LIBRARY OF THE University of California. Class Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2007 with funding from IVIicrosoft Corporation http://www.archive.org/details/childrenofgoodfoOOhendrich ^p C l^anforH |)entier0on. THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE. An Essay in Morals. Crown 8vo, ^1.30, net. Postage extra. JOHN PERCYFIELD: The Anatomy of Cheerfulness, Crown 8vo, $1.50. EDUCATION AND THE LARGER LIFE. Crown 8vo, $1.30, net. Postpaid, JS1.43. HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & COMPANY, Boston and New York. THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE an €^^ap in ^otal^ BY C. HANFORD HENDERSON ** Give me insight into to-day and you may have the antique and future worlds." Emerson. BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 1905 «'; 2HEm: '^_ 'Y/SSi Hi COPYRIGHT 1905 BY C. HANFORD HENDERSON ALL RIGHTS RESERVED Published Aprils iqos dedication: TO THOSE GRACIOUS SPIRITS WHO IN LIFE AND IN LITERATURE ARE HELPING ME TO DISCOVER IN WHAT GOOD FORTUNE CONSISTS CONTENTS PAGE I. Prologue . 1 II. The Problem 19 III. Human Conduct 28 IV. Right and Wrong 43 V. Efficiency 63 VI. Worth 81 VII. The Moral Person 110 VIII. Individual Morality 150 IX. The Cardinal Virtues 178 X. The Doctrine of Automatic Goodness . 209 XI. Social Welfare 241 XII. The Morality of the Four Institutions . 274 Xni. Occupations 328 XIV. Immediacy 368 XV. The Moral Outlook 388 THE CHILDEEK OF GOOD FORTUIS^E PROLOGUE THERE are two galleries in Europe which possess a charm at once abiding and unique. One of these is the room of the portrait busts in the Capitoline Museum at Rome ; the other is the gallery of artist-portraits on the first floor of the Uffizi at Florence. In all these detained faces, — the marble faces of Roman emperors and philosophers, the painted faces of the master artists of Europe, — it is pos- sible to remark some characteristic that is mod- ern and contemporaneous. Each face suggests a human quality still current. Each separate fea- ture bespeaks a possibility in the neighbor or even in the self. It is not the technique that interests the layman, — marvelous as the tech- nique is, — it is this abiding human nature. Each portrait shows the general human type, the brows and eyes, the nose and chin, the lips and cheeks, and all the rest that goes . to make up the human face, but in one or more of these 1 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE common features there is an emphasis that is unique, a subtle something which transforms the type into an individual. Faces that lack this emphasis lack interest. The too perfect faces of Greek art fail in any deep sense to move the modern world. We gaze upon the calm face of the Phoebus Apollo, or even of the great Zeus himself, with a calm that is almost equal to theirs. But it is not so when we turn to the compassionate, grief-smitten face of the Man of Sorrows. It is this emphasis, this distinguishing stamp, which determines our own attitude towards the individual. A set of curves, a trick of light and shade, a play of color, a unique combination of dimensions, these proclaim a human quality and serve to attract or repel. Yet they are things so delicate, so elusive, that only an artist can seize them and make them permanent. Where the artist is a master, we stand in a gallery of naked souls. In Rome, it seems hardly credible that the spirit of the first Caesar can ever have quite escaped, for his marble face so holds the imagi- nation of men. Throughout Italy the devotion of Hadrian confers a this-world immortality upon the beautiful Antinous. When we turn from these admitted portraits to the ideal faces which people with excellence the many galleries of Europe, we read the same 2 PROLOGUE story. There is the same running scale of human possibility, the same insistent dwelling upon one particular aspect. As we follow the sweep of time, we get some glimpse of the major contem- porary preference. Only here and there does one detect a timid minority report. In spite of the features common to all, the anatomy which keeps them true to the species, the standard of beauty, or excellence, or interest is evidently a very shift- ing quality. One must needs have considerable culture to be appreciative of such dissimilar types. But in the end, if the study has been fruitful, one ceases to ask that tiresome and altogether useless question as to which type is the most beautiful. One discovers, quite without asking, which type it is that appeals to one's own deepest and most genuine mood. But one also discovers, and this is equally educative, that in the world at large there are many moods of undoubted worth and many types of undoubted beauty. Fortune is commonly represented by a woman's face. When her smile is turned towards us, we call our own private fortune good. We all desire this smile, this good fortune. But when we say this, we have totally different things in mind. Fortune is well symbolized by a face, for she has as many aspects as the competing faces of the picture galleries. Many of these aspects are fair, if only one had the sympathy and the wit to search 3 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTU-NE out the fairness. But it requires a philosophic mood to seek the indeterminate good. The quest is generally more specific. The particular good fortune which each man desires is like that one type of face which arouses the liveliest satisfac- tion, and appeals to the deepest and most genuine feeling. Each man places the emphasis for him- self, and so makes his own desired good fortune individual. The good fortune which my neighbor aspires to, and seems to have almost in hand, would be so intolerable to me that I should perhaps be tempted to commit suicide. It may take the form of a smug meat-shop, with marble-top tables and brass weighing machines and a brisk trade ; and deep down in his heart he may be pitying me for desiring less solid and juicy things. Around the corner there lives a man of genius whose good fortune, it may be, seems to me so altogether desirable that I should be willing to face instant death if, in a succeeding incarnation, I might experience a like beatitude. Fortune has such very different and such very definite messages of desire. To one man she means houses and lands, a fat bank account, or a wealth of beautiful objects. To another, she means home and children, or friendship or fame. To a third, it may be of&cial position, or great learning, or the artist-power, or saintliness, or 4 PROLOGUE some other form of personal possession. To the sick, good fortune may mean the slightest touch of returning health ; to the poor, the mere absence of immediate want. It is seldom good fortune in general. It is nearly always good fortune in particular. Even the traditional youth, who starts out to seek his fortunes in the traditional story- book, is after a definite end, however vague may be his ideas in regard to means. He wants the beautiful princess, and the smiling kingdom, and the well-filled treasure-house. And unless he find them, no healthy-minded child will be satis- fied with the tale, whatever the professed senti- ments of the youth himself. Good fortune, to be genuine, must be indi- vidual, and this both in the quest itself and in the thing sought. On the whole, imitation is a poor thing, either in art or in life. The artist who copies, even though he copy masterpieces, gets a journeyman's reward. His proper craft is to create new master- pieces. So in life, it is the man who grasps the needs of the present hour, who reaHzes that life is an on-rushing, dynamic thing to be freshly reported by each new beholder, it is this man who renders faithful service. And he is a master craftsman indeed who under .his modern symbol can preserve and include the loveliness of the past. The modern knight of good fortune is THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE under the same necessity, the necessity of con- serving the gains of the past, and at the same time of advancing the quest. With the world as old as it is, and human experience as deep as it is, one must count it a rather shabby and com- monplace thing to fix one's heart upon any of those old-time goals which to modern eyes are properly discredited. We may readily grant that in each of the ideals thus given over as a whole there is some element of substantial value quite worth the keeping, something that made them a once priceless lesson. But to elect these unre- vised plans of the past, to lay hold of some static scheme of life, is to lose the major good of Hving. It is easily conceivable that those who do this should feel an intolerable ennui before the game is played out, for the game has ceased to be sig- nificant. Life, just bare life itself, without initi- ative and novelty, without the sense of on-rush and progress, is not entirely worth while. To be good, life must be full-blooded and at first hand, a stirring, personal adventure which engages all one's interest and resource, and leads to some goal at once desirable and desired. To say this is to say that the good life, the life which represents good fortune, is essentially dynamic, an affair of the present moment, an affair of to-day, not a reflection of yesterday, not an anticipation of to-morrow. There must 6 PROLOGUE be nothing belated about it, nothing outworn, nothing discredited. The good life is vital, pal- pitating, immediate. It is to be remembered always that good for- tune is a personal possession, an affair of con- sciousness, and that this holds true in whatever good fortune be made to consist. The miser who believes his money stolen when in reality it is only misplaced, counts himself poor. The so- cial worker who sows the best of seed and yet fails to come personally into the harvest, counts himself defeated. An unexpected windfall so heightens the idea of wealth that the windfall itself is commonly spent several times over. In a word, good fortune is a very primitive thing. It is a feeling, — the feeling we have about our- selves and our performances and our properties, — and fluctuates quite as violently as the feelings will. A favorable looking-glass, a becoming suit of clothes, an auspicious rumor in the market, a word of genuine praise, a friendly conference, even a comforting dinner, and the erstwhile unfortunate man believes himself favored of the gods. Good fortune, to the possessor of it, is very real, even though from an outside point of view it be made of the veriest stuff that dreams are made of. Colonel Sellers, dilating on his pros- pective wealth, has all the expansive feelings of 7 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE a veritable millionaire. The Indian adept, pos- sessed only of loin-cloth and begging-bowl, and parted from the material world as far as mystical contemplation can do it, believes himself on the road to high good fortune. As a matter of fact, good fortune is an experience. The cause may be slender enough, but the feeling is genuine. While this subjective aspect of good fortune has its trivial and amusing side, — and one may often see it in one's self, — it is an aspect that must be reckoned with practically. The effort to hearten a man up may spring from no more serious motive than an amiable desire to make him feel comfortable, and yet be productive of really substantial good. In our own day, opti- mism has been erected into a cult, and has set thousands of people seeking a good fortune which, to the onlooker at least, must seem highly hypothetical. And yet, in spite of the crudeness and ovei>statement which characterize perhaps the majority of these movements, it can hardly be doubted that, taken as a whole, they have made the world a sunnier and better place to live in, and have thus been a genuine contribution to social welfare. On the other hand, to believe that the battle is constantly going against you is to force it to go against you in the end. For this reason, pessimists are seldom converted. An initial pessimism becomes valid occasion for fresh 8 PROLOGUE pessimism. It is a classical instance, that of the well man made genuinely ill by having a dozen friends drop in upon him the same day and sep- arately comment upon how poorly he is looking. But a man's beliefs, whether influenced in this casual fashion by a passing suggestion, or shaped by a larger and more compelling fate, are the effective motive-power in the human drama. There are valid objective standards by which the success of a life may be weighed and measured. They are standards which one man may apply to another man, the historian to his statesmen and generals, the biographer to his hero, the moralist to his hypothetical men and women ; but these standards have no influence whatever upon the attainment of success, unless they be accepted by the man himself, the actor, and sincerely incorporated into his own concep- tion of success. From the point of view of a saint, the business man is a failure, no matter how many millions he may accumulate. From the point of view of a commercialist, the saint is a failure, no mat- ter hoW saintly he may become. These truths are unpardonably obvious, but they are worth repeating, for they are so easily overlooked. It was Mr. Mill who remarked that some platitudes are luminous. If a man believes that he has succeeded, that THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE he has attained good fortune, he will naturally rest just there ; and in point of fact, he would be a very foolish and unreasonable person if he failed to do so. It is true that the greater good fortune may come when he realizes that he is mistaken, when he sets out, like Paracelsus, to seek a second and a greater good. But, however he came by it, it must be his own ideal of good fortune. The good fortune must seem to him worth while. It must seem to him at least in part attainable. It must be the thing that he would most like to possess. For no man can fol- low a light which he does not see. It is as use- less as it is lacking in good taste to try to bully a man, either intellectually or spiritually, into seeking a good fortune which he does not be- lieve in, does not want, and would not value. It is like expecting an animal to drink when it is not thirsty. Of necessity, each soul sets up its own goal, and satisfies itself that the goal is being reached. The tragedy of life comes in large part from the persistent attempt to force our own ideas of good fortune down our neighbor's throat". The pathos of life comes in large part from his too amiable comphance, his vain attempt to follow a light which he does not see. If we ourselves have found the light, or believe that we have, let us by all means try to reveal it to our brother. 10 PROLOGUE If he share our confidence in believing that we have a light not yet perceived by him, let him by all means try to catch sight of the beatific vision. But, meanwhile, let us be ourselves, both me and my brother, the sincere followers of such light as we genuinely have. This quest of good fortune, however dimly it may be perceived, however falteringly it may be followed, is in effect the significant part of human life. It is a quest on which all embark ; in which all have some slight measure of success ; in which some have large measure ; in which a very few have full measure. Yet, apparently, the same methods are open to all. Jhe drama of life is a process in which character, the inner part of a man, expresses itself in conduct, the outer part of him. If character were a fixed quantity, it would be able in the end to express itself quite perfectly in conduct, and the heart's desire would be an achieved fact. But the problem is not so simple. It is not made up of fixed, determi- nate quantities, like an easy sum in arithmetic. Rather, it is like one of those fascinating prob- lems in the calculus,. where we study the relation between quantities which are themselves variable. For myself, I do not regret that the problem of life is so involved. I rejoice that it is a prob- lem of such many-sided, inextinguishable inter- est. It is the more worth while, and gives ample 11 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE reassurance that life will never become the tra- ditional sucked orange, — a poor thing, to be thrown away quite without regret. The attempt to solve the problem of life once for all and have done with the problem is responsible for most, if not all, of the ennui of life. In reality, there is no static solution, no hard-and-fast an- swer, like the answers to be found in the key to an arithmetic. Life is not a tableau, even a tableau vivant ; it is a drama. But even as a drama, life would fail of per- manent interest if it failed to be broadly intel- ligible. It is a useless, impertinent question to ask the full meaning of life, when all we experience of life is a mere fragment. But the conviction deepens, the more we study this fragment, that we can at least discover something of its quality. The joy of following a series of ideals, however lofty and beautiful, would soon be given over, if one ideal after another were abandoned and a new and unrelated one put up in its place. There are few hearts so stout as to withstand this incoherence. Existence would be a meaningless process, a mere following of some transitory will- o'-the-wisp. There are, indeed, lives which seem, from the outside at least, to display just this lack of meaning and effect. They are Hves in which the idea of good fortune changes so frequently and so radically that conduct hardly begins to 12 PROLOGUE adjust itself to character, and nothing quite worth while is ever achieved. Failure to attain the reasonable ends of Hfe is not so common or so inevitable as is generally supposed. What does happen is, that the ends are changed before the old hne of conduct has come to its proper harvest. Men who have achieved their ends, men like Edison, for exam- ple, are quite outspoken in af&rming that the secret is not so much genius as concentration. A character that is too volatile has no adequate chance to express itself in conduct. Men may suffer quite as much from an excess of ideals, a confusion of them, as from a deficiency of ideals. It is almost literally true that all comes around to him who will but wait, — if by waiting one means steadfastness to a fixed idea. But, as I have been trying to suggest, these ideas depend for their value upon their relation to one another, and upon their significance in the whole scheme of life. If they lack unity and meaning, they may express themselves adequately in conduct and yet give us nothing more impressive than a series of childish exploits, — a full harvest, but without much value. The major inquiry for those who wish to live a life of serious beauty is, what sort of an ideal will be progressively and permanently satisfying ; and what sort of con- 13 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE duct will continuously adjust itself to the attain- ment of this ideal ? I am here embarking upon such an inquiry. I have called my venture The Children of Good Fortune, in the belief that this expresses the purpose and the destiny of mankind. For whether our lives be admirable or wretched, we are all of us reaching out after a good fortune such as we see. We are all children of the same great earth-mother, all bent on satisfying the heart's desire. We differ from one another mainly in our conception of what good fortune really is, and in the efficiency of the methods we employ in trying to compass it. But for all of us, the quest is inevitable. It is, as I have said, the significant thing in human life. And no human life is wholly devoid of significance, for no man wholly escapes the universal seeking. So far, such an inquiry might be merely one of worldly prudence, the reaching out after suc- cess, quite regardless of what success is made to consist in, provided only it kept the adventurer himself contented and happy. But even so bare a quest would not be devoid of moral value. Any definite plan and purpose is better than what some one has called ' a mere succession of unorganized and unrelated acts and sensations,' for in the end it brings a discipline which is both self -regarding and other-regarding. Indeed, 14 PROLOGUE Hobbes and the early English moralists made self-preservation the touchstone of their systems ; and this prudence was simply enlarged and made social when Lord Shaftesbury amended it to mean preservation of the species. But while every quest of good fortune involves as much as this, involves self-preservation as a necessary condi- tion of attainment, the deepest interest of the student and practitioner of morals is enlisted only when he can sympathize quite as genuinely with the worth of the good fortune sought as with the efficiency and success of the quest it- self. And sometimes, as we all know, the highest good fortune results from a line of conduct which to smaller souls appears to throw prudence completely to the winds. We have here a situation which is both inter- esting and puzzling. Good fortune has many aspects, quite as many aspects as the human face itself. Furthermore, it is an individual experi- ence, is private and subjective. Each man who goes on the quest — and we all go — must set up his own goal, must believe in it, must choose his own methods for reaching it. And this, as he is an honest man, he is quite bound to do, whether his neighbor approve or disapprove. In a large sense, every man must be a law unto him- self, since he must obey that law whose authority he accepts. But morality is a judgment which 15 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE must include both the man and the neighbor. It is obHged to look at the matter from a less personal standpoint, and to apply a more objec- tive and less individual measuring-rod. Morality must consider both the individual idea and the world idea, since its province is to know quite beyond peradventure whether the fortune is good and the quest is successful. It is the high province of morality to discover in what genuine good fortune consists, and to point out the con- ditions under which it may be realized. Much of the confusion and uncertainty in the current theory of morals and the current prac- tice is due to this double aspect of the question, this necessity of bringing forward a standard which shall be individual and subjective on the one hand, and universal and objective on the other. In particular, this double aspect is re- sponsible for the quarrel, now over twenty cen- turies old, between those moralists who hold that pleasure, or happiness, is the highest good, the summum honum, and those other moralists who hold that the highest good lies in conformity to an outer, objective standard. Taken separately, neither party to the controversy is right ; taken together, they are both right. The considerations to be brought forward in the present volume are permeated by the convic- tion that there is no real conflict between indi- 16 PROLOGUE vidual happiness and social welfare. It will be pointed out that there is an essential conflict be- tween false ideas of individual happiness and a genuine social welfare ; and it will further be pointed out that there is an equally essential con- flict between a genuine individual happiness and false ideas of social welfare. It will be held — and I hope successfully — that happiness in the deepest and truest sense of the word is real- ized only by conduct which is objectively and socially acceptable ; and quite as steadfastly will it be held that no outwardly imposed standard of conduct is valid which does not lead in the end to personal, individual happiness. It is difficult to believe that a collection of separate units can possess qualities not possessed by the individual units, and equally difficult to believe that the good fortune of a community can be made up of anything less real than the good fortune of indi- viduals. These considerations do not solve the diffi- culty. Perhaps they even emphasize it. But just as a knotty problem in mathematics is far more attractive than every-day sums, so this most difficult of human problems — What is right? — has always had great fascination for the thinkers of all ages. It has pleased the more abstract of them to inquire in what good fortune consists, even where they have not personally tried to 17 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE grasp it. Frankly, this is not the way the prob- lem is to be solved. Good fortune is an experi- ence, not an abstraction. Only those who live can say anything very helpful about life. One must needs be a practitioner of morals, as well as a student, in order to gain the larger insight. My own sympathies are wholly with those who go on the quest ; not with St. Simon Stylites on top of his pillar, type of those who renounce life, but with the men down in the heat and dust of the plain, who accept life in all its exuberance and many-sidedness, and try to make it good. It is needless to say that such an essay as this is not meant for the technical moralist. While I should feel honored by his company, I am not at all sure that he would find the following pages to his taste. They are wholly untechnical. They are addressed to those earnest men and women who are struggling with the problems of morality, not with a view to gathering them into a system, but rather with a view to putting them into practice, the men and women who are try- ing to import into the daily affairs of life an atmosphere of serious and abiding beauty. II THE PROBLEM IT is a very old question, this question of right and wrong, and so many wise men and so many fooHsh men have been working away at it during the centuries that one might think the last word had long since been spoken, and perhaps forgotten. But the problem is eternally new and eternally unsolved. For men are constantly eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The problem is no sooner stated and partly solved by one generation than it must be re-stated and re-solved by another generation. This refusal of the problem to be stated and solved, once for all, comes about from the fact that right and wrong can no longer be written down as absolute terms, but must be counted purely relative. Right and wrong change their significance, as all words do, in harmony with the growing intelligence of the race. What was wholly right once is probably wholly right always. But it has not been given to man to see the wholly right. How blind he is in matters of morality can perhaps be better appreciated by observing his parallel blindness 19 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE in the more obvious world of brick and stone. With all their courage and insight, the founders of our own Republic could draw no picture of what it would be in the present year of grace. They had to deal with a totally different material world, with a world devoid of coal, railways, steamships, dynamos, telegraphs, ocean cables, telephones, electric lights, automobiles, a world without abundant iron and steel and copper, without our revolutionizing machinery. Nor could they even foresee these new elements, for they had no finger-posts to point the direction. Were we of to-day to attempt a picture of the world of a century hence, we should produce something too feeble to be called even a carica- ture. The passenger elevator is a simple matter, but it has made a complete change in our city architecture. The railroad is a comparatively simple matter, but it has created an altogether new distribution of population, and has brought about a new habit of national life. The century to come is filled with just such a complexity of possibilities, but we can foresee practically none of them. In the more subtle and plastic world of the spirit, we are meeting equally radical discoveries and inventions, passing out of old conceptions of human relations into totally new ones, adding ideas, changing, supplanting, suppressing, until 20 THE PROBLEM we find ourselves in a moral world so novel and so spacious that no earlier generation could have either foreseen it or provided for its needs. Were we disposed to turn prophet and try our hand at forecasting the morality of the future, we should doubtless go as wide of the mark as in our clumsy attempts to picture the outward aspects of the coming civilization. In his moral life, man has had to deal all along with the partially right, or, more perplex- ing still, with what was considered right. Had there been some available touchstone for right and wrong, a standard quite beyond question, it would have been an easy matter to escape