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is best and highest in the minds of young men who would serve the public.

Yet in a democracy even the ablest and wisest leaders are but the agents of public opinion. The safety of the Republic, therefore, rests not with the leaders, but with the public opinion which you and I and every other individual help to form. It is for us all, therefore, to see that public opinion is intelligent, sound, and high-keyed. I have hitherto been laying stress on the moral aspect of our political awakening. It is important, however, not to overlook its intellectual side, for the best of men may be hair-brained and unpractical. Every revival, whether religious or political, begets fanaticism. The political awakening of our own time will be no exception to the rule. And I think I can divine two classes of agitators from whom we may apprehend danger. I name them together as the sciolists and the socialists. The sciolist is dangerous in politics, as elsewhere, because his knowledge is imperfect and superficial and his conceit is apt to be in proportion to his ignorance. New movements stir men's minds and make them exceedingly impressionable. It is the psychological moment, therefore, for the operations of the quack and the sciolist. To mention only one example, the evils and crimes which in recent years have been brought home to our large corporations, whether organized for the purpose of production, transportation, or insurance, have produced their inevitable reaction in creating a demand for public ownership of all sorts of utilities. Yet the failure of municipal ownership and municipal trading in England, in Russia, in Australasia, and other places where it has been tried constitutes an object lesson fraught with admonition and warning to any such proposal. We need to bring to the solution of our political problems the wisdom of the ages and the experience of other nations. We have the "get-richquick" societies and the "get-wise-quick" societies. It becomes us to be on our guard against the "get-happy-quick" nostrums which the sciolists in politics are constantly spreading before us.

The other fanatics against whom I would sound a note of warning are the socialists. Numerically, they are not a strong force in this country, and their centralizing tendencies are so incompatible with our Constitution, which provides for a limited central government, with large rights reserved to the states and to the people themselves, that I cannot think they are likely ever to become an important political factor. Nevertheless, while there is much in socialism that appeals to the envy there is also something in it which appeals to the justice of men. This latter aspect is the one important for us to consider now. For I have just said that the political awakening of our time means a deepening

sense of justice. Now socialism carries justice to the point of equality. It abolishes all private ownership in land, capital, and all the instrumentalities and agencies of production and transportation. I shall not dwell now on the impossibility of any modern government conducting such a colossal business as would devolve upon it if it took over all the railroads, all the mines, all the factories, all the shipping in a word, all the business of its citizens. I will not repeat that such centralization of government is utterly incompatible with American institutions. I will not add that this socialism is at war with the principles of individual initiative and self-help, which have made English-speaking peoples the dominant power in the modern world. I regard the matter now solely from the ethical side. And I repeat what Herbert Spencer said some twenty years ago, and what Aristotle said more than two thousand years ago, that if of the conception of justice one component part is equality, another component part is inequality also. Because individualities differ, men will differ in abilities, and not only in abilities, but also in desires and in the means of gratifying them. And the development of individuality, subject to the equal right of all other individualities, rather than the equality of material possessions, seems to me to be the object of human existence and, so far as evolutionary biology throws light upon the subject, the object of all existence whatever.

And so I say in closing, while we keep our hearts responsive to the high moral ideals and sound political principles which are reinvigorating the political life of our time, let us also keep our heads cool and our minds hospitable to the lessons of history and experience. And let us not in our devotion to just reforms run into any excesses which will endanger those ideals of liberty and individual rights which have been the glory of the American people and the inspiration of American history.

HOW CAN CHRISTIAN IDEALS BE MADE DOMINANT IN A COMMERCIAL ERA?

THE VERY REVEREND A. P. DOYLE

SECRETARY-TREASURER OF THE CATHOLIC MISSIONARY UNION, WASHINGTON, D.C.

The subject that has been assigned to me is one whose academic nature is completely lost in its practical character - How Can Christian Ideals be Made Dominant in a Commercial Era?

It certainly does not imply that Christian ideals are now forgotten in the present day thirst for gold, nor does it suppose that the fundamental principles of justice and honor and right dealing which are at the basis of all Christian ideals are no longer the principles that guide men's lives in their commercial relation one with the other. But it suggests in the most delicate way that the type of character whose life is wholly inspired by the ethical teachings of the Christ is rarely found amidst the keen bargaining of the market place, in as much that a man cannot serve two masters; that where money rules it creates an atmosphere of selfishness, distrust, assertativeness, and egotism that does not surround the perfect Christian character. It implies that where money standards prevail Christian ideals cannot be dominant and in the eager pursuit after commercial success men may not be and generally are not respectful of the rights of others, that money getting does become a passion, and in its gratification some men are liable to ride roughshod over their neighbor; that in the intense striving for pre-eminence the ethics of business life are not so much the golden rule "do unto others as you would be done by" but rather, as a shrewd commentator puts it, "do others before you would be done by them."

