too general in their benefits to have the cost of maintenance individually apportioned. One can easily recall a long list of such functions. But as a class, these lumping arrangements are morally objectionable, for they do involve more or less injustice. Whenever it is practicable, the state department which is self-supporting is morally the more desirable type. In summing up this too long chapter, it is unnecessary to avow its incompleteness. The established institutions of society have too deep roots in our daily social life to permit any summary treatment. The most that one can hope to do is to suggest a valid moral point of view. Such a point of view is found, it seems to us, in our oft-repeated position that all institutions, however august, are merely organized modes of conduct, and must be morally measured by their results, in terms of strictly individual good fortune. The individual passes; the institution remains. Yet the major concern of the universe is manifestly for persons. It is this permanence of the institution which constitutes one of the largest elements of its usefulness. Even family life, the most transient of all, transcends the life of the individual member. The school, and especially the state school, has a continuity of service in marked contrast to the transient work of the individual. The church and state, through their relative permanence, have been the storehouses of ideals, and the useful machinery of service. It would be a dull person who did not recognize the immense value of this institutional inertia. Yet it remains true that this great service has been rendered by individuals working through the institution, and that the greatest service has been rendered by individuals who transcended the institution. The philosophers of Greece have had an influence on mankind quite in excess of the influence of any university or group of universities. The greatest educator in America was a man who stood, himself, outside the school. The moral teachers of mankind have been breakers of the old law. And while one would wish to render all honor where honor is due, it must always be remembered that this very permanence of the institution is responsible for most of its abuses. The old conception of the family, school, church, and state as ends in themselves, as institutions sacred in themselves apart from their power of human service, has been and is a fertile source of all the teeming evil of the world. To sacrifice the individual to the institution is to do evil that good may come. The one moral view of the institution is as a means, a means which must always serve and never obstruct the true end, individual good fortune. XIII OCCUPATIONS HE young people of America receive a cer THE tain amount of formal education. For some, it ends with the primary school; for some, with the grammar school or high school; for a few, with the college or professional school. The efficiency of this training depends upon the particular institution, and still more upon the daily, unofficial life which goes on side by side with the institutional life. It is a long story, the totality of education summed up in the twenty-four hours. But for all these young people, whether fortunate or unfortunate in their school and home opportunities, there comes a time when all attempt at formal education ceases, and the child or youth or young man goes out into the world to seek his own fortune. The average age at which these nestlings are made to fly is very young,much younger than a society bent on social welfare can at all afford, and two questions of large moral import at once suggest themselves: first, How can this industrial coming out be delayed? and secondly, How can the industrial life be made educative ? A community in honest pursuit of welfare must realize that it is of far greater importance that childhood should be protected and educated than it is that industry should profit by cheap childlabor. The utilization of children in mine and factory, office and department-store, coal-breaker and passenger elevator, as bootblack, messengerboy, newsboy, farm-hand, is prompted by our view of prosperity as dependent upon things. The growing protest against child-labor is regarded by many honest persons as a blind attack upon the national prosperity, due to the ignorance of a set of idealists unacquainted with anything so substantial as good times. And the objection is consistent and legitimate, so long as the standard of prosperity is wealth in things rather than wealth in persons. But once get it firmly fixed in mind that this old standard of things is false, that the true wealth of the world is human, that it consists in beautiful men and beautiful women and beautiful children, persons of strength and accomplishment and goodness, and child-labor becomes a hideous, unsocial thing, an attack upon the very sources of welfare. Children of ten and twelve are now allowed, both by their so-called natural parents and by the state, to work long hours under conditions absolutely fatal to human happiness and welfare. Somewhat older children, taught by a false phi losophy of life to regard wages as the greatest good, voluntarily sell themselves into what is virtually an industrial slavery. Young men and women, by premature marriage, confirm this slavery, and breed more immaturity and incompetence, another generation of those who are not free. There are several methods by which this misuse of childhood can be done away with. The most ideal method is through the force of a contrary idea. In the matter of child-labor, public opinion wavers. If the case be that of an immediate neighbor, of a child known to us, we take sides at once, and we do the same in a general, theoretical way. We admit, the full-blooded men and women among us, that childhood ought to be spent for better things, and we wish that it might be better spent. We deplore the ugly necessity which seems to require the substitution of the processes of industrial money-getting for the more wholesome processes of education. But we falter when we reach the practical side of the problem, the ways and means by which these little people are to be fed and clothed and sheltered, if they do not work. The most ardent child-lovers among us would hesitate to lodge their care and maintenance with the state, and so encourage the most reckless begetting of children on the part of those who mean neither to |