con- fusion in both theory and practice. It would have made the game of human life less interest- ing, but far surer. The one wisdom had been a knowledge of the perfect code ; the one virtue, obedience to the code. But we know very well that this is not the case. We know that right and wrong, as we iinderstand the terms, are purely matters of human opinion, — grotesque enough, where opin- ion is crude and uninformed ; touched with the sublime, where the opinion is chastened and rationalized. In the individual, opinion is fluid up to forty, let us say. In the community, opin- ion has its periods of arrest, its dogmatic slumber, followed by periods of plasticity and spiritual 21 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE on-rush. We have the Dark Ages and the Renaissance. To know what is wholly right, this would turn us men into gods. But even as men we may believe that there is a wholly right; we may believe in a scheme of absolute morals, a rule of life which would commend itself to gods and men alike. Such a system would be made up of necessary truths. It would be capable of just as exact and formal statement as the propositions of geometry. It would indeed be a branch of exact science, and open to rigid demonstration. It is possible, and perhaps even helpful, to con- ceive that there is such a system, but it is need- ful to bear always in mind that if there be, it exists only in the empyrean above us, in that absolute world of which no traveler has brought us charts. Human experience makes us recog- nize that we ourselves live in a world of moving moralities, a dynamic world. If we are so con- stituted, we may find rest and courage in the thought that somewhere there is a moral equi- librium, a static world of complete attainment. The conception is helpful to this extent, that it enables us to picture the moral life as an unend- ing path leading from however unpromising a present into however gratifying a future. It makes the quest of good fortune what the human heart makes it, a game never quite played out. 22 THE PROBLEM It is even conceivable that the gods themselves have not yet reached the ultimate goal, the high- est good, for in one sense to attain everything would be to lose everything. It may well be that the game is never closed, that progress is the eternal stimulant to the celestial hosts as well as to the denizens of earth. This conception of an absolute though inac- cessible right is also helpful in enabling us to picture a multitude of individual souls moving on the same path, the path from nothingness to God, traveling at different stages and unequal rates, but all with faces turned towards the same light. So I may pass my more sluggish brother, to be left behind in turn by the one who is more alert. One obvious danger in such a conception of absolute values is that we may sometimes make the grave mistake of supposing that we ourselves have got hold of very truth, the wholly right, and in our enthusiasm, may be for forcing the precious gift upon our unwilhng neighbor, quite forgetting that he, too, has his visions, perhaps not so wide as ours, perhaps infinitely wider. Such an attitude of compulsion is full of mischief, but happily it is not permanently possible. Sooner or later, human experience brings human toler- ation. The Right and Wrong with which mankind THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE has daily to deal are fluid terms whose content deepens as life itself deepens. If one has been accustomed to think of them as absolute terms, even in human affairs, this conception of their relativity may seem at first sight quite to rob them of authority, and to be on that account wholly unwelcome. But as one entertains the conception and explores its implications, one be- gins to realize that this very fluidity is a source of compelling power. Not only does this infinite possibility of growth convey a vitality and abid- ing interest to life which nothing else can, but one becomes more sensitive to right and wrong when one perceives that in reality right is some- thing more august than it at first appears, and wrong something more hideous. Right being the desirable thing, and wrong the undesirable thing, the history of human endeavor is the search, however blind, to know the right and follow it. Saints and sinners are on the same eternal quest, and the line between them is not so hard-and-fast as we sometimes think. There are few saints wholly free from sin, and few sin- ners wholly devoid of saintliness. The main dif- ference between them is the degree in which the subjective ideal of the desirable coincides with the objective ideal of the right. Using right in its relative human sense, it need create no confu- sion of moral values to point out that if the 24 THE PROBLEM objective ideal of right is in effect wrong, the so-called saint may be the real sinner, and the so-called sinner, the real saint. If right be used in the absolute sense, it is salutary to remem- ber that the divergence of both ideals from the supreme standard leaves saint and sinner near kinsmen. It is the partial vision, the fragmen- tary knowledge, that makes the saint what he is, and the sinner what he is. If both were infinitely wise, both would be infinitely good. The problem of right and wrong, the old problem of good and evil, is essentially the problem of Knowledge and Ignorance. So it appeared to Socrates, and so it appears to the men of the Renaissance. During the Middle Ages, the problem was obscured, but nevertheless the human heart went on solving it. The subjective ideal of the desirable is what we have called the idea of Good Fortune ; and the objective ideal, what we have called the idea of Social Welfare, In a very few average individ- uals, the two ideals may pretty nearly coincide, but in the majority, there is some divergence. Society at large has always been intolerant of any wide divergence, and quite as intolerant of a divergence above her own standard as below it. She has been almost as ready to crucify her pro- phets as she has her malefactors. The problem of morality is to bring these two ideals into har- mony, not, as is too often taken for granted, by ^"?.^^i.>. OF THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE making the subjective ideal conform wholly to the objective ideal, but rather by permitting the two ideals to react on each other, and so produce a standard more catholic and authoritative than either. By its very nature, character is essentially a private and subjective possession. It is influenced, and most powerfully, by the surrounding social atmosphere, but by no outward force can it suffer violent dislocation. But character is constantly expressing itself in conduct ; and in all civilized communities, conduct, for both moral and admin- istrative reasons, must be constantly chastened by the standard of social welfare. The quest of good fortune thus becomes on its theoretical side the study of morality, a study which has to do with human conduct, and with that aspect of human conduct which is good. The quest, theo- retically, is the science of good conduct ; prac- tically, it is the art of right living. A man's character may be pretty clearly known to himself, — though generally it is not, — but to his neigh- bors it is merely an induction from his observed conduct. They estimate conduct by the worth of its goal, and by its ef&ciency in reaching the goal. These judgments are sound morally only as they are discriminating, as they recognize what conduct is, and what right is. It seems, then, that morals has a double con- 26 THE PROBLEM cern, — it has to inquire what part of human activity may properly be classed as conduct ; and this determined, it must investigate in what the quality of goodness, as applied to conduct, con- sists. These two are indeed the basal questions of morality, — What is conduct ? What makes it right or wrong ? — and here we have a plain statement of our Problem. Ill HUMAN CONDUCT OPINION, and by this I mean informed opin- ion, differs as to how much of human action may be counted as conduct, and how much must be set down as simple bodily activity. Our opinion on such a matter very naturally depends upon the view we hold regarding the relation between life and mind. So long as these views differ, and they will probably differ for a long time to come, there must be corresponding dif- ferences in our estimates of the extension of human conduct. In a general way we may define conduct as human activity which involves a purpose. It is the adjustment of means to ends. We shall be getting at the subject-matter of morals if we eliminate from human activity all movement which is without purpose, and which involves no such adjustment. But this at once brings up the question as to whether there are any such activities as these to be eliminated, and we find ourselves at a fork in the road. Organically speaking, loss of function means sooner or later a loss of organ. As soon as an 28 HUMAN CONDUCT organ ceases to be used, as soon as it no longer has a purpose to fulfill, it begins to shrink, and in the end it either disappears altogether, or else becomes a mere shadow of its former self. And this is precisely what we should expect. In the process of evolution, a process too well accredited on all sides to need longer any defense, the development of each organ has come about in response to some condition in the environment, which demanded such an organ and offered free play for its activity. The enlargement of this field of action meant a corresponding growth of the organ. A lessening of the field meant a shrinkage of the organ. Withdrawal of the field meant disappearance of the organ. Illustrations abound on all sides. Animals deprived of light for generations lose not only the power of sight, but at last the organ of sight as well. Such apparently has been the fate of the blind fishes in the Mammoth Cave and elsewhere. Birds which for any reason decline to fly, lose in time the strength of wing which makes such flight possible. This has been the history of the great auk. These results of natural selection are duplicated in all experiments in breeding. On all sides, in the animal world, we find a constant interplay between organ and function. Human activities are subject to the same law, 29 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE and apparently the law is inexorable. All human action has at one time served some definite pur- pose. Otherwise it would never have come into being, for there would have been no generating cause. Human action has reached its present highly evolved form by reason of the increasing nicety in its adjustment to this purpose. The purpose itself represents the somewhat imperative opportunity offered the organism by the surround- ing conditions. Remove this purpose, and the movements which it called forth, and which respond to it, must eventually cease. There is no longer any stimulus to excite them. It follows, I think unavoidably, that all human action has a purpose, and is in some degree an adjustment of means to ends. Consequently, human conduct, which we have defined as action with a purpose, is coextensive with human action. Further, since all action is well or ill adapted to accomplish the adjustment of means to ends, it must be that all action is relatively good or bad, and consequently that no action, however trivial, is devoid of moral significance. The adjustment is open to criticism in the matter of efficiency ; and the ends, in the matter of worth. So astonishing a result demands a restatement. What we say is no more nor less than this, that morahty, which has to do with conduct, and with that conduct which is good, has in reality 30 HUMAN CONDUCT to do with life, and with life in its entirety. The subject-matter of morals includes the sum total of human action. This is not what people commonly believe, and it deviates in two important respects. It is com- monly asserted that conduct is not coextensive with human action, and also that of recognized conduct a portion is quite neutral, quite devoid of moral significance. Both these assertions must receive due consideration, and especially from those who are at all earnest in their quest of right conduct, for they must believe, as follow- ers of the gods of causation, that the majority failure to reach an individual good fortune which will square with objective moral standards, and so be good fortune in very truth, is a failure to reckon with just these simple and obvious matters of the law. And first in regard to human action at large. As I have tried to point out, no action devoid of purpose is continuously possible. As soon as the adjustment of means to ends ceases, there is no longer any force at work to retain the action itself. As organisms shaped by the process of evolution, we can do nothing that is essentially meaningless. Every movement is towards some end. The end may be relatively unimportant, but from this it passes to ends of the utmost importance. All bodily activity confirms this statement. The body 31 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE is indeed but a collection of organic industries, a veritable bee-hive, and all the drones are killed. The secretions of the glands, the pulsations of the diaphragm, the molecular changes in the brain, the actions and reactions among the nerves, all have this in common, that they have work to do. The manner in which they do this work marks the difference between a healthy and an un- healthy organism. The more perfect the adjust- ment of means to ends, the more complete the manifestation of life. From perfect to imperfect, the adjustment passes through all intervening stages as we journey from health to disease, until finally we reach death itself, for death — as a matter of definition — is but a complete failure of organic adjustment of means to ends. How- ever much it may be at variance with our initial view, I do not see how we can escape the con- clusion that conduct is truly coextensive with human action. Every breath, every heart beat, every tear, the movement of every single mole- cule, the movement of every limb, each and every activity of the whole, has purpose, serves an end, and is therefore a part of that supreme thing which we call human conduct. Conduct is not three fourths of life, — it is the whole of life. We turn now to that other aspect of the case, to the equally inclusive answer we have given as 32 HUMAN CONDUCT to how much of conduct is open to moral criti- cism. It is an avowal fraught with very deep meaning when we assert, as we do here quite with- out reservation, that just as there is no human activity outside the pale of conduct, so there is no conduct without moral significance. It is entirely true that there is to-day much conduct which is seemingly neutral. We have not fine enough per- ception to classify it properly. The problem is too subtle for such thick wits to grasp, but the prob- lem is nevertheless there. From these extreme cases at the one end, these over-niceties, conduct passes by quite insensible degrees to those equally extreme cases at the other end, to those moral possibilities in conduct so obvious as to be recog- nized by the civilized world generally, and even by a part of the savage world. The tremendous moral significance of all con- duct will be brought out more clearly if we con- sider the events of a single day, and especially the small events. We waken in the morning. The room in which we find ourselves is full of moral significance. Have we slept with the window opened or closed ? Is the air in the room sweet and wholesome, or stuffy and vitiated ? We are still in bed. Is the bed hygienically constructed, or is it not ? Is it health-giving or health-taking ? Is the pillow so high as to induce curvature of the spine, or so low 33 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE as to encourage rush of blood to the head ? Are the covers suitable, not heavy enough to weaken, and not light enough to expose? How is the body itself encased, is it suffocated in heavy flan- nels which are to be worn continuously through- out the ensuing day, or is some thought given to the skin and its needs ? One is still in bed. Shall one get up at once, or shall one lie abed ? Shall one be content idly to dream, half awake and half asleep, or shall one arouse one's seK mentally and work out some problem of the daily life, some aspect of indi- vidual duty ? And then when you are up, what alternatives present themselves at every step ! Is the furni- ture of your bedroom convenient, does it allow you to carry on the several activities of the toilet with little friction, or is it clumsy and ill-arranged, abounding in dust-harboring contrivances, and so stacked as to impede all wholesome move- ments ? Is the room clean ? Are the floor cover- ing and wall paper and window hangings reason- ably free from germs and poisons ? What of the bath, shall it be hot or cold, and what clothing shall be worn ? When you are dressed, is it bet- ter to go directly downstairs to the family group, or to stop awhile with yourself, repeating aloud, or in your own heart, the hope and aspiration of the day ? If you decide to stop, will the spirit 34 HUMAN CONDUCT be more refreshed by a few pages of good news, or by saluting the morning and the universe from your own window ? We do not commonly think of all these matters as having to do with the moral life, with the quest of that good fortune which bears inspec- tion, but my including of them here is not at all fanciful. Each element that I have just named conditions the health and the spirit, gives color to the ensuing day, makes possible sound judg- ment, generous action, right relations, or makes them impossible. So deeply laden with conse- quences are these simple actions of the daily life that it would be irrational in the last degree to deny them a moral significance. On the contrary, their chief content is moral. And you have not yet opened the door of your bedchamber. So far you have had to do only with yourself, with your own organism, and yet everything you have done has been fairly subject to the criticism of morality, has been relatively good or relatively bad, has helped you forward on the quest or has hindered you. Open the door, and the problem becomes tre- mendously more complicated, for you have to do with others as well as with yourself. The com- plexity begins with the first face you see and the first voice you hear. What does your own face proclaim, what is your own salutation ? Are they 35 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE such as to warm and cheer and strengthen, or do they chill and depress and devitalize ? ) There are large moral possibilities just here. And at the breakfast-table, what do you talk about? This is far from being a matter of moral indifference. Do you bury yourself in the morning paper, and read on in rude silence ? Do you open your mail and quite ignore the other people present ? Do you omit to say ^good-morning' to the maid-ser- vant? These minor moralities are not mentioned in the decalogue, and they are ignored by many persons who consider themselves moral, but their omission makes up the major budget in the im- morahty of Hfe. Furthermore, there is the immorality of the second-best. One may talk, and both agreeably and politely for that matter, and yet not say the best thing that one is capable of saying. The talk may be clever and yet leave a bad taste in the mouth. It may serve to cheapen life, may stimulate the evil expectation, may make more difficult for some listening soul the reahzation of the ideal life. What one does, and what one refrains from doing, both involve a positive moral issue. Nor is the problem of the breakfast-table — a homely problem, but one, nevertheless, which comes to a man three hundred and sixty-five 36 HUMAN CONDUCT times a year — confined to the altruistic side of things. The talk reacts upon one's self. The occasion, like the bed that one has just left, may be health-giving or health-taking. To speak hon- estly and nobly, to speak upon worthy topics, does indeed affect the whole family group, but no one so intimately as the speaker himself. In helping others climb, one must needs climb one's self. I am not forgetting that the primary object of a breakfast is the taking of food. What one eats, what one drinks, and what one desists from eating and drinking constitute a most impor- tant part of conduct, and one not sufficiently in- sisted upon. The housekeeper who assumes the duty of selecting and preparing food for a family group, and particularly if the group include young children, assumes a very great duty and generally fulfills it badly. It is, I think, an ad- mitted fact that much of the drunkenness in America is directly traceable to wretched cookery and the consequent lack of proper nutrition. It is very clear that morality is but dealing with the causes of things, with conduct germs, so to speak, when she pronounces for or against a given diet. And here, as elsewhere, the moral Hfe demands self-activity. In the absence of anything like uniform temperament, or indeed of any very defi- nite scientific knowledge in the matter of foods, 37 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE there is no ideal diet to be prescribed for all. Discrimination is necessary, and discrimination becomes a part of morality. Voltaire, it will be remembered, declared that he had no respect for a man who after thirty asked his physician what he should eat. It may be a moral or an immoral act to drink a cup of chocolate, — highly immoral if the chocolate bring indigestion, for the indigestion produces headache, sluggishness, incapacity, and these mean depression of spirit and unsoundness of judgment. These have to do most unmistak- ably with conduct, and if morality condemn the conduct, the condemnation must include the whole causal chain, — the physiological condition which brought about the unsoundness, the food which induced such a condition, the ignorance or self-indulgence which led to the taking of the food. Nor does the moral chain come quite to an end, even here. We have still to seek out the causes of the ignorance or self-indulgence. This carries us back over a road which ends only with the dawn of consciousness, and gives to the prob- lem of morality a truly Titanic aspect. Outside the house door, and the problem is still further complicated. One has to deal not only with one's self and with one's fellows in their individual capacity, but with a corporate whole, with society, and this evidently requires further 38 HUMAN CONDUCT adjustments of means to ends, adjustments which may be relatively very good or relatively very bad. And yet the day has hardly begun. There are twenty-four hours to be considered, and though the moral content of the hours differs in seriousness, it is manifest, I think, that no hour is devoid of significance. This all too brief and inadequate survey has included only those actions which are more or less conscious. But in saying that conduct is coextensive with human action, we commit our- selves to everything. We necessarily include in conduct every movement of whatsoever nature. It is common to divide all human activity into voluntary and involuntary movements. If moral criticism did not go back of results to causes, it would clearly have little to do with the move- ments that are involuntary. Many of them are so far involuntary that we hardly think of them as having any concern whatever with the affairs of the conscious life. In many cases, it is only when disease interrupts these movements, or, to speak more accurately, when the interruptions and irregularities in the movements declare them- selves in disease, that we are in any sense aware of them. To this class of involuntary movements belong the pulsation of the heart, the circulation of the blood, the respiration of the lungs, the digestive action of the stomach, the secretions of 39 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE the glands^ and many other less obvious bodily functions. All these movements are full of pur- pose, are manifest adjustments of means to ends, and are therefore well within the boundaries of conduct. By our very definition of conduct, human activity which involves a purpose, these involun- tary movements have a part in conduct quite as well assured as have those more obvious bodily movements which come under the direct control of the will and are classed as voluntary. Further- more, these involuntary movements would still be open to moral criticism, were they as truly beyond control as they are seemingly, for they undoubtedly serve well or ill the purposes for which they exist. But the criticism would lack any very vital interest. A doctrine of conduct which gravely considered the moral aspect of the circulation of the blood, while it expressly declared that such circulation was both involuntary and beyond even indirect control, would attract few students. If we calmly turn over all these bodily functions to the care of the subconscious self, and dechne all further responsibihty, there is not much more to be said. But there is another and more helpful way of looking at the matter, the causational and scientific way. The element of human interest comes back again, and vitalizes the moral criticism, as soon as it is recognized that the circulation of the blood, though beyond 40 HUMAN CONDUCT present direct volition, is nevertheless subject to distinct conditions, such as exercise and the like, which are themselves under the complete control of the will. The sense of human interest and responsibility deepens when it is further borne in mind that the circulation of the blood plainly conditions brain action, and so has very immedi- ately to do with the life of the spirit, and with all that goes to make up conduct. Viewed in this light, the moral aspect of the circulation of the blood is seen to be a very grave reality, and not at all the absurdity which it at first sight appeared to be. In the same way it can readily be shown that all those bodily movements which we are pleased to call involuntary may in reality be brought under the control of the will, if we have the patience and knowledge. It is only that the causal chain between volition and movement is more circuitous. But the gods of causation are still in control. If we accept this view of human conduct, and make it coextensive with human activity, that is to say, with life, then the practice of morality be- comes the one possible human art. The secret of good fortune is found to rest in control. Faith- fulness in seeking knowledge, and an equal faith- fulness in applying it, constitute the genuine alchemy by which a dull, commonplace, wretched 41 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE life may be transformed into something radiant, interesting, and helpful. It is the practical pro- cess by which human poverty is supplanted by human wealth. I cannot help regarding such a conclusion, that conduct is everything, as a truly overwhelm- ing conclusion. It does away with all smaller conceptions of the significance of life, and car- ries one quite irresistibly into regions of higher effort and attainment. But it seems to me a con- clusion from which we may not escape. And indeed, when we come to understand the nature of the moral standard, it is a conclusion from which we would not wish to escape. IV RIGHT AND WRONG IF conduct include the whole of human activ- ity, and morality have to do with right con- duct, it becomes a matter of the utmost impor- tance to inquire what makes human activity good or bad, right or wrong. Touching as it does the whole of life, the question of what is right and what is wrong in conduct is one of those fundamental interests which may not be neglected by a single human being. One may properly doubt if the question is ever totally neglected, from the feeblest of the race up to the most strenuous. We are all avow- edly after good fortune, some persistently, some intermittently, many mistakenly. When the quest is on, there must needs be a certain amount of reflection, at least some rudimentary inquiry into cause and effect, some show of a plan. It is even reasonable to believe that this elementary morality exists among animals; possibly, in a modified form, among plants. Such a belief may easily rest upon one's own limited personal ob- servation, and still more upon the large body of evidence gathered by Spencer and others regard- 43 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE ing the behavior of dogs and cats and other highly developed animals. The evidence