In the process of evolution as a great nation the American people are now going through the money getting and fortune making era. As with the human individual, he first acquires strength, then he makes a fortune, then if he is wise spends his years of maturity in enjoying the fruits of his labors in the pleasures of a cultured, studious, and religious life. So, with this nation, we waxed strong during the century past. Our strength is now being utilized to develop the vast material resources that are at hand and to multiply our wealth. We shall soon enter the period of maturity when art will flourish with unwonted splendor and religion will finally mellow and crown the perfect development of a glorious nationality.

While this is the ordinary course of national development, still it is

based on one essential condition and that is that we do, as a nation, maintain our grasp on vital religious principles. If we lose this we are doomed to destruction. We shall go down to ruin and disaster as so many other republics have done before us and the pathways of the world will be strewn with the wreck of a mighty nation, and history will be filled with the lamentations of what we might have been.

For this reason I know of no more pertinent question to ask just now than the one proposed in this paper, "How can we make Christian ideals dominant?" How can we transfuse into the blood of the people the red corpuscles of religious vitality that will safeguard our national strength while we pass through this time of wealth getting and fortune building.

Without allowing ourselves to get into a pessimistic mood, we must confess there are so many signs of degeneracy forcing themselves on our notice that we cannot but deplore the sinking of religious ideals into a very inferior place. Before the nations of the world we stand for money making. This is perhaps the first time in the history of the world when the temples of mammon over-top the cross that crowns the spires of the temple of God. The greed for gold has become the devouring passion of the American heart. The principle that seems to be the norm of so many lives," Get money honestly, if you can, but get money" is leading men of place and power into ways that are dark and paths that are devious, whose end is destruction; so that there has been a moving picture of one public man after another standing for the moment in the fierce white light of public investigations and then going down into ignominy and disgrace because his questionable business methods could not bear the gaze of public scrutiny. So far has this gone that if another Diogenes would come forth to look for an honest man, we wonder if perchance he could find one.

It may be presented as a very serious study as to whether this all consuming search for the golden fleece may not be a very striking evidence of how far Christian ideals have been withdrawn from the public gaze. The gospel of Christ would have us seek first the kingdom of God and His justice. There is laid down as one of its positive precepts not to lay up treasure where the moth would eat or the rust would corrupt.

Indeed, so far have we drifted from these older Christian ideals that we have begun to glory in our false standards, and to point to the evidence of our material prosperity as a sign of our marvelous progress, and we despise those nations that have not the same degree of commercial splendor and yet who at the same time cling more closely than we do to Christian ideals.

Another sign of how much we have forgotten Christian ideals or have become possessed, as a people, of this all-devouring passion of avarice, is the cheap price at which we hold human life. There is nothing that marks the contrast between a Christian and a pagan civilization so much as the Christian value placed on a human soul. It was made a little less than the angels. It cost the blood of a God-man for its redemption. All the treasure and measure of this earth would profit nothing were it a question of the loss of one soul. This one great pregnant idea of Christianity is the fons et origo of all our liberties. The constant affirmation of this fact in the ears of a pagan civilization preserved the weak against the oppressive tyranny of the strong. It saved the deformed and those afflicted with incurable disease against the murderous designs of their friends. It guarded the life of the unborn, and it protected helpless infancy. It struck the shackles from the limbs of the slave and granted his inalienable rights as he stood on the auctionblock in the slave market. It stretched out an uplifting hand to helpless womanhood and it safeguarded the most precious jewel in her crown. It not only abolished slavery and uplifted woman, but it asserted the dignity of man, and secured for him his rights, and if man to-day enjoys civil and religious liberty it is because of the Christian affirmation of his individuality in the possession of an immortal soul and his rights to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness because of his infinite redemption by a God-man. Pagan civilization has no idea of the value of life. The Assyrian monarch wrote on the stones of Nineveh: "I took prisoners, men young and old. Of some I cut off their hands and feet; others I mutilated. Of the young men's ears I made a heap, and of the old men's skulls I made a tower. The children I burned in the flames." The all-devouring greed for gain is setting at naught the Christian value of life, and the sacrifice of hundreds of human beings to corporative greed is no uncommon occurrence. Directors of corporations are willing to put the lives of thousands in jeopardy in order to satisfy stockholders' natural desires for larger dividends. Incidents are happening every day where hundreds of lives are snuffed out in theatre fires and steamboat wrecks or railroad collisions showing at what a very cheap price we hold so precious a thing as human life.

What are of infinitely more value to us are our dividends, our salaries and our coupons. These are the Gods we worship since we are ready to offer up holocaust for them. Nor is our mode of worship with reverential knee, but with crooking our hands for our share of graft. Little wonder that when we bow down before the golden calf the worship of false gods demands human sacrifice, but the pity of it all is that on the

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