cotton mills, or to accept their own share of the evil profit. It is not slavery that most of us object to, but the slavery that shows itself.

Social welfare measured in terms of things is an impossible state of affairs, impossible theoretically, and if history bear credible witness, impossible practically. It is bread and the circus and doomsday. Instead of things being in the saddle and riding mankind, as Emerson justly complains, we must reverse the matter and have mankind securely in the saddle.

Individual morality is of a piece. Any breach of the moral law is a breach of the whole law. The same law-giver who said, 'Thou shalt not commit adultery,' said also, 'Thou shalt not steal.' Any transgression, whatever its specific nature, is against one underlying principle. Individual morality does not consist in the pursuit of specific cardinal virtues. This may lead, indeed, to a certain dogmatic hardness and inflexibility not at all consistent with morality. It is rather a general attitude of mind and habit towards all life, a distinct soundness of the moral fibre. So public morality is of a piece, does not consist in the inflexible, letter-bound pursuit of any one cardinal social virtue, whether it have to do with land tenure, the suffrage, industrial policy, irrigation, forestry, immigration, municipal control. All these issues must be met, studied, and solved. They have their proper place as elements of welfare. But public morality is that general attitude towards public questions which enables the individual to apply wisely the touchstone of social welfare. There is no panacea of doctrine which will dispense with the careful, detailed study of particular social problems. There are separate problems, but not separate moralities. A community which could make the central, dominant motive in all its activity an intelligent desire to further human wealth, to promote the freedom of

non-interference and opportunity, would attain quite unavoidably its own more abstract end, social welfare. But after all, the problem is individual. The community cannot start such a work. It has no power of initiative. It is folly to appeal to it, to praise it, to blame it. The work must begin with individuals, the community is a result. When the idea spreads from man to man, the community becomes socialized, and the result is welfare.

This reflection that the individual may be the point of application of a tremendous social force lends dignity and added significance to all individual efforts after perfection. The individual is the keeper of the national destiny. It is really he who determines whether America shall be free and noble, strong and great, or whether she shall fail. All nations have failed. They have had their youth, their manhood, their old age. They have been and now are not. What is the secret of this universal decay? Are the issues of life and death the same with nations as with men? Must they, too, spring up, flourish for a time, and then die? It would hardly seem necessary. The nation is made up of a multitude of men, and though the individual man dies, mankind itself endures. The material for the daily rebuilding of the nation is always at hand. The truth is, that when a nation dies, it dies of moral

heart-failure. Under the outer defeat there is an inner and more overwhelming defeat. Efficiency and worth are wanting. Public morality, like private morality, is essentially self-preservative. The individual who risks his life for some unworthy end, for houses or land or gold, and perishes, may commend himself to our pity, but not to our admiration or our sympathy. The nation which spends itself unworthily in the pursuit of things, rather than in the furtherance of human excellence and beauty, passes into the tomb equally unmourned. Social welfare, like the individual good fortune of which it is built up, is personal and human, and for its stability and permanence depends upon the excellence of men and women and children.

XII

THE MORALITY OF THE FOUR INSTITU

CIVILIZATION

TIONS

IVILIZATION has developed four institutions now so well organized and so apparently essential to social life that we almost forget that they are human devices, and come to regard them as a part of the established order of nature. The family, the school, the church, and the state constitute a social environment in which the modern man is to the manner born. It is difficult for him to imagine a life devoid of any of these four institutions, and quite impossible for him to imagine a life devoid of all of them. To most men and to nearly all women these institutions have a sacredness which well-nigh excludes them from discussion, and makes every proposition to abolish them, or even to modify them in any radical way, a proposition at once irrational and painful. To the majority, the family is the institute of the affections; the school, the institute of opportunity; the church, the institute of duty; and the state, the institute of rights. These elements of human life — affection, opportunity, duty, right are admittedly too fundamental to

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