is the more remarkable becauSe it appears to show that this incipient morality is particularly manifested in those animals which have come in the closest contact with man, the so-called domestic animals. It would carry us too far afield to go into the question of animal morality, but I think we may safely assume it as an established fact. Our dogs and cats and horses, even the less clever inhabitants of the barnyard, show a rudimentary sense of right and wrong which adds immensely to their interest and companionableness. Wild animals, made more alert by the necessity of winning their own food, and by the constant presence of danger, show an even keener intel- ligence, and a team morality which perhaps im- presses us less than the individual expediency of the domestic animals, because it spends itself against us, instead of for us. That the belief in animal morality is an acceptable one is shown by the popular delight in modern animal stories, tales which differ essentially from the old ani- mal fables in being told, as far as a man can tell them, from the point of view of the animals themselves. If, indeed, we followed Hobbes and the earlier English moralists in making morality wholly and avowedly prudential, a more or less enlightened 44 RIGHT AND WRONG scheme of self-preservation, we should have to accord morality to plants as well as to animals. ^ The struggle for existence ' would be their good deeds. And still more should we have to accord morality to such lowly organisms as the infusoria, which never die. This reference to the non-human world is not a mere idle fancy. It is meant to serve as a deliberate introduction to the very modern and at the same time the very ancient conception that the moral law is as much of the soul of things as gravitation itself. Structures built without due regard to gravitation collapse. Human lives conducted without regard to the moral law come to grief. Ttiere is a necessary connection between morality and well-being, between immorality and disaster. Morality must be accounted, not as a human device for keeping the rabble in order, but as a very much more august thing, as a veritable law of nature. In venturing such a comparison between mo- lality and gravitation, we seem to be naming on the one hand a group of very subtle, complicated, spiritual phenomena, and on the other hand a group of obvious, simple, and highly material •happenings. Yet they are in many ways parallel. It is to be remembered that gravitation covers not only such visible events as falling bodies, but also the less obvious manifestations of chemi- 45 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE cal affinity and the greater mystery of the ether, the almost spiritual phenomena of light and elec- tricity. We may grant that morality starts out with bare self-preservation, the limited virtue of mineral, plant, animal, and savage. But as the self expands, as it becomes more sensitive, more human, more spiritual, self-preservation ceases to be a bare term. It becomes the name of a highly involved ministry. The advantage of our com- parison, or if you prefer, our analogy, does not consist, however, in tracing any close parallel- ism, but in pointing out beyond peradventure that morality, like gravitation, is not an elec- tive, but an obligatory, unescapable element in life. In saying that morality is a law of nature, we invest it with no false or mysterious function, no veiled origin. We state a simple matter of ex- perience, and connect it with so much of cause and effect as we have been able to perceive. The so-called laws of nature deal with the mys- teries of existence and touch the boundary of the unknowable, but they are themselves no mystery. They are statements prompted by ex- perience, mere human statements of the common element in a series of related events. As such, these laws are open to enlargement, revision, even total restatement. Nor do these laws ex- plain themselves. They only sum up our present 46 RIGHT AND WRONG state of knowledge on that particular subject. None of us knows what gravitation is. Our law of gravitation is a convenient working formula, which tells us how the force acts. Bodies attract each other directly as their mass, and inversely as the square of the distance. It is quite con- ceivable that the whole of gravitation, were it known, could be summed up in a final formula which would constitute absolute law. We phrase these matters, but we really never come up with them. Because our partial human law may be a part of very truth, may be a tiny clause in the final law, we are not justified in parading it as infallible. At the most, our laws of nature are merely laws of nature as we see it, human proba- bilities of greater or less weight, but never more than this. In quite the same way we are constrained to deal with morality. The absolute morality touched upon in The Problem bears to our human morality the same relation that all absolute law bears to all human law, — the one is stated to be the whole fact, the other may be a part of the fact. This sends the student of morals back to ^ very old teacher, — one said to be the best, — that is, to experience. All he can hope to gain is a high degree of probability. But this is all that the student of gravitation can hope to gain. The result, partial as it admittedly is, is far from 47 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE contemptible, for it is enough to differentiate right from wrong. It may be that at first sight this view seems calculated to rob morality of all certainty, and the moralist of all enthusiasm. But after all, human experience — the historical life of man — is a pretty definite thing for those who care to read the record with any degree of temperance and disinterestedness. Morality may present a shifting standard of conduct from the point of view of the ages, but at any given time it is fairly specific. It is the science of that conduct which to-day is held to be good. Before finally letting slip our analogy of phy- sical laws, it may be well to suggest that they all rest upon quite the same grounds as morality, that is to say, upon experience. We do not on this account feel any disquietude in our daily going and coming in the material world. We do not know the whole of gravitation, but we adjust ourselves to so much of it as we do know, and so escape the major disasters. The shifting of morals, like the shifting in physical research, in spite of positions given over, commonly leaves enough solid ground to stand upon. We never at one time throw over our entire body of doc- trine in either morals or natural history. The new conceptions must needs justify themselves, and so can make their way only slowly and gradually. 48 RIGHT AND WRONG Furthermore, it is worth remarking that physi- cal research, by reason of technical resource and modern prosperity, has been able of recent years to go into the most subtle and fascinating inquir- ies that it has ever entered upon, inquiries into radiant energy and waves and vibrations, matters so delicate that they might almost be classed as spiritual. Totally new worlds are being opened up ; totally new conceptions of the universe are being propounded. These matters were hidden even from the acute mind of Greece, for thought can advance only when going hand in hand with experiment, that is, with systematized expe- rience. The same thing holds true in morality The very difficulties and complexities of mod- ern social experience carry us into new concep- tions of human relations, and new perceptions of social possibilities. It is no exaggeration to say that the twentieth century opens, in matters of morality, with as large opportunity for elaborate research, and as great a chance for helpful dis- covery, as it offers in the physical world. But the method must be the same. It may not be purely speculative. It must needs be experimental, must consist in reflections based upon immediate, first- hand experience. This very brief examination of the matter makes it plain that no final definition of right and wrong can ever be given. When man has 49 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE done his very best^ the moral possibilities are not yet exhausted. One more day of life, one added experience, and morality has fresh data that must needs be taken account of. We may say in a general way that conduct, or purposeful human activity, is right or good when it promotes human weKare, and that conduct is wrong or bad when it hinders human welfare. Accepting the broad definition of conduct as adjustment of means to ends, it is increasingly clear that moral criticism has to do both with the efficiency of the means and the human worth of the ends. The proper standards of efficiency and of worth are discover- able only through daily experience. This empha- sizes once more our initial position, that morality can be known only to those who are its prac- titioners as well as its students. In saying what conduct is right and what is wrong, morality may neglect neither efficiency nor worth. Her judg- ments may sum up the matter, but they must contain both these factors as essential elements. Efficiency alone may give us simply the accom- plished rascal, the man of Napoleon's type. The worthy purpose alone may give us th*e most use- less of sentimentalists, the man of Rousseau's type. It is true that both Napoleon and Rousseau have been accorded the genial praise of per- sons who suppose themselves moral. Napoleon so 50 RIGHT AND WRONG dazzled the world by the high efficiency of his methods that he quite blinded it to the gigantic evil of his ends. But the judgment of posterity grows discriminating. More and more, Napoleon is spoken of as a tarnished idol, and the greatest of modern alienists, Lombroso, classes him as a criminal of genius. The same bedazzlement is seen, in our own day, in the imperialism which dominates the policy of more than one world- power. The carrying out of these imperialistic schemes has involved so much undoubted heroism and excellence that men have been fascinated by the spectacle of high efficiency, and have appar- ently forgotten to inquire into the worth of the ends. It seems that nothing succeeds like success. With Rousseau, we have the opposite defect. His plans for the education of the young were so admirable in themselves, and were presented with such literary skill, that they quite took Europe by storm, and this, too, when his own children were being shamelessly turned over to the tender mercies of foundling asylums. These two types, the man of high efficiency and evil ends, the man of excellent purpose and feeble execution, do not represent good fortune. From neither the individual nor the social point of view can such careers be called successful. They fail to promote human welfare, and fail- ing this, they are not able to commend themselves 51 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE to the moral judgment of mankind. Morality has always this double aspect. Both aspects must be remembered, and the double demand which they set up must be satisfied, or else the final verdict is necessarily one of condemnation. To handle successfully so complicated a double problem as this, one must begin by simplifying the problem as far as possible. Perhaps the greatest and most helpful simpli- fication comes from remembering that morality has no judgment to pass upon persons. It deals only with conduct, with human activity, and this in the most impersonal way. It is a judgment of conduct, and not upon conduct. Morality has but one function, and that is to measure. It measures the efficiency of the means and the worth of the ends. Morality neither condemns nor approves, neither blames nor praises. The moral vocabulary is free from all personal terms. Strictly speaking, morality does not know the meaning of such words as ' merit ' and ' demerit,' ' responsibility,' ^ obligation,' ' opportunity,' or even of that word which is supposed to be its peculiar possession, the word ^duty.' These are terms of human stress and strain, and very precious terms they are in their right connection. But morality itself is absolutely passionless. Just as morphology studies and classifies the observed forms of matter, so morality studies and 52 RIGHT AND WRONG classifies the observed manifestations of the human spirit. Morphology passes no judgment upon matter, neither condemns nor approves the manifold works of creation, does not blame the lump of clay for its lowly state, or praise the dia- mond for its brilliancy. Morality stands in the same attitude. It is simply a keen, accurate, piti- less measuring-rod of the desirable and undesir- able in human conduct. Such a view of morality makes one, metaphori- cally speaking, button up one's coat and turn up one's collar. But the warmth lost on one side is gained on the other. If morality does not praise, neither does it blame. Its one motto with respect to persons is : Judge not. So large a charity as this makes possible the true position which morality aspires to occupy. It would be neither accuser nor judge. It aspires rather to be that light whose rays wiU enable the individual soul to judge, and if need be, to con- demn itself. Morality would be an illumination playing about the problems of the inner life, the illumination of an adequate knowledge. This frank avowal of the strict function of morals may force us to part company with a large number of earnest moralists, men who have joined with their criticism of conduct a large admixture of what seem to be totally irrelevant consid- erations. More particularly will they take issue 53 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUI^E with the elimination of such words as ' duty ' and ^ ought ' from the vocabulary of morals ; and with our somewhat stubborn insistence that moraHty is merely a measuring-rod, that it has to do with the quaUty of human attitudes, states, and actions, and is in no sense a judgment upon persons. But I hope to make good this conten- tion. I hope to be able to show that these terms of hiunan stress and strain do not belong to the science of right conduct, but wholly to the art of right living, to applied morality. And for this art, we will reserve the more personal word, ' reli- gion ' ; for as a practical process, religion sums up a man's attitude towards life. In speaking of immoral conduct, we may — if the language seem to us temperate and becoming — employ the terms of condemnation of an almost puritan zeal. But in speaking of immoral persons, we are con- strained to feel no condemnation, but rather the same genuine sentiment of pity and regret which attaches to the image of an ignorant person ; honestly believing that no one would willingly be immoral, any more than one would willingly be ugly or unhappy or less fortunate. A further clearing of the ground results from a recognition of the fact, already indicated in speaking of Napoleon and Rousseau, that the inner motive is not an object of moral judgment to the exclusion of the outer act. Both come 54 RIGHT AND WRONG within the province of morality as essential ele- ments of complete himian conduct, and both must be fairly estimated. A good motive followed by a bad act indicates a failure in causal relation, a deficient executive machinery. Morality declares the intention good, but it also declares the act itself bad, and no less bad because of the good intention. They are estimated separately, and neither excuses the other or condemns the other. In the same way a bad motive followed by a good act presents two aspects for moral criticism. The motive is bad, but the act itself is good, and no less good because of the bad motive. It may be that from the point of view of the individual, the good motive in any particular case, or the absence of bad motive, is more important than the acci- dental outer bungle, since the motive expresses an essential quality of character and gives pro- mise of better things in the future ; but from the point of view of society, the bad act remains, and also the possibility of similar mishaps in the future. A man may carelessly shoot his friend and not be accounted a murderer. But the dead man's children are nevertheless thrown on the town, and through ignorance and want may com- mit a hundred crimes. Morality must consider these results. Such a clearing of the ground makes possible a science of right conduct, for it disentangles 55 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE the subject from a number of problems not easily susceptible of scientific treatment, and notably from the ever-recurring problem of free will and necessity. We are not forced to say with Dr. Martineau, and other morahsts of a similar turn of thought, that ' either free will is a fact, or moral judgment a delusion.' We may be in- terested, on other grounds, in the riddle of free will and necessity, but it is not an integral part of the problem of morals. It matters not for our present purpose — the estabhshing of a standard of conduct — whether what we do is done under the constraining force of an iron necessity, or is the act of an agent perfectly free to choose between right and wrong. Judgment is passed upon the act, not upon the actor, and upon the act quite regardless of the forces at work upon the actor. The subject of moral judgment is conduct, and the function of right conduct is to promote human welfare. One cannot say, a priori, just what conduct will promote or hinder welfare. It is possible to judge only by observing the results of conduct. Even the most casual acquaintance with life warrants the position that, in itself, conduct is neither good nor bad, but is only good or bad as it does or does not lead to results which are desirable No act, however simple, is in itself either right or wrong. It is a question of 56 RIGHT AND WRONG relation, just as any given color in the landscape, or in a picture, has no absolute value, but de- pends wholly upon the ensemble of the other colors. Numerous attempts have been made to set up a criticism of conduct upon other than these sim- ple empirical grounds. But they have all signally failed. And they have failed because they have been unable to justify their standard and make clear its authority. ' Thou shalt ' and ' Thou shalt not' are imperative commands as soon as it can be shown that the one injunction leads to good and the other prevents evil. But without this sanction, they would be quite devoid of com- pelling force. Every attempt to establish the moral standard on arbitrary or artificial support — whether it be the supposed will of a deity, or the will of the people, or the counsel of a select few, or the promptings of an inner voice, or the pressure of state power — controverts the funda- mental principle of rational measurement, and is bound to fail. For observe just what these attempts mean. They endeavor to measure con- duct, — the adjustment of means to ends, — not by the efficiency of the adjustment and the worth of the ends, but by the imposition of an unre- lated unit, a false yardstick. No expression of will, whether it be reputed oracle or the mere roar of the multitude, can make conduct good or 57 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE bad ; and failing this, it cannot be the standard by which conduct is to be measured. In proposing to estimate conduct by its results, we simply propose to do what in reality every moral system now does, whatever may be its theoretical standard. Alike in pagan and in Christian morals we find the recognition of this principle of cause and effect. No system has ever been promulgated in which it was not more or less distinctly avowed that right conduct would lead to personal welfare, somewhere, some time ; and that wrong conduct would bring its own penalty, here or hereafter. The Beatitudes, beau- tiful as they are, and breathing as they do the spirit of an inspiring devotion, are not unique. They are found in every language, in every land, in every age. Blessed are the good, for they shall reap the desirable rewards of goodness, — this is the great and universal beatitude. It sums up the moral experience of humanity. So long as we thus go forward from good conduct to good results, we all travel the same path. We may disagree in our definitions of goodness, and in the methods we advocate to re- alize it ; we may disagree in our ideas of the wel- fare to be gained, and the time of the fulfillment, but we all agree that goodness, whatever that may mean, will be followed by personal welfare, whatever that may mean. This agreement is no 58 RIGHT AND WRONG small thing. It bears witness to the reality of the moral life, and to the essential sanity of the rela- tions which prevail in that life. It says in effect that the universe is a moral universe. But when we propose to estimate conduct solely by its results, when we affirm, as the empiri- cist must, quite without qualification, that con- duct is good or bad just so far as its results are good or bad, and no further, we meet commonly with denial and dissent. The large company of moralists who went with us willingly enough from good conduct forward to good results will not pass over the same road in a reverse direction, and reason from good results back to good con- duct. Good conduct, they say, always leads to good results, but it is not the good results that make the conduct good ! It is true that the moral law remains inviolate, whatever sanction we may grant or withhold. It may be that that absolute morality, of which our human morality is but a fragment and a shadow, rests upon ideal foundations which quite tran- scend so incomplete a thing as our limited human experience, but the fact remains that the abso- lute morality and the ideal foundations are not given with the human morality and its super- natural sanction as necessary deductions. It is the reverse. The human morality and its em- pirical sanction are the data given, and the abso- 59 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE lute morality and ideal sanction are inferred. But in neither case is the authority of the stand- ard exterior. It is not for us to take or leave. The authority is within, wrapped up in the very constitution of things, and as inevitable as the law of gravitation. But even were we distrustful of the solemnity and dignity of human life, and disposed to place the authority of the moral standard somewhere else than in human experience, we should be forced back to this conclusion at the first application of our logic. There is nothing outside the bound- aries of human experience for us mortals to seize upon. Those who have wrestled with the theory of knowledge, or have tried to evade the drag-net of idealism, know how futile it is to try to erect any abiding structures outside of human con- sciousness. They remain mere afl&rmations. If we make the moral standard rest upon other than empirical authority, no matter how august that authority may be, or what we name it, we are forced to admit that our knowledge of it is human and personal, that our moraHty, after all, is just a question of human experience. And were we to pass to the extreme view and declare that morality is a matter of divine revelation, we must stiU recognize that the channels of communica- tion are human, and that our only way of know- ing whether the revelation is from God is by 60 RIGHT AND WRONG its character, its results, and this again is a mat- ter of pure experience. In practice, such an ap- peal is universally made. Such dissimilar saints as Jeanne d'Arc, Santa Teresa, and Jonathan Edwards are alike in this. In protestant and catholic Christianity, and in fact in all serious systems of religion, the supreme test has always been the same : By their fruits. Many questions allow the holding of several opinions, and one may honestly understand how another man must entertain a wholly different opinion from one's own. This comprehension gives us our much-prized virtue of toleration. One would wish this above all in such vital and temperamental questions as those concerning morality and religion. While it seems impossible to escape the belief that the moral law, as we know it, is the necessary outgrowth of the total of human experience, it is quite possible to com- prehend the holding of very unlike opinions in regard to the nature and origin of that ideal moral law of which our human law seems the intimation. Before finally leaving the question of the moral sanction, however, it is worth remarking that those who place the moral standard in conscience, or instinct, or intuition, are in reality fellow em- piricists ; for at bottom, conscience, instinct, and intuition are but inductions from individual or 61 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE race experience so swiftly drawn that we do not at first recognize their origin. The whole question of the moral sanction is a large and controverted one, and those who are interested to follow it will find the discussion in extenso in any book on ethics which pretends to historical treatment. We are passing over the matter so lightly here, not in any contemptuous spirit, but rather from a feeling that the question has been pretty well thrashed out elsewhere, and that so long as we are agreed upon experience as the immediate moral sanction, we may safely leave unsettled the vaguer problem of the ultimate transcendental sanction. The results of this chapter are purely general. They may be summed up by saying that human conduct, which includes all human activity, and is an adjustment of means to ends, is right or good when the adjustment is efficient and the ends are conducive to the highest human wel- fare. And furthermore, that it is only through experience that we can acquire a high efficiency, and can learn in what good fortune or welfare consists. To say this is to say once for all that .we are here presenting an empirical moraHty. We must now be more specific, and in succeeding chapters must inquire into efficiency and worth and the daily problems pf the moyal life. EFFICIENCY MEASUREMENT is comparison. The com- parison in conduct is between the act and some end which the act is meant to achieve. This makes all conduct relative, the adjustment of acts to ends, of the activity to the purpose which called it forth. Consequently, the first half of moral judgment concerns itself with the efficiency of the adjustment. Whether an act does or does not accomplish a given purpose would seem to be a simple enough matter, and theoretically it is so. There is at least small ground for discussion. But practi- cally it takes no Httle wit to recognize whether our ventures do in the deepest sense carry or miscarry. It is sometimes a hard matter to know quite honestly whether we have succeeded or failed. The mills of the gods grind slowly. The harvest may be so slow in coming that we do not live to see it, or of such a nature that we fail to comprehend it, or so obscured by other interests that we cannot recognize it. The apparent fail- ure turns out to be success, and the victory we are about to grasp becomes defeat. 63 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE So frequent and baffling are these inversions that in the language of poetry and mysticism they are often accepted permanently. The de- feated man comforts himself with the thought that after all he has somehow or other succeeded. It is a frequent device, even of those who wish to report life soberly, the device of representing an unsuccessful quest after one good as something quite successful and praiseworthy because it hap- pens to land one at some unforeseen minor good. So failure is praised, and drudgery is blessed, and the imperfect is glorified, and much else is done to break down in our minds the recogni- tion of cause and effect, and the sane distinc- tion between victory and defeat. Even the most robust of our English poets sings with such note of exultation that on all sides it is quoted with approval : — " What I aspired to be, and was not, comforts me." Heaven knows that in the many vicissitudes of life we must seize these consolations for all they are worth, — and they have a real value both as a promise of victory in the future and a help in the present, — but we make a grave mistake if we apply them to our pain, not as a soothing ointment, but as a veritable cure. The healthy-minded man may get things tangled sometimes, or even often, but to retain 64 EFFICIENCY his healthy-mindedness, and not be won over to the region of sick souls, victory must still mean victory, and defeat, defeat. The world, too, makes gross mistakes, blunders outrageously, but in the long run, the run of the centuries, it keeps the act straight, and calls successful the things that are successful. The emphasis of moral judgment is seldom placed by modern moralists upon this first aspect of right conduct, the accomplishment of what we set out to accomplish. And they have neglected it, in spite of the explicit words of such master moralists as Jesus and Buddha, — By their fruits ye shall know them ; That which ye sow, ye reap. But we seekers after good fortune cannot af- ford to neglect efficiency. We, too, must count the had son who said he would not, and did, better than the good son who said he would, and did not. In a word, when we come to look at morals with a view to getting some help out of them, we see that the first requisite of morality is efficiency. It is not enough to propose good ends : we must so adjust our means that the desired ends are realized. With the human heart still beating true, and God still in his world, I have myself no expec- tation of being saved by anything so little con- temporary as bygone texts, but it has always 65 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE seemed to me profoundly significant that in his dramatic allegory of the great day of judgment, an allegory impressive through its very simplicity, Jesus placed the entire emphasis upon action, — not upon belief, not upon good intention, but upon ef&ciency. The blessed ones are those who rendered the service, — not those who meant to render it, or would have liked to render it, or were prevented from rendering it. And Paul, rugged and unregenerate as he was in many ways, reflects the same saving grace when he defines true religion before God and the Father, not as some hidden belief of the heart, some idle sentiment, but as applied moraHty, — social ser- vice and individual integrity. And James has the same strenuous regard for good deeds. To be practical, that is, to succeed, is not a mere worldly and prudential maxim. It is the first half of the moral life. From the standpoint of the individual, it becomes an imperative duty to succeed, to make life efficient and telling. From the wholly impersonal standpoint of morals, it is equally essential to succeed. Conduct which fails to carry out its purpose, which is imprac- ticable, which lacks efficiency, which stumbles in the adjustment of means to ends, is distinctly immoral, for it either makes directly against human welfare, or at least fails to further human welfare. 66 EFFICIENCY Evolution lays the same stress upon efficiency. The degree of development in any organism is measured by the nicety with which it adjusts means to ends. The vertebrates stand highest in the scale of life, not because there is any occult virtue in a backbone, but because animals so equipped possess the greatest mastery over their environment, and are capable of the most pur- poseful activity. The jelly-fish may possess a wealth of purpose, a treasure-house of good in- tention, that would stagger even a German meta- physician, but science classifies the jelly-fish for the purposes it does make manifest, for its actual adjustments of means to ends, and these being meagre, the rank is lowly. Human conduct is ranked in the same way. It sweeps over a wide range of quality, from activity with small pur- pose, and that but partially reahzed, to activity rich in purpose and attainment. Science calls the one conduct Httle evolved, and the other con- duct highly evolved. The most highly evolved conduct we count the most moral, because in it there is the most efficient adjustment of means to the most far-reaching ends, and this union of efficiency and worth makes for the highest manifestation of life, for the largest measure of welfare. But moral judgment has to do with worth as well as efficiency, and however highly one may 67 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE be disposed to praise efficiency, one must not for- get that it is a partial constituent of morality and not the whole measure of the law. If effi- ciency were all, a young and vigorous jelly-fish, performing its adjustments to simple ends with a high degree of perfection, would outrank an aging vertebrate performing its adjustments to more compHcated ends with relatively less per- fection. This mistake in classification is some- times made, not indeed with respect to jelly-fish and vertebrate, but with respect to human con- duct and to men. In moments of discourage- ment, when the Weltschmerz presses home, one is tempted to turn to the lowly, to the men of simple peasant nature, who propose relatively minor ends and attain them, and is tempted to ascribe to this little evolved conduct a far higher moral value than is ascribed to the relatively less efficient conduct of men who set up more com- phcated and far-reaching ends and attain them less completely. This attitude is seen in Tolstoy and Maeterlinck, and in a host of smaller disci- ples and imitators. It is the mistake of pairing off relative efficiency against a much more solid total attainment. In such moods as this, the in- sistence of the poets upon the value of unful- filled ideals is a thoroughly wholesome correc- tive. One would prefer to strike for Heaven and make only a few steps on the journey, rather than 68 EFFICIENCY to set out for Hoboken and get there. But the fact remains that it would have been still better to have made Heaven. The content of morality may well be repre- sented by the product of two factors, efficiency and worth. It is a narrow territory, an activity of but limited value, if only one of these factors is sizable. That kingdom which we have desig- nated as good fortune requires that both dimen- sions have maofnitude. The question of efficiency is still further wrapped up in the question of ends, since it is only in relation to these that we can determine efficiency. It may seem, indeed, like putting the cart before the horse, to consider efficiency be- fore ends. The only excuse for doing so is that of the two factors of morality it is the less com- plex, and as the more neglected factor it deserves the emphasis of first mention. In attempting to form a moral estimate of any line of conduct, one must clearly distinguish the goal, not only to get at the total content of the action, but also as a very first requisite in measuring the efficiency. Mor- als touch our feelings and prejudices so keenly, are so fundamental a part of what we conceive to be the public good, that probably in no other department of thought are we guilty of so hasty and inconsiderate judgments. This defect is in- creased by the fact that no matter how trans- THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE parent a life may be, its inner ends and purposes, if alien to our own, are largely hidden. It re- quires rare tact to discover even one's own deeper self, still rarer tact to put the finger on the mainspring of another's life. What we see is the outer act, and indeed only a portion of that. What we infer is the inner motive. But the neighbor is not always consistent, — the inner motive may shift, the outer act may be but an imperfect manifestation of it. Nor are we always logical in drawing our conclusions. And so the practical difficulty of saying whether a life is successful or not, even from the bare standpoint of efficiency, is heightened by our common failure to apprehend its purpose. We aU know many gentle and delightful souls who seem to us so singularly unpractical that the erecting of success into a duty sounds like a harsh programme. But it may well be that these delightful persons are not really unpractical, but are merely neglecting certain ends which the world at large sets great store upon, in order to grasp ends vastly more important. Here there has been no failure in efficiency. The smaller ends have been deliberately passed over in order to reach the greater ends. In a commercial age, where money represents success, a neg- lect of money-making schemes stamps a man as highly unpractical. This is the popular verdict. 70 EFFICIENCY But to St. Francis, wealth was the illusion, and poverty the real success. To Jesus, it was the kingdom of God and his righteousness that con- stituted the major concern. Without this key, his life seemed to his contemporaries a tragic failure. The man who does not want to go to Congress, who is not concerned about money-making, who is indifferent to family life and big houses, must not be adjudged a failure because he does not attain these things. We may have our own opinion about him, and praise or blame his taste, but this does not lay him open to the charge of inefficiency. He may be pursuing ends of his own with a high degree of success, ends which we have not the insight to recognize are vastly more important than those more obvious ends which he has deliberately chosen to ignore. This inwardness of motive, this obscurity of the ends of conduct, makes it extremely difficult to render righteous judgment in the matter of efficiency, and almost impossible to pass judg- ment upon persons. Happily we are freed by our own explicit disclaimer from attempting the latter. The real judge to whom we are con- stantly appealing is the liver of the life, and he, if any one, knows the underlying motive. Look- ing at his purpose, and then quite honestly at his performance, he must know in his own 71 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE consciousness whether he has carried it out, or failed. The cynics of the world take pleasure in making these comparisons, in picturing the youth fresh from college and flushed with high hope, and then some years later, the same youth grown old, bent down by expediency and marked by bitter disappointment. It is the same attitude that so far takes failure as a foregone conclu- sion that it finds a grim humor in all youthful hopes and baccalaureate aspirations. Even Tho- reau, moderately healthy-minded as he is, gives voice to what is evidently a deliberate conviction when he says that most men begin collecting the materials for a palace, and end by building a hut. This, too, is the burden of that deeper pessimism which not only finds this pitiable gap between purpose and performance a probability, but declares the failure inevitable and necessary. Youth is the time for illusions ; age, the time for discovering the essential nothingness behind the mask of appearances. This, the world over, is the hopeless verdict of the inefficient, the unsuccess- ful. It is also at times the verdict of the efficient, the successful people of the world, the people who gain their ends, only to find that the ends themselves were unworthy. But this only em- phasizes the fact that morality has to do with both means and ends. This despairing mood, this sense of actual and 72 EFFICIENCY inevitable failure, comes to every man, even the sunniest of us, on occasion, and stains life with its days of gloom. It is the habitual mood of those whom Professor James and others have called the sick souls. But such a mood is unwhole- some and unnecessary, and for that matter, thor- oughly unmanly. It is the mood of the suicide, a mood to be fought with the same vigor that one would fight typhoid or malaria. Doubtless the sense of failure, in the presence of failure, is entirely chastening. One must look the truth squarely in the face. But the point is as to whether one regards the failure as inevitable. If one does, then it seems to me that one gives over the principle of cause and effect, and quite allows the world to go to the devil. But if one does not regard the failure as inevitable, then defeat and despair are pitiably weak. The bet- ter mood is an amiable defiance, a refusal to be downed. The experience of life really justifies this lat- ter mood, this mood of amiable defiance. Let us admit that there are thousands of failures. Let us accept all the data of pessimism, and blink not a single black item. It is also true that there are scores of successes. The company may be small, but there are assuredly those who have gone in quest of good fortune, and have found it. There are those who have seized upon the idea of 73 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE the splendor of life, and have realized it. What is possible to one is possible to all. The essential thing is to discover the method of good fortune, not a difficult matter, since by its very definition the moral law offers the one possible and neces- sary method. But the method is strenuous, and the law itself as implacable as gravitation, as passionless, as inevitable. I believe myself that it is practically possible for every one to achieve good fortune, absolute good fortune, if he be normally sound, relative good fortune, if he be handicapped. The way to go about it is precisely the same way that successful engineers build successful bridges, by a knowledge of material and forces, of matter and motion, and by a sound application of the knowledge. It seems to me wholesome throughout such a quest as this to remember that the first half of moral judgment turns wholly upon efficiency, and is the most practical application of cause and effect. Was the end gained, or was it not? Saints and sinners, ascetics and sensualists, patriots and traitors, are, to that extent, moral or immoral in just the measure of their success. Moral con- demnation falls upon conduct which does not carry out its own purpose, which fails to adjust means to ends, the sort of conduct which makes a knave doubly a knave for his very failure to be knavish, and sends the would-be saint to J 74 EFFICIENCY purgatory over the paving-stones of good inten- tion. The sturdier part of popular judgment agrees with this sturdier aspect of morality. A school- boy may propose an extremely silly stunt, but in the opinion of his comrades it is ' up to him ' to do it well. The world holds a similar view. Com- mon-sense may condemn the complete perform- ance, but in our more generous and more manly moods we are all disposed to give the devil his due. Morality, too, does this, grants the excel- lence of the adjustments, even while it points out the worthlessness of the ends. In saying all this, we do not join in the apo- theosis of force, do not shout with Kipling over imperialism, or add our dipperful of praise to the exploits of Napoleon. But what we do say is that practical force and efficiency, the habit of success, is an essential and inexpugnable element of the moral life. To speak thus is to open a window to the cool and bracing west wind of endeavor, and to beg the soul to be satisfied with no cheap and sentimental victories. I demand of myself, not that I shall want to be good, — a mere baby prank, — but that I shall he good, fit adventure; for a man. One may not end, for the time, even so brief a survey of efficiency without considering two at- titudes of mind which frequently interfere with 75 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE its just measurement, and these attitudes are modesty and humility. They are commonly rated as virtues, and by many as virtues of the first order. They are nearly synonymous. If we take them to mean a just estimate of one's self, neither too much nor too little, they are simple honesty, and we have no need either for the terms or for the unreal distinctions. But modesty and humility are not commonly so used. To say that a man is honest with himself is to give him high praise in the matter of both insight and good-will. But to say that he is modest or humble is commonly to credit him with admit- ted under-estimation of himself. He is so very honest that he is dishonest. As the opposites of those ugly qualities, arrogance and pretension, modesty and humility have a relative value, — are good by comparison with something worse ; but that is all that one can say for them. In the clear, truth-loving eyes of morality, the less bad is never counted as good. In the normal affairs of life, it is a universal experience that truth makes for human welfare, and is therefore moral ; while falsehood makes against human welfare, and is therefore immoral. There is no valid argument for making an exception in the matter of self- estimation. It is still of the first importance to be honest. ' Neither too much nor too little,' is the moral requirement. 76 EFFICIENCY In the practical attempt to reach right con- duct, this dishonesty with the virtuous mien, this sickly trick of disguises, is a veritable stumbling- block. The man who cannot frankly and hon- estly recognize success cannot be trusted to recognize failure. I write a great many poor sentences ; occasionally I write a good one. If I cannot, or will not, recognize the good sentence when I meet it face to face in my own manu- script, I shall soon cease to recognize the poor ones. Most probably I shall end by believing that all my sentences are good, and that it is only my excessive modesty that makes them seem poor. This is indeed the fate of many a modest man. He makes such over-allowance for his own Ufider-estimsition that modesty quite defeats itself, and right judgment is out of the question. It takes an extremely clever person to toy with dishonesty, and not in the end get worsted. In our western art, modesty is usually repre- sented as a veiled face, a draped figure, as if there were something indecorous and unseemly in the truth. It is a symbol that stands for the modesty of both person and conduct. It is some- thing hidden. I like the frank nakedness of the Greeks better, the fearless truthfulness with which her philosophers sought to measure both excel- lence and defect. Morality demands the same openness, and demands it imperatively. The quest 77 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE is not foj* those who close the eyes either to wel- come or unwelcome truth. Over against modesty and humihty stand their ugly opposites, arrogance and pretension. But morality has as little commerce with the one as with the other. What morality demands is that a man shall be honest, shall recognize without affectation such small excellence as is rightly his, and shall acknowledge without self-deception and evasion the large imperfections, the many fail- ures, which inevitably come to light when moral criticism reviews his conduct. I am here so much insisting upon these points because the bravest of us, the most unflinchingly truthful, may well cry out for mercy, and shrink back, when the calm, passionless measuring-rod of morality is applied with scientific precision to that assem- blage of conduct and quality and motive which constitutes the self. For under all our discus- sion there must run this one assumption, that moral judgment has to do with what is, has to do with human activity as it finds it, — not in church, on parade, but in the house and street and market-place, — and does not in the least concern itself with what are commonly called extenuat- ing circumstances. To remain scientific, morality must be a sort of thermometer, unemotionally registering the moral temperature. Our own per- sonal attitude towards conduct is largely influ- 78 EFFICIENCY enced by considerations of circumstance. If we are charitable, we ^rnake allowances/ as the phrase goes, for those who are sorely pressed; but morality does not and cannot. As we have been saying, morality concerns itself solely with performance. Human sympathy very properly deals with effort and motive, accepts them, ex- cuses the deficiencies for which they are the proffered substitutes, and hopes for better things in the future. But morality, in measuring conduct, makes as little comment as does the yardstick which proclaims a man tall or short. A virtuous man is one who is whole, not one who tries to be whole. We may respect the man who tries, but we obscure his vision, as well as our own, if we mistake the effort after virtue for virtue. One may have had in youth no apparent oppor- tunity to gain an education, and in consequence may display throughout the rest of life the hide- ousness of uninformed conduct. Morality pro- nounces only upon the hideousness. One may have inherited a deficient organism, and go through life an invalid in mind and body. Mo- rality pronounces only upon the weakness. This is Spartan doctrine. It takes a brave soul to invite so calm and pitiless an inspection of the inner life, thus to pass in review his tat- tered garments before the eye of the Eternal. But through no other gate can the path toward 79 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE perfection be reached. This calm, pitiless, pene- trating scrutiny of human conduct has about it the immense strength of the things that are absolutely honest. This fearless way of regarding conduct, one's own as well as another's, precludes all attitudi- nizing, whether the less-than-the-truth of humil- ity, or the more of pretension. The student and practitioner of morals must have a passion for things as they are. And if this flawless honesty be needed in estimating that simpler half of morality which we have called efficiency, still more is it needed in considering the vastly more complicated questions concerning the ends of conduct, that other half of morality which we have called worth. VI WORTH IT seems that all inquiries, and particularly all moral inquiries, have a tendency to branch out in many directions. Morality, as we have just seen, divides at once into efficiency and worth. It is possible to keep efficiency pretty much of a unit, though hardly possible to treat it adequately with any degree of brevity. Effi- ciency presents many aspects worthy of the most careful attention, aspects barely touched upon in the preceding chapter, and not easily exhausted. When one writes about morality, one writes about life, and by that very fact is doomed to be fragmentary and inadequate. But the handling of efficiency is mere prelimi- nary skirmishing compared to the almost inter- minable vistas which present themselves at the bare mention of worth. We have at the outset another of those bi- sections of which we have just spoken. Life's purpose, in order to be carried out at all, must appeal to the individual as a goal worth striving for, as the good fortune which his heart desires. But life's purpose, in order to be moral, must also 81 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE satisfy those objective standards of conduct which emerge from the broader experience of .the race. In calling the subjective ends of conduct good fortune, — the goal which stirs the individual deeply enough to keep him, day after day, in vigorous action, — and in calling the objective ends of conduct social welfare, — the more ab- stract standard of morality which corrects and chastens the limited experience of the individual, — we have not only a division which is conven- ient for the purposes of formal exposition, but more significant far, a division which supplies the one possible key to the solution of this prob- lem of worth. The final and overpowering interest in moral- ity depends, as I have tried to show in my very title, upon the subjective side of morals, upon individual good fortune. What healthy-minded men and women care about is immediate and per- sonal salvation, the art of right conduct, the art of successful daily living. They are interested, not so much to set up some abstract standard of morals, which by its ingenuity shall please them- selves, if no one else, but rather to help on the cause of concrete morality, the practical quest of good fortune. And yet, as soon as one comes to deal with the problem in any serious way, one sees that this abstract side of morals conditions the practical quest and must needs have adequate 82 WORTH study. Reflection, and especially reflection upon the cause of human failure, soon suggests that while individual good fortune is the supreme end of conduct, it is an end too frequently missed. The conviction deepens that individual good for- tune is the result of very definite forces, and that the quest, in order to be intelligent and success- ful, must recognize these forces and must act in harmony with their requirements. To want good fortune is one thing ; to get it is another. To seek good fortune momentarily and on impulse might be said to be the method of the majority. But the method commonly fails. It fails because it lacks persistence, that is, effi- ciency, and because it is founded upon the very limited experience of a single life. The individ- ual who omits to chasten his personal desires by reference to that larger experience gained by the race, in reality omits to measure his idea of good fortune by those valid objective standards which establish the worth of the idea. This less per- sonal side of morality, this wholly impersonal side, by which human conduct is objectively and unemotionally measured, is the necessary correc- tive of individual ignorance and eccentricity. In saying, then, that that conduct is right or good which promotes human welfare, we have in mind two realities, personal welfare and social welfare. To know good fortune, and in what it gen- 83 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE uinely consists, one must know what welfare in this larger sense means, and must be able and willing to measure one's desires objectively as well as subjectively. But it is every whit as essential that this outer show of welfare shall honestly mean the inner good fortune. When morality becomes so ab- stract and formal that it leaves out the human heart and its needs and desires, it passes into an arid desert where there is no longer any motive power to set in motion the machinery of con- duct. If morality part company with experi- ence, it grows speculative and theoretical, and finally comes to propose ends for conduct not only without worth, but even harmful. Good fortune and social welfare are both of them mat- ters of experience, and the successful student of morals, let us repeat, must needs be at the same time a practitioner. It is grotesque that a closet philosopher should ever attempt to tell the world in what the worth of conduct consists. We all gladly admit the intellectual supremacy of the Greeks. Yet even in the days of their prime, one is struck by the curious feebleness in their handling of natural events. They pre- ferred to speculate about Nature, to think out what she might be, or could be, instead of finding out experimentally what she is. As a result, we have a series of poetic but eminently 84 WORTH childish conceptions, a universe composed of the four elements of earth and air, fire and water ; a cosmogony beginning anywhere and ending nowhere. Even in music, which receives such frequent mention in their literature, the Greeks made small advance, for they neglected the phy- sical basis of sound, and declined the one source of acoustic knowledge, experiment. Even in mo- rality, we are struck quite as much by what the Greeks failed to achieve as by what they did actually achieve. They sought good fortune with rare singleness of purpose ; they produced works on human welfare which are still sources of inspiration ; but the greatest of their moralists, Plato, never repudiated human slavery. Coming much nearer home in both country and time, we find the same tendency to speculate upon the worth of conduct, instead of seeking worth in valid human experience. Especially in Germany do we find these astronomers who have never seen the stars. In Germany, perhaps more than in any civilized country, do we find professed teachers leading altogether unnatural and artifi- cial lives. There is something almost humorous in Kant's telling us in what the worth of conduct consists, — Kant, the German peasant, who never went away from home, who lived the narrowest of human lives, who had neither wife nor chil- dren, who could not brook dissent or contradic- 85 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE tion, who grew more dogmatic with each year of his life. There is something unreal and uncon- vincing when Schopenhauer speaks. One must always admire the high accuracy of German labo- ratory work, but in the more social sciences it seems to be a land of half -digestion, of unassimi- lated facts. One is struck, not so much by the boldness of her speculation as by its unsoundness. To discover in what the worth of conduct genu- inely consists, we must go to sincere daily life, to experience. If we fail to do this, we make the same disastrous mistake that the Greeks did in their handling of Nature and music, and we get the same very partial results. The point is that while worth divides in this way, the two branches are not divergent, but are strictly parallel, and are bound together by a series of intricate cross-roads. The subjective side of worth, good fortune, and the objective side, social welfare, are separate aspects, but they must needs react upon each other constantly, or the thing itself — worth — quite evaporates and becomes a speculative illusion. Let us first consider the subjective side. In turning to personal experience, we find some- thing so complicated and bulky that one at least understands the temptation to substitute specu- lation. Here are eighty million people in Amer- ica, and uncounted millions elsewhere, pursuing 86 WORTH more or less successfully ends so unlike as to be contradictory or even openly antagonistic. With China and Turkey both restive to do things that the rest of the world is bent on preventing ; with the Triple Alliance standing for one thing and the balance of Europe for another ; with one half of America hot for one policy and the other half equally hot for its opposite ; with hundreds of churches offering rival paths to salvation, and different schools of medicine rival paths to health, and a heterogeneous lot of schoolmasters rival roads to culture ; with my own neighbors so little agreed upon the right that the town judge must decide between them ; with my own house- hold swayed by so many standards that only good-breeding prevents daily clashings ; with my own heart subject to such diverse promptings that I am not one, but many men, it is very clear that the seeker after the true ends of human con- duct in the realm of experience must needs have courage ; and the finder of it, more wisdom than is given to most of us. For the curious thing about this many-sided performance is that the majority of these people are doing the thing that they defend as right, and all of them are doing the thing which they regard as desirable. It is easy to pass over that body of current experi- ence which we are pleased to believe is indicative of less highly evolved conduct than our own, but 87 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE even among our admitted peers and our grudg- ingly acknowledged superiors, there is such wide diversity in the proposed ends of conduct that the boldest of us is whipped into some sort of caution in attempting to name the determinate goal, the highest good. Either worth in conduct is tricked out in many disgmses and hard to recognize, or else it is so generous a possession that only one drop of it may be poured into the tiny chalice of a single life. The study of life, the major study in the cur- riculum of the moralist, gives ample ground for believing that both these conclusions are abun- dantly true, and that both are significant. One might almost say that good fortune differs in degree and in kind. It has quite as many faces as we were disposed in the Prologue to think that it had. It wears a multitude of masks. But deeper still are those essential differences of goal which are necessary and proper to beings who are trav- eling, it may be, in the same general direction, but who are, at any given time, at such widely different stages of the journey. The history of evolution is the history of goals attained and passed and forgotten, but in the whole chain of events, not one of them was unnecessary, from the smallest to the most august. My neighbor does not have to do what I do in order to count himself fortunate, — for which 88 WORTH I am thankful. And I do not have to do what he does, — for which I am more thankful. Yet each of us, taken at his best, is needed to com- plete the world. It may be that I am blowing a penny whistle compared to the deep bass trum- pets of the gods, but I shall not, on that account, throw it away and draw out of the game. I have all the fun of blowing, and though they may not hear me, I sometimes hear them ; and in time, I rather expect to be blowing a bigger trumpet myself. If we have any openness about us, any whole- some flexibility of thought, I think we must come very genuinely to some such conclusion as this, that good fortune is essentially and radically varied, and would be distinctly less good fortune, or even none at all, if it were possessed of uni- formity. It would be unpardonable egotism to believe for a moment that my own particular good fortune is the only legitimate good fortune there is. I may reasonably believe that the goal I set for myself, and on the whole strive for, bears some intimate relation to my nature and to its needs. But the same reasoning holds in regard to my neighbor. From the world point of view, as well as from that of the individual, it is the variety and the immortal freshness that give to life its enduring charm. The attempts of the older moralists to turn us out all of a pattern, to 89 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE make us all enamored of the same sort of bliss, have met with quite the fate that they deserved. These older pictures of a static, uniform heaven, of a changeless, monotonous beyond, are as dull as anything in literature. If we all took to wear- ing crowns and to harp-playing, and never left off, we should soon reach a state of mind in which the severest drudgery of earth would seem the utmost of good fortune. But in spite of the tremendous diversity in right conduct, which we not only discover but count precious, the thought persists that there must be some common element woven into this diversity which constitutes the quality of right- ness, an element recognized by the possessors of these various types of good fortune, and in reality creating their community of satisfaction. The something which constitutes objective worth in human conduct must be something which not only furthers general well-being, but at the same time appeals to the actors in the drama as per- sonally desirable. That is to say, worth has pri- marily this subjective side. It is certainly more accurate historically to consider the good-fortune side of worth before the more abstract social- welfare side, and this in spite of the fact that austere moralists affect to despise so trivial a thing as personal satisfaction. If worth failed to promote well-being, it would 90 WORTH long since have been lost to such late-comers as ourselves, for it would have killed off the pos- sessors of worth, and raised up no new genera- tion. If good conduct tended to kill off its prac- titioners instead of conserving them, only the bad would survive on the earth, and the good would not only die young, but more fatal still, would soon cease even to be born. It is equally obvious that if worth were so occult as to fail of recognition and human desire, it could be the object of no human striving. If worth came with- out this hall-mark, it would be a matter of pure accident whether a man were good or bad, and also a matter of pure indifference, since neither the man nor his neighbors could at all discrim- inate. We should be quite helpless pawns, and morality would be wholly out of the question. It is vitally important to establish, even at the cost of so much iteration, that worth in human conduct, to be continuously possible and signifi- cant, must have this inner witness, this testi- mony of the individual spirit, must come to each one of us in the subtle guise of good fortune, as something to be desired and worked for. The one possible end of conduct, from the individual standpoint, is the feeling to be aroused by the conduct itself. To be inaugurated and persisted in, the conduct must produce some feeling which the individual wishes to experience. We may 91 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE properly call such a feeling satisfaction, or grati- fication, or happiness, or pleasure. This feeling is the primary and necessary end of human con- duct, the thing that men are working for in the present, have worked for in the past, and will work for in the future. It is, on the whole, a clarifying reflection that however dissimilar our views of life, we are all subject to the same inner spring of action ; we are all of us the agents of the heart's desire. We difPer from one another, not because some men want happiness and some do not, but wholly in the sort of happiness that we want. How entirely true this is will appear after a moment of very primary psychological reflection. We never do anything unless we want to do it, for the simple reason that we cannot. We often enough declare to the contrary, but the language is not accurate, for in the absence of the desire to act, the machinery of nerve and muscle would not operate. It is of course true that we often want to do something else, but under the given circum- stances, we evidently want to do it less than the thing that we actually go and do. Otherwise we should have done the something else. One is forced to do a thing, even a fatal thing, such as walking the gang-plank, but one does it in pre- ference to accepting the still more terrible alter- native with which it is paired. We do a thousand 92 WORTH things which abstractly we do not want to do, — which, taken out of relation to their context, no sane man would think of doing, — and do them voluntarily, because their alternatives are still less acceptable. As a matter of fact, then, we do them because we want to do them. We may quite easily wish the circumstance otherwise, but the circumstance being what it is, the thing we do is necessarily the thing we want to do. And this is universally true, a judgment which holds of all men in all time. This fundamental and necessary proposition, that one cannot do what one does not want to do, or that one can only do what one wants to do, is commonly denied or ignored, partly, as we have just seen, because events seemingly refute it, and partly because the reverse of the proposition is not true. It is not true that one can do, in every case, what one wants to do. This might be true if, by some inscrutable decree, the desires of the human heart were limited to the region of the possible. But we know that this is not the case. We know that all along the line of human en- deavor, from the baby reaching out its hand for the moon to the most sedate of life's adventurers, we are constantly running up against the impos- sible. So much is possible to those who are in earnest, to the men who sincerely believe, that we have in our midst a company of generous en- 93 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE thusiasts who are quite ready to declare that all things are possible. It is a delicate matter to draw the line between the possible and the im- possible. To bring the ends of conduct too near is to be guilty of the immorality of the second- best, to build the hut instead of the palace. To place the ends of conduct too far off, in the impossible, is to rule out efficiency, and by thus depriving morality of one of its essential factors, to rob it of all content. We may say, then, in general, that the subjec- tive worth of conduct lies in its power to produce human happiness. To define the end of conduct as perfection, or virtue, or blessedness, is thought by some to be a morality of sterner fibre, and these impressive terms do warm the unreflective heart into an agreeable state of moral enthusiasm, but in reality they are not sufficiently elementary to serve as an adequate measuring-rod. Perfection is only a more attractive name for efficiency ; virtue is the possession of something still to be defined ; blessedness is a state which needs much further description before it can be erected into a practi- cal end of conduct. The true subjective end must be a simple feeling, one primitive enough and mas- terful enough to set in motion the machinery of conduct, and universal enough to account for universal human striving. 94 WORTH It is not well-being, but the sense of well- being, that the individual is reaching out after. That constitutes his good fortune. And for this sense of well-being, this brooding satisfaction, the simple word ^ happiness ' seems the most appropri- ate and fitting. Morality criticises the desires of the human heart and the conduct which springs from those desires, measuring them both in terms of their happiness-producing results. Conduct which produces happiness is good. Conduct which produces more happiness is better. Con- duct which produces most happiness is best of all. We might, indeed, end our inquiry into worth at this point, if the uninstructed human heart knew in what happiness really consists. But this narrower personal ideal of happiness re- quires, as we have seen, the corrective of a larger experience, the ideal of social welfare, before it can be accepted by morality as the true end of conduct, before it can be said to possess worth. Few standards proposed by moralists for the proper end of conduct have been so severely criticised and so roundly abused as just this simple and unavoidable standard of human hap- piness. Carlyle called it, in his characteristic way, a 'pig philosophy,' under the apparent impres- sion that the happiness pigs are presumably after is the only sort of happiness which the universe provides. It has been discredited as a low sort 95 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE of prudence, something much below the severe mountain heights of legitimate morality. It has been arraigned as the poor-spirited scheme of a pleasure-loving people to cheat pain out of its due harvest among the children of men, — ' Let us eat, drink, and be merry, for to-morrow we die.' It has been held up to scorn as compar- ing most unfavorably with more ascetic rules of life. The vocabulary of abuse has been well-nigh spent upon it. In our more austere moments, pleasure appears as the favorite bait of the Father of Lies when he goes angling after poor human souls. We tried to show, in the chapter on Right and Wrong, that experience is not only the basis and source of morality, but that in spite of all contrary and supercilious assertion, it is the only practical basis and source. When we come to examine other systems of morality with respect to their proposed ends of conduct, we find signi- ficantly enough that the ultimate goal is not only expressed in terms of happiness, but is necessarily so expressed. The difference is solely in the sort of happiness, and in the time when it is claimed. This agreement in ultimate purpose finds vivid expression in The Data of Ethics : ' No school can avoid taking for the ultimate moral aim a desirable state of feeling called by whatever name, — gratification, enjoyment, happiness. Pleasure 96 WORTH somewhere, at some time, to some being or beings is an inexpugnable element of the conception. It is as much a necessary form of moral intui- tion as space is a necessary form of intellectual intuition.' To acknowledge happiness as the supreme subjective end of conduct seems at first sight an acknowledgment that all conduct must be good, since all conduct, consciously or unconsciously, is directed towards that end. But the pleasure- lover is so far from being by necessity a moral person that he merits much too often the severe criticism of the more ascetic. We have here a situation which demands adequate explanation, and which it is of the utmost importance to morality to explain, — on the one side, persons pursuing with might and main the admitted goal of moral conduct, happiness, and on the other side, the entirely just criticism that their conduct is not only not moral, but too frequently is highly immoral. I emphasize the riddle because I believe it to be at bottom the obstacle which prevents many persons from accepting a rational system of morals ; the obstacle which prevents obedience to a splendid old text : Serve the Lord with gladness ; the obstacle which forces many a severe moralist to regard that quest of good fortune, to which I and my little book are pledged, as an adventure of more than doubtful 97 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE worth. Moreover, many o£ us know by personal experience the puritan tendency in such matters. Taken unawares and before we have had time to think the problem out, we instinctively jump to the conclusion that of two alternatives, the more disagreeable must be the right one. So much of life is instinctive and habitual that such a tendency in the blood makes for unnecessary harshness and ungraciousness, and does it in the sincere pursuit of a high moraHty. Furthermore, this same riddle is at the bottom of that old and pretty well thrashed-out quarrel between egoism and altruism. It is commonly felt that when people do what they want to do, they generally do what is bad for themselves, and always what is bad for other people. And the riddle is also responsible for that wide breach to which reference has already been made in the Prologue, the breach between those moralists who hold that happiness is the highest good, the sum/mum honum, and those other moralists who hold that the highest good lies in conformity to an outer objective standard. Difficult as the riddle is, and important as the chain of consequences is, the solution is not so very far to seek. First of all, it is to be remembered that moral- ity is the product of two factors, — efficiency and worth, — and this is one half the solution. Con- 98 WORTH duct which proposes for its end a form of the purest happiness, but fails to attain it, is im- moral. Less severely stated, such conduct is moral only to the extent that it attains its end, that is, to the extent that it is efficient. The pleasure- lover, even though he pursue the most exalted pleasure, is not a moral person unless he make his pursuit causational and effective. No sub- limity in the pleasure sought will give content to morality unless the other factor, efficiency, is also sizable. In the second place, and more important still, the happiness upon which uninformed desire sets its heart is found very commonly to be a bitter- sweet sort of happiness, to be a happiness of such false measure as to be succeeded by more than proportionate pain, — and this is the other half of the solution. Moral criticism may justly be directed, not against the pursuit of happiness, but against the pursuit of an inverted happiness. In reality, the criticism is directed against the ignorance and narrowness, the sensuality and selfishness, which obscure a man's vision and pre- vent him from seeing in what genuine happiness consists. If pyrite be substituted for gold, one can have no quarrel with the genuine metal because the fool's gold failed to stand the test. When we pronounce judgment against an article, we are bound in the interest of common honesty 99 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE to see that we have hold of the article itself and are not dealing with a counterfeit. The reviewer who read one book, and attached the scathing criticism it called forth to a totally different book, would be esteemed a most outrageous per- son. What shall we say of the moralist who does practically just that thing in the realm of conduct, who finds seK-indulgence and folly and selfishness unprofitable to the last degree, — as all must find them in the end, — and proceeds forthwith to condemn in quite unmeasured terms a totally different thing, the pursuit of a sound and genuine happiness ? He seems in the same case with those disputants who set up men of straw and find pleasure in the light gymnastic of knocking them over. It is true that these mis- taken judgments are made easy and somewhat natural by the fact that the paths of self-indul- gence and folly and selfishness are commonly chosen under a belief that they lead to happiness, in fact are by a psychological necessity chosen under such a belief, but the judgments are not on this account made righteous. The justifiable conclusion from the large data of wrong-doing is that the individual grasp after happiness is not necessarily or even commonly moral. And a fur- ther conclusion is that the individual ideal of happiness needs correction. But this is what the empirical moralist has been saying all along. It 100 WORTH is ignorance that constitutes the great mainspring of immoral conduct. It is ignorance that is the fundamental immorality in the universe. One who knows all understands all, forgives all. If we were infinitely wise, we should be infinitely good. There may be limited devils. There could not be a malevolent deity. This brings us quite naturally and inevitably to that objective side of worth which we have called social welfare. The practical inquiry as to how a man in pursuit of personal happiness can learn quite assuredly that he is not following a will-o'-the-wisp, 'not turned towards a mirage, but has started upon a veritable moral quest, becomes in effect an inquiry into how far his idea of good fortune will bear comparison with that objective standard of worth which has emerged from the longer view and deeper experience of the race. There need be no confusion of moral values if it be always borne in mind that worth has this double aspect, and essentially fails to be worth unless both the objective and subjective standards are genuinely satisfied. Such a chastening of individual desire by con- stant reference to objective welfare is the time- honored process of discipline. It is simply a process of correcting the experience of one man by the experience of many men. The discipline falls upon all. In the case of the unreflective, 101 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE it is forced from without. In the case of the thoughtful man, it is self-imposed. But disci- pline is more essential to the seeker after good for- tune, where good fortune means happiness, than it is to the ascetic. For in a large way there is only one path to happiness, the path of the genuinely moral life ; while there are many paths to misery, to the denial of happiness, to immorality. The one is quite literally the straight and narrow path; the other, quite literally, the broad and accommo- dating road. Morality grows quite inevitably out of expe- rience, for all life is discipline*. Personal im- pulse and degire are forever being instructed by the pressure of events. A man is taught by life, whether he will or not, whether he knows it or not, for evolution and genuine education are much the same operation. Day by day, and all unconsciously, there come about the strength- ening of those desires and the impressing of those habits which make for human welfare. The apparent aim of evolution, as of education, is to make a human world more human. Morality is distinctly the child of wisdom. In turning from individual desire to the test of social welfare, we turn indeed from limited personal knowledge to the larger racial wisdom. But it must not be forgotten that in the well- born at least, the larger and more abiding part 102 WORTH of this racial wisdom is not outer and objective, but is an inner possession stored up in one's own heart, the precious heritage of the ages. This ever-present instinct tends to inhibit all lower desires and strengthen all social impulses. When the prophet comes, the divine teacher, he is the focus of this larger wisdom, and commonly he offends society, except the chosen few, by his de- parture from the average ideal of social welfare. Only the few perceive that he stands above the accepted level, instead of below it. The majority of the well-born have their moments of greater insight, when they are tfempted to transcend the standards of their environment. If the impulse be a true advance, the immediate result may be suffering, the pain of progress, but the ultimate result is a supreme happiness. It is salutary, however, when one projects or estimates such a contravention of accepted standards, to inquire with the utmost diligence whether the new level is above or below the old one. It is a prudent and commonplace course to stick pretty close to the average ideal of social welfare. The criminals of society fall below it ; the saints and martyrs rise above it. Much that we do every day, and without the least compunction, is in reality quite vicious, but it will be properly classed only when the tide of moral perception rises above it. But as soon as one recognizes this fact, one realizes 103 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE that it is no longer moral to limit one's concep- tion of worth in conduct to the prudent and commonplace level of the average conception. One is bound, by the very insight, to a moral alertness in criticising all ideals of worth, whether the ideals of good fortune or of social welfare. There is such a thing as strictly personal wel- fare, which we may call individual morality, but even this solitary wisdom depends for its extent and soundness upon the race experience. To these private problems of morality the individ- ual simply applies the accumulated wisdom of the age, and if he fail tt) do this, he fails com- monly to solve the problems. But practical morality does not long concern itself with the conduct of the solitary, for life does not supply this spectacle. Conduct in all its large phases is the purposeful activity of a group of men, and the human relations which find place in such a group constitute the major content of the indi- vidual life. A man has certain very sacred rela- tions with himself which it is of the utmost importance to have sound and true, but the relations with his fellows form the bulk of his conduct and of his life. In idealizing these re- lations, he finds the greater play for his moral activity. These idealizations concern society, it is true, and in their total, make up that social welfare which represents the objective side of 104 WORTH moral worth; but limiting the scrutiny for the moment to one man, the idealizations are of far graver importance to him than to society. They determine his personal success or failure, while socially speaking, they are but a drop in the ocean of welfare. It is commendable enough to urge social-mindedness upon a man from the community point of view, but it is quite untrue to the fact to represent it as a social claim and an individual concession. It is nothing of the sort. It is a joint opportunity, but one in which the individual gets vastly more than he gives. He gets the very condition necessary for increas- ing his stature as a man. He might well shrink back from a just sense of over-requital, but never from any justifiable idea of self-sacrifice. The community can well enough do without me, but I cannot do without the community. Morality has mainly to do with this interplay between a man and his fellows, and not alone because the problems are manifold, but because they constitute the very life of the man himself. To make this interplay ideal is a man's first con- cern. It is an utterly false view to erect such an interplay into an essential antagonism. Between an ignorant man and an ignorant community there is often very real warfare. But the quarrel is not due to any genuine antagonism of interest, but wholly to the blindness of all ignorance. 105 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE Between egoism, the good fortune of the individ- ual, and altruism, the welfare of society, there is no gulf fixed. Success does not consist, as so often represented, in an amiable compromise be- tween the two, a noonday siesta of lion and lamb, but in a very genuine extension of both. The better the fortune of the individual, the larger the welfare of society ; the more thorough-going the welfare of society, the more complete the good fortune of the individual. This essential identity of interest is a modern conception. It is the result, however, of a tre- mendous social experience, — the experience of excessive state-power in Europe, the experience of excessive individualism in America. The trend of social evolution has been from the human mass, the clan or family, to the human unit, the individual. The process is, of course, incomplete, and finds fruition only in a few highly evolved minds and a few advanced communities. The conception of an identity of interest be- tween the individual and society is of high impor- tance in morality. It removes the last possible vestige of antagonism between the subjective and the objective aspects of worth. The chastening of individual desire imposed by society does not imply either theoretically or practically the cur- tailment of good fortune, but rather its utmost realization and extension. The individual desire, 106 WORTH by this objective criticism, is rectified and en- lightened. The heart's desire is not defeated, but transformed, turned towards those activities which lead to a good fortune that will bear investigation, to the attainment of genuine hap- piness. The whole function of the welfare criticism in estimating the worth of conduct is to keep happiness-seeking conduct sound and true ; and to see to it that the pleasure-lover is a moral person, not by ceasing to love pleasure, but by learning to love true pleasure instead of its counterfeits. This conception of worth, which unites good fortune and social welfare into one quest, dis- poses once for all of that curious biological view which has recently been much in vogue, the view which makes society an organism endowed with a life quite different in kind from the life. of its individual components, and capable of a mys- terious perfection not only superior to anything so puny as individual excellence, but purchased sometimes at the cost of it. But more important far than any mere over- turning of fantastic analogies is the serviceable effect of such a conception of identity in mak- ing both the subjective and objective worth of conduct consist in its happiness-producing power. It is a conception which stamps the social pur- 107 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE pose as essentially immoral if it do not make for human wealth and happiness, for the unequivo- cal attainment of personal good fortune. It condemns quite unsparingly those subterfuges and sophistries by which both individuals and nations erect industrial and material achieve- ment into success, regardless of the condition of the men and women who lend a hand. Just as it can be shown that the uninstructed pursuit of pleasure leads to grave moral disorders, — to self-indulgence and folly and selfishness, — so it can be shown, and quite as abundantly, that the uninstructed pursuit of social welfare leads to equally grave disorders, — to oppression and misery and death. The quest of good fortune, in the hands of those who do not know in what good fortune consists, may lead to licentiousness. The quest of social welfare, in the hands of those who do not know in what social welfare consists, may lead to brutality. The corrective is similar in both cases. As we have abundantly seen, good fortune had to submit to the objective standard of welfare, else it ran great risk of losing worth and so ceasing to be good fortune. It is quite as imperative that the idea of welfare be chastened by constant reference to the subjective stand- ard of good fortune, else it, too, loses worth and ceases to be welfare. The application of this doctrine to social ques- 108 WORTH tions has distinctly radical consequences, as we shall see further on, but we cannot escape the consequences without repudiating the doctrine. Personal wrong-doing is so immediate in its re- sults that we are always ready to apply the strait-jacket of welfare. But social wrong-doing commonly masquerades under the name of wel- fare, and though the results are manifestly harm- ful, we are prone to take a pessimistic view and count them inevitable. What is wanted is a sim- ilar strait-jacket, the test of good fortune applied to the reputed welfare. We may sum up this too long chapter by saying that worth in conduct includes at the same mo- ment individual good fortune and social welfare ; and that as an end, it means a human happiness whose length and breadth and height are con- stantly increasing. Conduct which produces such a happiness as its result possesses efficiency and worth, and is moral. VII THE MORAL PERSON MORALITY, as a science, is unemotional. It seeks to discern what conduct is right, and what conduct is wrong, and why. It declares human conduct to be coextensive with human activity, because all activity is essentially purpose- ful. It bisects into efficiency and worth, judging conduct as to whether it accomplishes its purpose, and as to whether the purpose represents personal good fortune and social welfare. Human conduct is the adjustment of means to ends, and is good or right just in proportion to its efficiency and the happiness-producing power of the ends. This is morality in its most general terms. It is a stand- ard, a measuring-rod, and pronounces no judg- ment upon conduct, or upon persons. But the interest and value in such an abstract morality rest in its appHcation to the very concrete problems of daily life. To make this personal application is to import into morality the banished warmth of the human element, to bring back again the terms of human stress and strain, those words which are the nucleus of our deepest feel- ings, the words ' duty,' ^obligation,' ' opportunity,' 110 THE MORAL PERSON ' responsibility,' the most potent of all action words, — ought. To do this is to pass from the science of right conduct to the art. It is to touch morality with emotion. This art of right conduct, this morality in action, may properly be called Religion, for religion is a man's attitude toward life, toward the seen and the unseen, and this attitude can be expressed only through conduct. The Twentieth Century opens as an eminently religious age. It is a time when the moral law has laid firm hold upon the human heart, and with incomparable urgency is pressing it to action. To say this is not to deny that it is a time of gigantic wrong-doing, but the wrong-doing is being called in question and measured by high standards. This major concern of society is in- creasingly getting itself expressed in the daily affairs of life, not on one day alone, and through one institution alone, but on aU days and through all institutions, in the family, in education, in art, in science, in all forms of social activity. This social progress in morality is not, however, a social phenomenon apart from the individual. It is merely a summation of individual gains, and rests upon the evolution of its individual component, the moral person. While, therefore, the quest of good fortune is the personal moral aim of each one of us, it is necessarily the very heart of the social purpose. Ill THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE To apply morality in the concerns of the in- dividual life is to adopt religion. It is to become the highest type of man, the philosopher-artist, for the philosopher is the man of clear vision, the believer in cause and effect, the one who sees in what happiness essentially consists ; and the artist is the doer, the man who carries cause and effect into beneficent action, and practically realizes happiness. The philosopher represents worth of ends and the artist efficiency of means. The moral person must be a combination of the two, the man who knows and the man who does. The quest of the philosopher-artist is in reality the quest of culture, the practical study and pursuit of moral perfection, a quest which is at once the supreme duty and the supreme pleasure of human life. All that makes against this serious culture of our human nature, against our power both to discern and to realize happiness for ourselves and for others, must be looked upon as a denial of morality, and this whether the obstruction come in the name of economic requirement, or social expediency, or education, or dogmatism. The practice of morality requires the development of personal power, the heightening of intellectual and artistic interest, the broadening of human affection and sympathy, the deepening of spirit- ual insight. The moral person is the one who manifests in 112 THE MORAL PERSON his own life the two requirements of morality, efficiency and worth. He must find out by care- ful study, by personal experience, by deliberate experimenting, just how he can best increase his own individual efficiency, and then he must do it. And he must find out, by the same tireless endeavor, what ends of conduct are most worth pursuing. He must be competent and he must be wise. If he be neither of these, or only one of them, he is not moral, no matter what his call- ing or pretensions, no matter what he thinks of himseK or others think of him, no matter what his family or possessions. The man who demands success of himself demands a great deal, but if he ask less, he is not in earnest in his search for the moral life. Those who are interested in prac- tical morality are interested to inquire what type of man and what sort of career are best calculated to develop efficiency and to manifest worth. A machine is said to be efficient when it per- forms a large amount of useful work in pro- portion to the amount of horse-power put into it. Such a machine must be well designed, and this can be only when there is an adequate know- ledge of the power available, of the material to be used, and of the work to be done. It must be well built, a matter of careful workmanship and of good material. It must be kept in order. It must be supplied with power. An efficient person 113 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE must satisfy quite the same requisites as the effi- cient machine, must do it with equal accuracy and still greater subtlety. Efficiency in human con- duct means control of the motive-power, a know- ledge of its source and function ; sound health of body and mind ; and well-trained organs of sense. Besides this very obvious equipment in power and material, efficiency means a clear realization of the work to be done, that is, a clear realization of the ends which are to be gained. The efficient person, like the efficient machine, must not only be well designed for the work in hand, but he must be well built, built of sound flesh and bone and blood, built of causational habits of thought and action. He must keep himself in good work- ing order, and he must see to it that the motive- power of high achievement is never lacking. These requisites of human efficiency represent a distinct chapter in personal morality. They constitute the business that a man has with him- self, a sort of closet morality, a private reckon- ing. Efficiency in conduct is character in per- sons. It is the more individual haH of morality, the sort of achievement that a man must carry out alone. But it has its public, social side. The man who seeks efficiency must needs know what other men have done to gain it. He must broaden his own limited personal experience by reference to the larger experience of the race, just as he 114 THE MORAL PERSON must chasten his own private idea of good for- tune by comparison with the social idea of wel- fare. Furthermore, it is human intercourse that offers the larger field for the exercise of efficiency, that produces it, tests it, expresses it. As Goethe puts it, talent is formed in solitude, but charac- ter in society. The amount of efficiency open to a recluse is limited both by his smaller knowledge of the nature of efficiency and, still more, by the far smaller theatre that he has for its develop- ment. The efficient person requires wise plans, a know- ledge of the ends of conduct, sound equipment in the way of bodily and spiritual power, perfect working health, and above all, the motive-power of strong conviction and interest and desire. In a broad way this constitutes Individual Morality. Efficiency involves a knowledge of the ends of conduct. A man may, however, be efficient with- out being worthy, may have character without goodness. The great villains of history, like the great saints, have been men of character. They had clever plans, they knew very definitely what they wanted, they possessed personal prowess, they had the motive power of a fierce desire. In moments of strong reaction against sentimentality and other forms of inefficiency, we are all prone to the worship of force, and are hot for the apotheosis of the strong character, whether it 115 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE went with the heart of a villain or a saint. Mo- rahty joins forces with us in our wholesome aver- sion to weakness, in our primitive love of per- sonal prowess. But morality always insists upon the satisfaction of its second dimension, worth. The moral person must not only be an efficient machine, he must do work that possesses the highest degree of worth. As we have seen, this worth must satisfy himself as personal good for- tune, and must satisfy the community as social welfare. But the question of worth is always an open question. We may define worth as happiness- producing power, and may count the definition as final. But the moral person must go far be- yond this generalization. He must find out what happiness means, and indeed he must go on finding it out. There is no fixed goal. The only way to discern happiness in its highest and pro- gressive form is the method of personal participa- tion. The moral person must be an experienced person, not one of narrow life and routine duties, one in whom sensation and insight are well-nigh extinguished. He must not only accept experi- ence as it comes his way, he must deliberately seek it, must be an experimentalist, a veritable knight of good fortune. It is a curiously inverted view of morals, the view which regards as praiseworthy those narrow, 116 THE MORAL PERSON V ^^ ,,^ > ('V" Of Tht. inexperienced, poverty-stricken souls whose slen- der virtue consists in the evil they have omitted to do. To renounce the world, to renounce life, to renounce the self, — this is not the path of the moral life. The timid little souls who live in a corner and keep out of harm's way by keeping out of the way of good, are not moral persons. They are not even harmless, for by their coward- ice they inspire others with a similar lack of courage. There are many of these immoral persons, and they swarm in all walks of life. For the most part they are eminently respectable, and they all pride themselves on their morality, some of them on the treasure laid up elsewhere. They are modest shopkeepers, small farmers, routine teach- ers, apathetic clergymen, hand-to-mouth clerks, unambitious artisans, and all the other ^resigned' failures who leave unessayed the high adven- tures of life and morality. Let no man deceive himself into believing that he can be so poor a fragment of a man and count in the world of true values as a moral person. He cannot pos- sibly be so ranked. In reality, he is a wretched creature, devoid of morality, because he and his works are devoid of worth. Resignation, renun- ciation, self-sacrifice, asceticism, monasticism, all the cheap devices by which men and women abdicate life, are as unsound morally as the more 117 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE amusing devices by which men and women abuse life. These hundreds of thousands of commonplace, immoral people, who lose the best of life by accept- ing the least that is even tolerable, are found on every countryside, gathered into every village, crowded into the tenements of every city. They are the prisoners of a narrow environment which they, and many who genuinely sympathize with them, regard as inevitable. To judge them harshly is counted uncharitable and inhuman. But the true physician does not hesitate to ad- minister bitter medicine ; the skillful surgeon does not hesitate to use the knife. Neither must the honest moralist decline to call things by their right names. The persons who fail to discern and to reaUze happiness are immoral persons. They are veritable prisoners of poverty, of disease, of temperament, of circumstance. They are objects of the utmost pity, but the best pity is the practical pity which sets about their liberation. They are prisoners of their own ideas, of their own ignorance. No man is wholly free, but when he comes to recognize that the jailer is within, he knows at least on what ground the struggle for freedom is to be fought out. A man puts up with much unhappiness if he regard it as inevitable, and even brings some grace of humor to the ordeal, which goes far to 118 THE MORAL PERSON draw the sting. That there is at this moment vast unhappiness in the world quite goes with- out saying. But no one has ever been able to prove that it is inevitable. That done and pes- simism would have gained its case. It is true that there is a common impression abroad that there are not enough cakes and ale to go all round, and that this constitutes the essential and unescapable misfortune. If there be not enough good things for everybody, then naturally some- body must go without. Those who hold this view quite properly preach resignation, and even practice it ; for fate is not to be gainsaid, and the one possible worth is resig- nation and a graceful acceptance of the inevitable. But such a view is tenable only if one hold that good fortune is a limited store, something to be scrambled for, and that it goes for the most part to those who first get their feet into the trough. This was evidently in Carlyle's thought when he declared the pursuit of happiness to be a ^ pig philosophy.' If this were the true view, one might well be ashamed of happiness, and more willing to forego it than to accept its implications. ' Far be it from me to be happy, dear friend, if this mean that you must be miserable, for I have no mind to play the part of robber,' — this, or something like it, would be what all the self-respecting amongst us would needs say, or 119 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE affect to say. And if, in addition to believing that the store of good fortune is too scant to go anywhere near decently round, we also believed that Heaven inclined very decidedly to those who failed to get their share, the disposition to renounce happiness would be not only generous, but also prudential. It would be a sort of endow- ment policy, a life insurance, payable, it is true, only at death, but payable to one's self and not to one's heirs. But experience does not show that either of these contentions is true. Good fortune is per- sonal and subjective. Happiness is a feeling. Welfare implies the possession of the necessaries of life, but for its major content it depends upon our attitude toward things, rather than upon the things themselves. The keenest part of good fortune is strictly personal. It consists in the splendid exultation that goes with a sound, healthy body and well-trained senses. It consists in the curiosity and delight which circle like an aureole about the developed mind. It consists in the generous love one has for one's family and one's friends, in the sense of their love and in- terest. It consists in the vital life of the spirit, the sense of genuine communion with the higher intelligence of the universe, and of participation in the superb and timeless existence of eternity. This is human wealth, the major constituent 120 THE MORAL PERSON of all good fortune, and of this human wealth there is enough to go all round. We do not all possess health and beauty and accomplishment, intellect and comradeship and spirituality, but the potential supply is infinite. We have to work for this wealth, but it is not the hazard of good fortune. It is the certitude. The pursuit of human wealth is free from any gambling ele- ment. It is possibly the absence of this excite- ment that leads so few to seek it. But it is also free from remorse. The man who seeks this sort of personal human wealth has not only the great joy of possession, but also the great joy of know- ing that, in place of robbing others or even mak- ing good fortune more difficult for others, he is in reality helping the neighbor to attain good for- tune for himself. Human wealth is contagious. It tends to beget a like wealth in others. It is the one possible wealth in a true democracy. When a beautiful person enters the room, — and I use the word ' beautiful ' in its proper and inclusive sense, to mean the beautiful in body and mind, heart and spirit, — the dullest of us feels a thrill, a distinct uplift, that" we should most unwillingly have foregone. Stevenson says that it is as if another candle had been lighted. And we all know how communicable was his good fortune ; how he shared it with men and women and children in all parts of the English- 121 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE speaking world, with an alien and unlettered people on a remote island of the Pacific, and how, in sharing his fortune, it grew infinitely larger. This personal and vital core of good fortune is open to every man, not as a problematical reward of striving, but something as inevitable as gravitation. The man who gains this highest good, who grows strong and beautiful and ac- complished, wise and warm-hearted and reverent, is a moral person. The man who fails of this good fortune is an immoral person. Nor does that wretched underworld conten- tion that suffering is acceptable to Heaven find any support in normal, healthy-minded experi- ence. It is a most ungentlemanly, ill-bred belief, a sort of shopkeeping way of looking at things, a species of interworld gambling. You pay into the bank a certain amount of finite suffering, credited for the most part at much more than its face value, and you get out infinite bliss, — a quite shameless usury. One's very instincts revolt against it. And when one turns to moral- ity, one learns that the revolt is sound and just. For moraht'y says that the wages of sin is death ; not alone the final death, but the illness and misery and suffering that lead up to the climax. And morality says that the unavoidable reward of righteousness is happiness ; not alone the final, ineffable happiness, but the health and delight 122 THE MORAL PERSON and satisfaction that make up the happiness of to-day. It is true that moral persons suffer, but this is no occasion for inventing a theodicy. The moral man most frequently suffers not because he is moral, but because he is partly moral. The suf- fering bears to his morality the same relation that the pain of disease bears to health. The pain is beneficent to the extent that it tells us something is wrong, and we then proceed to right it. But the pain itself is not good. The superb health, free from every vestige of pain, is infinitely better. So suffering is wholly bene- ficent to the extent that it is the unavoidable result of wrong-doing. The suffering warns the wrong-doer, just as pain warns the sick man. If he neglect the warning, the results are fatal. But right-doing, which would have escaped all suffering, would have been infinitely better. It is a sickly, unmanly attitude, this attitude of begging to be whipped. If you deserve the whip- ping, you will get it quite surely enough, for suf- fering goes with immorality as inseparably as does happiness with morality. There is a nobler form of suffering which comes to the moral man, not as the schoolmas- ter's rod comes to the truant, but in that more heroic guise which is commonly called self-sacri- fice, but which ought in reality 'to be called self- 123 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE realization. It is the suffering which a man will- ingly endures in order to save others, endures even to the extent of losing his own earth-life. From the point of view of the individual, this heroism is not a sacrifice, but a realization. It may have been a bitter alternative, this sudden parting with the dear comrades of the present, this abrupt cutting short of an interesting earth career, but less bitter surely than the life-long sense of omitted manliness. To the intelligent believer in immortality, death is not the extreme calamity that it is represented to be. There are many worse disasters. Even to the intelligent non-believer, death is inevitable, and something to be met under the least unfavorable circum- stances. But this heroism, which involved the loss of so devoted and so socially valuable an individual, must also be regarded from the point of view of the community. What were the circumstances that made the loss possible or necessary? In some cases the occasion was one of those natu- ral catastrophes which are humanly unprevent- able, — a tidal wave, a volcanic eruption, an earthquake, a flood, — and the hero gave life or limb to save others from disasters for which nei- ther they nor society were to blame. But these cases are very rare. The natural disaster — the shipwreck, fire, flood, landslide — could com- 124 THE MORAL PERSON monly have been escaped, had there been greater knowledge and forethought. In the great majority of cases, the suffering of the hero may be directly traced to wrong-doing on the part of somebody. The group as a whole must be adjudged guilty of immorality. The group pays for it by the loss of the very type of person it can least afford to do without. When a good man dies, the disaster is not his, — it is a disaster to the society which loses his presence and his service. And this opens up the large counter-question of how far a moral person may offer himself in the place of another or of others. Some years ago a distinguished London phy- sician gave his life in order to save the Hfe of a poor little child in one of the hospitals. The child had been poisoned, and the physician, knowing the tremendous risk to himself, delib- erately sucked out the poison with his own lips. The child lived and the physician died. One can mention the name of such a man only with the utmost reverence. It was heroism of a sublime type. And yet morality, from the community point of view, must condemn the act. It was an unjustifiable exchange, the giving of a life socially very valuable for a life socially much less valuable. Had some colleague prevented, the physician would doubtless, by the skillful ministry of years, have been able to save the THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE lives of numbers of children. It is, of course, quite possible that this heroic act of self-realiza- tion has inspired so much devotion on the part of those who witnessed it, or heard of it, that the total result will be as good socially as it was unselfish individually. But this is only a conjec- ture, and it seems to me a safer social morality to regard the loss as well as the gain. Less extreme illustrations of this conflict be- tween personal willingness to be heroic and the demand of social welfare abound on all sides. Here is a little feeble-minded child, whose par- ents, being people of wealth, can afford to employ an educated, competent man to act as companion and tutor. They shrink very naturally from sending the child to an asylum. Is it right to accept such a post? My own answer is most decidedly that it would not be right. The mere fact that the parents can afford to pay such a man for so wasting his time does not make the waste justifiable. The same man would not think of taking a feeble-minded child from the gutter, even if he had himself a competence, for he would have the very wholesome feeling that a whole life, with all its great capacity for service, ought not to be given for something that at best can never be more than half a life. Socially speaking, the proper attendant for such a child would be a kind-hearted person of very humble m THE MORAL PERSON attainments, and even then the care-taking ought to be in groups and not singly. The same rea- soning applies to the case of a brilliant young man asked to take some rich boy to Europe for a year. It is more than doubtful whether such an act would be moral. It is not using capacity to the utmost. The total social results would be better if the time were given to a group of boys in some well-organized school, or even devoted to individual study. These are very special cases, but the general case remains forever true, that the moral man is not the one who unreflectively does the nearest thing at hand which happens to be good, but the one who seeks the utmost of good fortune, the thing that is most eminently worth while. We have many prudential maxims about the spend- ing of money and material, but we have little sound maxim and little sound practice in the matter of spending time. We are all busy enough, and diligent in business, the most of us, but we do not sufficiently see to it that the business is quite worth while. The greater part of good fortune depends upon our attitude towards things, and not upon the thing's themselves. Yet it would be almost as great a mistake to make prosperity independent of material possessions as it is to make it con- sist in these alone. Houses and lands, furniture 127 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE and books, food and clothing, tools and apparatus, have a genuine part to play in the proper setting of a human life. The common mistake is to re- gard them as ends in themselves. Their true use is as means. The supreme end is human wealth. The moral person must therefore regard pos- sessions as valuable solely as they minister to human wealth, to the production of a humanity at once strong and beautiful and accomplished and good. When things cease to do this, they are devoid of further human use or value, mere impedimenta. William Morris had an excellent rule in house- hold matters. It was to have nothing in your house which you do not either know to be use- ful or believe to be beautiful. This rule would indeed apply most admirably to all our posses- sions. It is a step in practical morality to dis- pense altogether with the traditional storeroom, to go through one's home once, or even twice a year, getting rid of the things not useful or beautiful, giving them to some poorer neighbor if they be not too bad and would represent an advance to him, destroying them utterly if they are really meretricious. The same purification might well be applied to one's library, one's pictures, one's wardrobe, one's stable, one's farm, indeed to all one's possessions, not even omit- ting stocks and bonds and bank accounts. To 128 THE MORAL PERSON possess things, and never to allow them to possess us, — this is an essential part of morality. When things cease to minister to human health and happiness, they are so much rubbish. When they obstruct human health and happiness, they are worse than rubbish, they are tainted and to be got rid of to-day, at once. That things have this power to obstruct the moral life, we all know, both from a study of our neighbor's affairs and from a study of our own affairs, — the uncomfortable clothing which prevents a whole- some unconsciousness of our person, and keeps us from commendable services ; the house which requires too much time for its care ; the invest- ments which chain us to one spot when human opportunity calls us somewhere else ; the too- large salary which makes us come to regard our position as more important than ourselves and our soul's health. It is a long list. I am but suggesting it. Good fortune requires that a man shall domi- nate things, shall even destroy them, if they stand too stubbornly in the way of the moral life. We may not all be in the plight of the rich young man whom Jesus told to sell all that he had and give to the poor, for we may not happen to be setting too great store on our modest wealth, but if so, and it is not well to be too sure that we are not, then the thing to do is to get rid of it. 129 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE But good fortune also requires that a man shall use things, and to that extent it has a distinctly material basis which the moral person may not neglect. The most primitive need is for food, and the moral issue is tremendous, though commonly neglected. The food must be of suitable quality and in proper amount, the sort to keep a man in health and spirits, without either starving him or over-feeding him. It ought not only to be unob- jectionable, it ought to be more than this, a source of positive pleasure. It ought to be par- taken under such conditions of light and scene and company that each meal is a veritable feast to which one goes with gladness, and from which one comes away refreshed in mind and heart, as well as properly repaired in bodily tissue. We have all been in places where the food was improper, a distinct moral failure, since it gave neither strength nor pleasure. And we have all been in places where the company and the scene and the light were still more debilitating. The moral person may not patiently accept these fail- ures. He is bound by the very conditions of his quest to set about righting them. If his present boarding-house do not offer moral food, and he can find none that does, he must set up his own housekeeping, no matter how modest it may be, and he must not rest until he has idealized the 130 THE MORAL PERSON taking of food ; for if he be made as most of us are, it is an undertaking that he must engage in more than a thousand times a year, — over seventy thousand times in the course of the tra- ditional lifetime ! •The world of ideas seems to stretch over a belt of country of which the 40th parallel of north latitude is approximately the medial line. In this region, during the greater part of the year, clothing is a necessity second only in im- perativeness to food, and socially the necessity covers the twelvemonth. During almost his en- tire waking life, and certainly during his entire social life, the typical civilized man is clothed. After food, clothing is the most important article in the morality of things. The moral person must see to it that he is properly clothed. It is very much his business to discover whether for his temperament and occupation, cotton or wool or linen is the best sort of underwear ; to decide upon such weight of coat and waistcoat and all the rest that they shall neither burden nor ex- pose ; to have his feet so protected that the worst weather cannot bring colds and sore throats. But the most hygienic of clothing would still be unsuccessful, if it made one an object of re- mark. The remark may be rude and out of place and altogether quite contemptible, but it is as much of a reality as the east wind, and it is quite 131 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE worth while to provide against it. In comparison to astronomical magnitudes, it is a very small thing whether a man wear a dinner coat or not, but in communities where the wearing of it is de rigueur, the independence of refusal is certainly worth much less than the good company which our back- woodsman might have enjoyed had he chosen to conform. Most of the radical departures from customary habits in dress are the result of inverted ideas of magnitude, the paying tithe of mint, and anise, and cummin, and the omitting of the weightier matters of the law. The Shakers, with their insistence upon the moral superiority of hooks and eyes over buttons, and the Quakers, with their conspicuous attention to matters of dress, are organized examples of a pettiness in the moral outlook of which individual examples can be found no further afield than in one's own self. The higher function of food is to please, as well as to nourish, and to become in the par- taking an occasion for social comradeship of a high order. The higher function of clothing is to delight the eye as well as protect the body. It ought to be the occasion of pleasure of a very real sort. Men, being mostly homely, can do little in this direction beyond the modest role of making themselves as little inartistic as Nature and the tailor will allow. But even this limited 132 THE MORAL PERSON field need not be neglected. The dullest of us, with only a few moments' reflection, can learn what is possible and what impossible ; can learn the coarser generalizations of dress, that freckles and check suits, colored shirts and gay ties, do not go well together, and other obvious maxims. With women and children, however, the field of effort is much more worth while. Here beauty deserves heightenilig. We may deplore the atti- tude of mind of the woman whom Emerson quotes, the woman in whom the sense of being well dressed exceeded in comfort even the con- solations of religion, and yet feel that it is a large part of the morality of dress to add to the beauty and delight of the world, instead of deep- ening its depression. Perhaps even men, when a more wholesome life of occupation makes them once more handsome, may undertake a more courageous dress. It is commonly thought that people spend too much time in thinking of clothes, and especially that women do. This may be true in the wear- ing of them, but judging by results, one would not say in the designing of them. The right time to think about clothes is at the time of pur- chase, and to think so effectively that the after attention will be free. The moral person must be properly fed and properly dressed, not only as a matter of legiti- 133 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE mate pleasure to himself and others, but also that he may have the full health and spirits needed for the fulfillment of the higher destiny of human accomplishment. In point of importance, shelter follows food and dress, and the morality of things requires adequate and beautiful shelter. It is not a mat- ter of moral indifference, the sort of home a man makes for himself. It is a matter of high impor- tance. The home is the setting of a hfe, the source of health and strength and courage and delight, or the source of their opposites. We Anglo-Saxons have very strong feelings about the home, and it is a large source of our power and supremacy. Houses have very real atmospheres. Some are bare and repellent, no matter how much spoil of foreign travel be heaped in all corners. Others, for reasons that it would perhaps puzzle us to state, hold out invisible hands of welcome. Do I like my home ; am I happy here ; is it the very best that I can make for myself, in point of sanitation, convenience, comfort, beauty, personal suitableness and hospitality, the source and centre of genuine human living ? These are the incisive questions that the moral person, be he benedict or bachelor, must ask himself and must answer. If the answers be negative, if the home do not bear this moral scrutiny, do not honestly satisfy the master of it, there is but one thing to do, 134 THE MORAL PERSON and that thing is assuredly not to put up with it. It is to go to work sturdily and create the sort of home that will satisfy the inner spirit. The man or woman too apathetic, too lazy, too unambitious to do this, may not pass as moral, for something of efficiency and worth has been omitted that may not be omitted, and a distinctly lower level of life has been consented to. There are many instances where the utmost effort has been put forth and the results are still poor, some shabby little house, some pitiable ten- ement, but there are many more instances where results that are poor might have been made ap- preciably better, if only the idea of morality had been causational enough and vital enough to perceive the problem and attempt it. The man who lives wretchedly seven days out of the week, and sings through his nose for an hour on Sunday, under the impression that he is a moral person, is suffering from the same sort of inverted ideas of value as beset ignorance in all times and places. It is his very special and indi- vidual business to set to work and realize heaven here and now, to drink to the full that larger measure of life, that flood of good fortune, which comes from decent and beautiful home life. I am not forgetting that the ultimate charm of every home does not reside with the architect or furnisher, is not determined by location. 135 • THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE These contribute to the proximate charm. The ultimate charm rests with the inmates. They create the final verdict, for just as they react on the things around them, and adjust them to greater advantage, so they react on one another and on us, determining our attitude towards the whole, and declaring almost audibly whether or not the result shall make for happiness. The personnel of the home is not a matter of chance. The man in pursuit of worth attracts people of worth, and creates worth both in him- self and in those around him. Even love, with all its traditional blindness, is the unerring mark of common affinities. The wife and children who make the spirit of the home, and add so much to the reality of a man's life, are of his own choos- ing, and stand in vital relation to his own nature. Whether they be fine or not fine is not at all a matter of caprice, but the definite result of defi- nite causes. Marriage is commonly regarded as a lottery, and it must be so to the man who makes it his first serious essay in the study of human nature. But it is something much finer and more moral than this to the man who has come into control of his own life, and has made some pro- gress in the idealization of his social relations. As life becomes more complex and subtle, and men and women grow more reflective, there must inevitably result a greater company of bachelors 136 THE MORAL PERSON and spinsters, not people who disapprove of mar- riage in the abstract, not cold-hearted people by any means, but people who dehberately give over the intimate comradeship of wife or husband for what seem to them excellent reasons, possibly lack of health or means, perhaps a failure to find the right person, sometimes from excessive ideality in requirement. These unattached people must still find shelter, and if they be mora^ people, it must not only be hygienic and beauti- ful, but soul-satisfying as well. It is the material setting of a life, and highly important to the success of the life. The customary solution is the hotel or board- ing-house, a solution which in rare cases is highly successful, but in the majority of cases is a blank failure. And it is a failure because it places the important questions of food and shelter and human atmosphere in the keeping of some one else, and of some one commonly less evolved than one's self. I am responsible to myself for these matters, and I have no right to delegate them to any one less competent. If I do, I am guilty of the same sort of abdication that Rous- seau was guilty of when he sent his children to the foundling asylum, or that the state is guilty of when it hands over its own inalienable right of eminent domain to some private, profit-hungry corporation. These are all forms of exploita- 137 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE tion, in which the immorality resides quite as much with those who allow the exploiting as with those who do it. The same frankness which declares hotel and boarding-house to be improper shelter for most moral persons must also admit that the people who elect this sort of shelter are guilty of gross ill-breeding when they growl and complain. If I do not like mine inn, and mine host honestly desires to know why, in order that he may improve his hospitality, it is gracious to enlighten him and help him to better things. But if mine host be satisfied and I be not, there is but one self-respecting thing to do, and that is to leave. In stopping with him, I accept the conditions which he imposes; I am the respon- sible person. In the majority of cases, even the bachelor and spinster must undertake their own housekeeping if they wish to satisfy the morahty of things. Many already do this, and surround themselves with other persons of worth, — relatives, friends, servants, — who not only create the right sort of environment for the nominal head of the house, but also find in it the proper atmosphere for their own lives. This individual shelter has the negative func- tion of protecting the moral person from unsuit- able food, apartments, and atmosphere, and so contributing materially to his development. It 138 THE MORAL PERSON has also the more positive function of enabling him to make his own life a social centre of greater effectiveness and worth. The men and women who decline a home of their own, however humble it may be, commonly decline a social opportunity of great moral value, as well as the condition of increased individual worth. Proper food and dress and shelter require money. To this extent, the getting of money is a part of the moral life. It is one of the most curious and persistent inversions in life as it is, as opposed to life as it ought to be, that money, which is properly but a means towards increased human wealth, is transfigured into an end, and is pursued at the price of human wealth, at the price of that very end which both theoreti- cally and practically it must serve in order to be any part of genuine human desire. But this opens up that large chapter in morality, the morality of occupations. Here we may consider only the opposite side of the question, the immorality of not having enough money decently to supply those material possessions upon which a moral life is necessarily based. The deficit is commonly the result of one of two causes, — either ineffec- tive work, by which the supply of money is too meagre to satisfy one's wholesome needs, or else that over-prudence which saves money that ought morally to be expended in procuring decent liv- 139 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE ing conditions. The moral person must have such industrial efficiency as will make him the possessor of sufficient daily revenue, and of this daily revenue he may morally save only that sur- plus which remains after he has provided suitable food and dress and shelter for himself and those dependent upon him. The young man who marries a wife whom he cannot decently support, who brings children into the world whom he cannot decently provide for and equip, is an immoral person. The wo- man who becomes the partner of such enfeebling poverty must share the blame as well as the suf- fering. But what shall one say of the children ? They were not consulted, did not elect immoral parents, or, so far as we know, did not even elect to be born. They came as the result of that second most primitive of human instincts, the instinct of race preservation. They are here, and are face to face with a great problem, — the problem of decent livelihood, — which they are so little prepared to solve that in many cases one must say with discouraging certainty that the solution is morally impossible. The problem of childhood is one of the knot- tiest that the moralist is called upon to consider. The doctrine of Karma, the doctrine that in the present life the human soul must reap the fruit of deeds done in a past life, offers the shadow of 140 THE MORAL PERSON an explanation for that mysterious thing, individ- ual destiny, and seems to justify the misfortune of an unfavorable birth. Those who advance the doctrine of Karma do it on what they regard as adequate witness. The doctrine has many other names, — predestination, destiny, fate, — all in- volving the inevitableness, and some of them involving the justification. In the absence of any valid objective proof, the moralist may not so calmly devote the children to an unescapable evil fortune, and the community to so low a level of welfare. This is indeed a highly immoral administration of things, which foresees the absence of worth, and is not sufficiently fore- armed to rescue the day for better things. The more responsible social view is now beginning to prevail, and promises in time to be less element- ary and more efPective. There are, broadly speaking, two ways of dealing with the problem. One is to keep the children from being born, and the other is to keep them from meeting their natural destiny of a hopeless handicap. The first way is radical, but will doubtless pre- vail as civilization becomes less superficial. The law is already very strenuous in denying the right of any man, no matter what his strength and possessions, to attempt to support two fami- lies. It is equally strenuous in refusing all immi- 141 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE grants who come empty-handed. These measures are manifestly contrary to the individual idea of good fortune of those restrained by them, but they are justified by the objective standards of social welfare. In the first instance, monogamy is insisted upon both for the sake of the indi- vidual and of society. In the second case, the in- dividual is denied what would doubtless be a betterment of his fortunes, in order to limit the national burden of pauperism. It may be open to criticism on humanitarian grounds, this exclu- sion of the oppressed of other lands, the very people for whom America was instituted, but it is at least regarded as expedient by the majority. From the viewpoint of both good fortune and social welfare, the case of the unborn is much stronger than the case of the immigrant. The latter is already here, and must face the problem of making the most of himself, no matter how difficult the problem may be. But social justice demands that children shall not come into the world so heavily handicapped, empty-handed as regards the better things of life, personal endow- ment and wholesome opportunity, full-handed as regards the burdens, personal defect and poverty. In more causational times, marriage and child- birth will be legitimate and possible only where there are normal health and capacity, and a reasonable assurance of support. 142 THE MORAL PERSON Just now the newspapers are filled with the praise of large families, and gentlemen in high places are calling bachelors and spinsters names. But no such generalizations are possible. The large family may be a part of the morality of life, or a part of the immorality, and as the matter commonly works out, it is the latter. Those who speak so solemnly about the possibil- ities of race suicide, and the crime of it, are mixing up means and ends in an altogether un- warrantable fashion. They quite justify Matthew Arnold's humorous comment : — ^ One has heard people, fresh from reading certain articles of the Times on the Registrar- General's returns of marriages and births in this country, who would talk of our large English families in quite a solemn strain, as if they had something in itself beautiful, elevating, and mer- itorious in them; as if the British Philistine would have only to present himself before the Great Judge with his twelve children, in order to be received among the sheep as a matter of right ! ' The second way out is less effective, but is imperative if the more radical first way be de- clined. It is the way of allowing the supply of incompetent and destitute children to continue unchecked, and of burdening the competent part of the community with their betterment and par- tial support. At the present moment this is done 143 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE in a fragmentary manner. The public schools attempt somewhat feebly to put the children of the poor in the way to a better fortune. Reforma- tories attempt to correct perverted ideas and desires, and to bring them into line with social welfare. Asylums, prisons, and death penalties remove the most incorrigible for shorter or longer periods. But more and more this beneficent social work is passing from symptoms back to causes, and is putting the emphasis on prevention, rather than on cure. Education properly begins with the ancestors, in having the children well born. No one who has moved among the ill-equipped children of the very poor, who has studied the * special classes ' for backward children in the Massachusetts public schools, who has visited the institutions for feeble-minded children at Elwyn and elsewhere, can doubt for a moment that so hideous a social malady deserves the most rigid quarantine. To be well fed, well clothed, well sheltered, and to have such daily income as will make this material well-being assured, is the homely and practical duty of every moral person. It is not the end of virtue, but it is the beginning. And moral criticism, here as elsewhere, concerns itself both with the essential worth of our ideas of material well-being, and the degree of success with which we realize them. 144 THE MORAL PERSON The attitude of the moral person towards the more subtle, more spiritual, more important part of morahty, of which this material well-being is but the foundation and beginning, will depend upon his general intelligence. His problem grows very complex, for it includes questions of purely personal morality, of occupation, of cardinal and minor virtues, of social relations, of cosmic out- look ; and while all these questions are, in their essence, much the same for all men, they all re- quire an individual statement which each man must work out and formulate for himself. But those who have not yet come into an orderly and law-abiding universe are distrustful of human experience and of the authority of its teaching. They are prone to turn with sincere eagerness to some one of those other sources of authority which carry with them the avowal of superhu- man origin, and appeal more dramatically to the imagination. It is true that by thus divesting the moral law of all external " authority, one does run some risk of weakening the law as a deterrent from evil and an incentive to good. The belief that cer- tain action is inherently and mysteriously right or wrong does lead many an unreasoning soul into some semblance of virtue, a semblance which might be obliterated by the suspicion that the action is quite permissible, if one stand ready to 145 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE take the immediate and seemingly transitory con- sequences. It is also true that the moral law is frequently contravened by men who accept the authority of human experience, and who in most of their dealings live up to its teaching, but who find it convenient from time to time to act upon the principle that the end justifies the means, and consequently to try to gain a worthy end by unworthy means. Their sincerity is undoubted. The breach comes to them as a temptation, and a temptation with a certain godlike face to it. If right be right and wrong be wrong solely be- cause of their results, then it is an easy conclu- sion that the experience of the race is always open to correction and enlargement. It is a temptation to a courageous moral man to dis- regard the generalizations of other men and become a law unto himself. It is as if, walking in the garden of the gods, he had tasted of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and, to that extent at least, become as one of them. Both these types, the conventional soul yield- ing under the stress of a too-sudden freedom, and the heroic soul willing to dare, and if need be to suffer, in order to test the limits of the moral law, may be guilty of large wrong-doing, and to the extent of their offending must pay the allotted penalty. What they have declined to learn as the result of the race experience, they 146 THE MORAL PERSON will be forced to learn as the result of individual experience. And in doing this they will have to taste the same bitterness, the same mortal pain, that has been the portion of the race. Where the offense concerns themselves alone, they will pay for it in personal suffering ; where it con- cerns society, they must pay the penalty that law provides. But even under the older view of morals, the view that gave to morality a superhuman sanc- tion, human transgressions have been many and terrible. Some of the offenders have disbelieved in the divine nature of the laws they were break- ing. But the majority, it would be safe to say, havebeheved, — that is, believed theoretically, — and in spite of the belief, have offended. Or perhaps they have doubted the uniformity of the divine government. They have attempted to make exceptions, just as the man who accepts the human origin of morality attempts to make exceptions. They have thought in a vague way to pass unseen in the swarming crowd of human- ity, and so escape the eye of the Eternal. As a deterrent, the old view has not always been suc- cessful. As a deterrent, the new view is not always successful. But in making his morality depend upon human experience rather than upon an extra-human, cosmic will, the empirical moral- ist does not deny the existence of such a supreme 147 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE cause ; he merely asserts that he can know only so much of it as experience reveals. In doing this, our moral person enters into the inner con- sciousness of life, and by reason of the high responsibility which he assumes, becomes an earnest, practical seeker after the good. The race is divided into leaders and followers. The leaders point the way, the others follow at a distance. The moral leaders have not been moral persons in the customary acceptance of the term. They have not been the bringers of smooth phrases, but rather the bringers of the sword, innovators, breakers of the old law in order to establish the new law. For the old law must con- tinually be broken ; it rests on experience as it was. And the new law must constantly be set up ; it rests on experience as it is. But these prophets of God, as we tried to point out in the chapter on Right and Wrong, do not disregard experience. They speak from a deeper experi- ence. So unique is their message that it appears to be either the intuition of a vast ancestral expe- rience, or else the word of a greater soul, more deeply taught than those commonly met with on earth. The moral person must be both a conservative and a radical, — a conservative in holding fast to all that is essentially good ; a radical in throw- ing over the pseudo-good and in exploring new 148 THE MORAL PERSON territory. In a word, he must be judicial, he must know. The moral life is not, then, a dumb following of the code, — it is a constant exercise of judgment. And these judgments must become increasingly subtle and penetrating as the moral person comes to handle those more subtle and complex problems to be reached in succeeding chapters. VIII INDIVIDUAL MORALITY THE major and all-inclusive duty of a man is to himself. It is self-realization in the high- est sense of the word. It is selfishness, if one use the term etymologieally, to mean attention to the concerns of the larger self. Commonly the term selfishness has disagreeable connotations. It stands for the assertion of that smaller self which is the denial of morals in place of their fulfill- ment. In the present chapter I use the word ^ self ' to mean the ideal self, that larger self which is a man's potential possession, as opposed to that outer world of human and non-human nature which reacts upon him, upon which he reacts, but which does not belong to him in any intimate and personal way. That the self is and should be the object of major concern to every moral person is made evident by two considerations, either one of which is conclusive. In the first place, the self represents a man's direct responsibility. For the rest of the universe, he is, for the most part, wholly irresponsible. The rain falls on the just and on the unjust. The 150 INDIVIDUAL MORALITY great events of the cosmos have little apparent regard for the individual man. He has his own important part to play, and plays it nobly or otherwise, but his sole moral concern is limited to this. He may be intellectually and sympathet- ically interested in the great world-drama, and it is a pretty poor sort of man who is not, but to vastly the greater part of the drama he stands in no causational relation, and can claim neither praise nor blame for creation. If man be a free agent, he is responsible for himself, and for such part of the world of affairs as comes within the sphere of his influence. But for the world-order as a whole, not the most ardent advocate of free- will would think of making him even remotely responsible. It is only within the sphere of his personal life that other persons and things can make their appeal, and claim his service. But it seems that this outer circle is determined by the self, and is very far from being a fixed and independent quantity. It is small or large, accord- ing to the dimensions of the self. The attitude of the man towards the events around him is not determined by the events and their claims, but by his perception of the significance of the events, and his own idea of possible service. His sphere of influence is a thing of his own creat- ing, and a highly important part of individual morality. 151 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE In the second place, as we have been insisting all along, a man's life, quite apart from others, is a very small part indeed of the total of his life. When society wishes to impose its crudest punish- ment, it dooms a man to solitary confinement. This does not rob him of life as a mere animal process, but it robs him most effectively of the human content of life. He is as good as dead, just as a man on a desert island is as good as dead, or an anchorite in his cell. Probably the only thing that keeps the prisoner and the cast- away from utter hopelessness and insanity is the faint expectation that some turn of fortune may yet restore them to human companionship. In the case of the anchorite, the expectation is more vivid, but it is of a companionship still more ex- alted. Even a man's animal wants depend largely upon his fellows. Few of us, alone and unaided, could compass the most primitive satisfactions in the way of food and clothing and shelter. At the first touch of incapacitating disease, all would be up with us. Nature, too, seems to have small concern for the solitary man. As the last of his kind, his fate is a matter of indifference. When we turn from mere animal existence, a gift of more than doubtful value, to the real content of a human life, the social dependence of the indi- vidual is complete. It would be appalling were it not met by an equally imperative dependence on 152 INDIVIDUAL MORALITY the part of his fellows. They are necessary to him, truly, but he likewise is necessary to them. It is a case of beneficent complicity. This human in- tercourse is the medium in which the greater part of the individual life is played out. The only way a man may escape it is to abdicate life itself. The significant part of the individual life consists in just these human, social relations. In these rela- tions a man must reaHze himself, must satisfy his affections, his intellectual curiosity, his spiritual aspiration. His own sense of good fortune, quite as much as the objective standard of welfare, requires the idealization of these relations. His happiness, and therefore his moral life, depend upon it. Looking at the matter from his point of view, the extension and perfecting of human intercourse is the greatest part, almost the whole part, of individual duty, of duty to the self. It is quite possible to turn the matter com- pletely round and state the problem, as it is usu- ally stated, from the social point of view. These duties of social intercourse and idealized human relations are classed as duties to the neighbor and to society. They are stated as essentially duties to others, and group themselves under the gen- eral name of altruism. As such, they are looked upon as opposed to those self-regarding duties which constitute a proper egoism. To many, the moral life is just this conflict between the two 153 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE sets of duties, between altruism and egoism, with morality thrusting forth the one, and inclination urging the claims of the other. This method of presentation makes hfe essentially militant, and is supposed to be the strenuous and robust method. It certainly makes our would-be moral soldier excessively self-conscious, for the enemy is within the gates, and constantly on the watch for our good knight, to catch him napping. When this happens, inclination whips moraHty, and the day is lost. It is possible to approach the question of human intercourse from either end, the individ- ual end or the social end, but it is not a matter of moral indifference which approach we choose. By making ideal human relations essentially a duty to others, in place of to the self, the issue seems to me needlessly obscured. Every question of duty must be regarded finally through the individual eyes of the agent. It is he who must perceive the duty, must accomplish it, and must in the retrospect be so far assured of its validity that he would willingly do it again. He may theorize as much as he chooses about his neigh- bors' duties, — and sometimes he chooses to do this to such an extent that he neglects his own more obvious ones, — but he is obliged, by the very nature of the case, to handle his own duties, if he handle them at all, from a highly practical 154 INDIVIDUAL MORALITY and personal standpoint. The whole moral out- look becomes very artificial and uncertain the moment a man abandons the solid ground of his own part in the drama, and betakes himself to a hypothetical region which he cannot explore and of which he can have no certified news. In treat- ing the problem of human relations, one must proceed from the known to the unknown, and the known in this case is one's own end of the relation, one's own genuine feeHng and personal experience and acquired knowledge ; and the un- known is the other man's state, the part that is hidden. The part that is not hidden is a part of one's own knowledge, and forms a part of the handle which a moral man is glad to possess. But he makes a sad mess of it, if he abandon this assured ground, and base his solution not only upon the unknown end of the relation, but also upon a position at variance with the known end. The most powerful moral maxim is the Golden Rule, and this expressly throws all action touch- ing others back upon the personal, individual insight of the agent. As he is intelligent and moral, and he cannot be the latter without be- ing the former, what he would that others do unto him is founded upon his personal and private view of good fortune chastened by the social view of welfare. He acts, therefore, upon the principle of worth, a principle vaHd for both. 155 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE To present moral conduct towards others as something doing essential violence to one's own nature, instead of fulfilling and realizing one's nature, is not only to falsify the experienced facts of Hfe, but to leave one without assured ground and motive for action. It is to make morality less practical and less current. By setting up an essential antagonism between egoism and altruism, between the moral issues when human intercourse is approached from the point of view of the individual and of society, there is produced great obscurity not only with regard to social duties, but also with regard to the proper attitude of the individual towards social intercourse in general. It leads to the be- lief that the individual view of good fortune is really the one that it would be personally pleas- ant and profitable to follow, and that the chasten- ing of this view due to the social idea of welfare is in truth a concession to an antagonistic set of duties, which one owes in some mysterious way to other people. But this, as we saw in our inquiry into worth, is a wholly false view. The unchastened idea of good fortune is not the path of right and happiness. The corrective view of social welfare was not introduced to satisfy some outside claim of an octopus-like organism known as society, with a life different in kind from that of the individual, and a welfare antagonistic to 156 INDIVIDUAL MORALITY the welfare of the individual, but was introduced solely for the salvation of the individual, to teach him in what happiness, or good fortune, really consists, well knowing that when the individual is saved, society is sound. From this point of view, a point of view to be maintained throughout the present book, there is no conflict between egoism and altruism. And as there is no conflict, so there is no reconcilia- tion either necessary or possible. One cannot bridge a chasm which does not exist. Egoism and altruism are but the subjective and the ob- jective aspects of human intercourse, the exact counterparts of good fortune and welfare. When human intercourse is made sound and true, is idealized, then worth is attained, and morality made possible. It remains literally true that when a man has performed his full duty to him- self, he has performed likewise his full duty to his family, to his neighbor, to society, to man- kind, and to the unseen. Strictly speaking, then, one may not speak of individual morality and social morality, of duties to the self and duties to the neighbor, for mo- rality is all of a piece. It is right conduct, the efficient adjustment of means to worthy ends, and conduct is an individual phenomenon. But it is convenient to consider moral conduct in the order of an apparently diminishing self and an 157 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE apparently increasing neighbor, and to consider under the head of individual morality that part of conduct which seems the most private and personal. One may well begin with that moral ^ four-in- hand' which every seeker after good fortune must seriously take up, the quadruple duty of being strong and beautiful and accomplished and good. The pursuit of the first of these ends has often been undertaken by persons not at all enamored of morality, and they have even met with partial success. But it may be shown that not even the most primitive of these personal duties, the duty of being strong, can be fulfilled by an immoral person. The brute-like strength of the prize-fighter is not the sort of bodily per- fection which counts either in terms of time or tasks. To be strong, in the moral sense, is to have that perfect health of body, that develop- ment of each member and organ and faculty, that will mean the largest possible measure of personal power. This finer health is not satisfied by mere chest expansion and girth of arms and legs. It requires a nicety of organization, a fine- ness of tissue, which make the human body a highly efficient and serviceable machine. Moral- ity distinguishes between athletics, the develop- ment of some particular faculty for show pur- 158 INDIVIDUAL MORALITY poses at the expense of the other faculties, and physical culture, the development of the body as a whole for human purposes. These quadruple duties seem at first sight highly individualistic. One might pursue them apparently without being in the least socially minded. But one cannot look at them twice without perceiving that by all odds their larger content is social. Personal strength and health would seem essentially egoistic, a phase of indi- vidual good fortune, unchastened by any ideas of social welfare. And this impression is deep- ened by the fact that social welfare, as commonly conceived, is frequently achieved at the cost of individual health and strength, even at the cost of life. But it will be shown in the chapter on Social Welfare that it is a distinctly false wel- fare, a veritable disaster, which is thus achieved at the cost of individual good fortune. To be strong is the first of individual duties, for it is the first condition of wholesome happiness. To have the body well developed, to have arms and legs, chest and thighs, hands and feet, head and heart, thoroughly sound and strong ; to have the faculties alert and well trained, the seeing eye, the hearing ear, the cultivated voice, the skillful touch, the discriminating smell and taste, is the first requisite of good fortune. It is the human wealth, of which, as we have said, there 159 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE is enough to go all round, and the only sort of wealth worth serious consideration as an end. Wealth in things must always be looked upon as means, as significant only as it ministers to this human wealth. In America we have not very much of this human wealth. The typical Ameri- can has sacrificed his body on a variety of altars, to false duties, to perverted appetite, above all to 'business.' It is the offering of Cain, the mur- derer, and cannot be acceptable to the God who commanded perfection. In good health, one is unconscious of the body, and the attention is free for the larger emotions. In superb health, one adds to these emotions a distinct sense of personal well-being, the exultation of strength and power. Invalidism is the reverse of all this, an out-and-out immorality, for it makes good fortune impossible. It is useless to urge that the invalidism is unavoidable, and not to be dealt with in this harsh fashion. It may be unavoid- able, the very natural and proper result of health- destroying causes, but the causes were avoidable, and the failure to avoid them is a tremendous immorality. If America, as a nation, be pursuing such ideals and such policy that the present bodily weakness characteristic of America is inevitable, then the national life is essentially immoral. And this is precisely what many of us beheve. The pursuit 160 INDIVIDUAL MORALITY of material ends, trade, business, money, the denial of the sacredness of human personality and integrity, constitute a profound moral wrong, for which the nation pays to-day in its failure to be glad and happy. And that we do fail to be glad and happy must be evident to every one who considers not himself alone and the chosen few who are following the path of the larger life, but who seriously considers, let us say, one hundred of his casual acquaintances. Various causes are assigned for this national unhappiness. It is said that we need more holidays, less am- bition, greater thrift, more religion, — and to a certain extent this is all true. But our most primitive need is for more robust health. And this need is shown not only in the excessive number of doctors' signs and drug stores and patent medicine advertisements that offend the eye on all sides, but still more in the faces of our compatriots. In these faces one finds genuine instances of happiness and peace, the benedic- tion of those who have found good fortune, but one also finds pictures so pitiably sad that they haunt one like so many spectres, the pinched faces of puny, ill-nourished children, the weary, desperate faces of ill and overburdened men and women. To declare health and strength to be an essen- tial of morality, the first ingredient of good for- 161 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE tune, is one thing. To attain this boon is an- other. For many of us, for most of us indeed, entire bodily soundness is out of the question. We start the race handicapped with our burden of ancestral wrong-doing, our inherited ills. We add the exposures and injuries which arise from our work, from making a living in a community which regards the theft of a loaf of bread as highly reprehensible, and the more or less rapid sacrifice of a life to industrial exigencies as com- mendable faithfulness. To most of us it is not given to satisfy this first requirement of the moral life, — the requirement of strength. To that ex- tent morality condemns us, or rather forces us to condemn ourselves. It may seem a harsh judg- ment, but it is righteous. If one be not strong, no matter what the cause of the weakness, one is to that extent deficient in virtue. But one can at least be honest. The personal problem, however, is never the unattainable. It is not how far one would go if one had seven-league boots, but the humbler problem of how far one really goes in one's present, factory made shoes. A man may properly regret the strength so inevitably denied, but the moral life demands that he attain such measure of strength as is open to him. And this is larger than most of us suppose. If one regard good health as a duty, and decline to sacrifice it either in work or play, its increase is some- 162 INDIVIDUAL MORALITY thing quite remarkable. And should the duty of good health and strength pass into the social consciousness, and be made to cover several gen- erations, America would witness the birth of a new race. The problem of strength is individual. The moral man must look himself over intelligently, and this frequently means through more skillful eyes than his own, the eyes of trained specialists, and must inquire into the cause and remedy of his defects. It is only then that he can properly determine diet, residence, occupation, recreations. The responsibility for these things is commonly shifted to other hands, often to mere chance. But it is a man's own personal and private busi- ness to look into these life conditions, and so to rationalize them that they make collectively for strength. It would be beyond the proper limits of an inquiry into morals to consider the vast body of detail which goes to make up the phy- sical life; but that part of it which concerns one's own temperament must be effectively studied by each seeker after good fortune. We are justified in making health and strength the first essentials of individual morality because they are ends of happiness in themselves, and because they condition most completely all as- pects of individual activity. But for precisely the same reasons, health and strength are the 163 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE first essentials of social welfare. As the condi- tions of happiness they are the conditions of social welfare. A whole nation of sick and un- happy persons can never achieve welfare for the nation. Each sick and unhappy man makes it less possible, for social welfare is distinctly the sum of individual good fortune, and does not differ from it either in amount or kind. Fur- thermore, the power of achievement for the nation at large rests upon the strength of its individual components, and can never exceed this. Social affairs in the hands of invalids suffer the same incompetent treatment that do indi- vidual affairs. There is the same loss in morality, because the same lowering of collective efficiency, and the same failure to grasp the full ends of good fortune and welfare. In the matter of individual strength, both egoism and altruism teach the same thing ; they teach the primal duty of perfecting it to the utmost. The man so socially minded as to look at all questions from the point of view of welfare rather than of individual good fortune would do in this respect precisely what the individual seeker does. He must set to work to make him- self strong and well in order that he may serve the more effectively. To sacrifice one's self is to sacrifice one's cause. The man who breaks himself down in any service, be it individual or 164 INDIVIDUAL MORALITY social, reduces both the quality and the quantity of his usefulness, and is to that extent immoral. Society is not best served by human wrecks and fractions. It is best served by full-blooded, whole-hearted men and women. To be beautiful is not commonly considered a part of the moral life. On the contrary, personal beauty is usually disparaged us something rather incompatible with the attainment of the height of morality. The homely are encouraged to con- tinue in their homeliness by the news that beauty is but skin deep. Or it is remarked sententiously that beauty is not everything, the obvious im- plication being that it is less than nothing, — a snare, rather than a source of legitimate delight. The majority of men and women are homely, — physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually. It is a part of the poverty of a people given over to the pursuit of things. This widespread dispraise of beauty is a natural result. It is an impulse of self-justification. The majority disre- gard human wealth, — strength and beauty and accomplishment and goodness, — and make suc- cess consist in less personal matters, in industrial combinations, in engineering feats, in astound- ing statistics, in institutions, laws, big crops, large outputs, — in a word, in the mechanics of living, rather than in life itself. Those who sac- rifice strength and beauty to these notoriously 165 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE false ends are very prone either to pride them- selves on the sacrifice, or to belittle the value of what they have thrown away. Yet we admire beauty in things, in scenery, in architecture, in music, in literature, in the fine arts. We admire it in plants and animals. We like to live in beautiful houses, and surround ourselves with beautiful objects. We Hke to have our meals served from beautiful china, and to have ourselves and our friends attired in beau- tiful clothing. We like to ride beautiful horses through beautiful parks. We travel miles to see a really fine picture or building, and put our- selves to no end of discomfort to catch a glimpse of some natural masterpiece. In all our ideal enterprises, we demand beauty. We admire it in persons, even to the extent of worship, but we take it fortuitously, not as a thing to be worked for as a part* of the real good of life, and cer- tainly not as something to which the masses may reasonably aspire. But there is a moral way of looking at beauty. It is good in and for itself, a source of whole- some pleasure both to the possessor and to the be- holder, a part, therefore, of both individual good fortune and of social welfare. The man who likes to have his favorite authors in strong and beauti- ful editions, to worship in temples which speak of eternal strength and beauty, must surely wish 166 INDIVIDUAL MORALITY his own spirit no less suitably housed. He would be inconsistent indeed if personal ugliness did not distress him, and personal beauty did not bring pleasure. The most important thing in the visible creation is man, and if he fail of beauty, the disaster is very great. Those who find beauty in their own faces as they look in the glass, and strength and beauty in their own persons as they survey them from head to foot, have attained some measure of good fortune, and they were mean spirited indeed if they counted it less than its value. But this beauty of face and person gives pleasure because it is the mark of more than superficial excellence. It speaks of health and strength and well-being. And the term beauty connotes more than mere regularity of feature and form, more than mere anatomical beauty. The idea of beauty depends upon the spirit of the beholder, only somewhat upon the object itself. Personal beauty, to the noblest natures, includes not only the strength and line and color of physi- cal perfection, but quite as essentially the intelli- gence of an informed mind, the graciousness of a warm and sympathetic heart, the spiritual charm of a soul which has come into reverent relation with the unseen. To be beautiful in this inclu- sive way is indeed to satisfy the full law of in- dividual morality. It involves strength, it ex- presses charm, it necessitates accomplishment, it 167 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE radiates goodness. This is the gracious person, the one who bears the very stamp of excellence, whose worth lies not in the past, not in the fu- ture, not in what he has done, not in what he means to do, but in what he is, and what he does, in the immediate present. We require this thoroughness of beauty in the things which we admire, this genuineness. Rhine- stones are less valued than diamonds, because from these man-mixed silicates we cannot get the sparkle and brilliancy of the elemental carbon. Scagliola-work does not pass for marble, or a glass ball for rock-crystal, among persons who know, and the refusal is not on the bare ground that they are imitations, but on the truer ground that they fail to reproduce the beauty of the things imitated. We require the same thoroughness in the beauty of plant and animal ; not alone the grace of branch and leaf, blossom and fruit, the outer virtues, but as well the subtler excellence of fibre, odor, and taste ; not alone the color and line of blooded stock, but the sparkle and quiver that indicate speed and endurance and faithful- ness. We are justified in using the term beauty in this same inclusive way when we seek to apply it to the most excellent of earth objects, to per- sons. The thoroughbred alone is beautiful. To be beautiful humanly is to have this excellence of the entire person, this beauty of mind and 168 INDIVIDUAL MORALITY heart and spirit, as well as the beauty of form and color. As we have said, the standard of beauty is not determined by the object, but by the beholder. Strictly speaking, the lover of excellence does not know such a thing as mere anatomical beauty. To him it would be regularity of feature, nicety of coloring, but it would not be beauty. It is no sophistry to say that the major content of human beauty is spiritual, is the inner fire and spirit that shine out through the face and person, and pro- claim the worth of the individual as a whole. So the faces of the aged, when they speak of peace and serenity; the faces of ^ plain' men and women, when they are touched by good-will and intelligence; the faces of freckled, snub-nosed children, when they are alert with interest and comradeship, possess this radiant beauty quite as much as does the Apollo of the Vatican. To be beautiful in this thoroughgoing fashion is an essential part of human worth, and the striv- ing to be beautiful is a necessary part of moral aspiration. One must accept the larger features of one's person as heredity imposes, but by exer- cise and healthful living one may improve the heritage, may make the very most of it, even if it be one poor talent only, and may at least be less unbeautiful than if one had not tried. In spite of his many masks, man is a unit, and the 169 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE mind and heart and spirit in him have as specific features as has his outer person. But apparently they are more flexible, and by exercise and health- ful living they too may be brought into greater comeliness. To make the mind supple and in- formed, to make the heart sympathetic and human, to make the spirit reverent and intuitive, — these tasks present serious material for a life- time of effort and happiness. It is an individual task, the self-imposed culture which covers the whole of life, the control of one's own conduct. It is the quest of good fortune in the most per- sonal and individual fashion. It is a high plea- sure even to essay this genuine beauty. To possess it would be a consolation in the desert or quite alone in the wilderness. The feeling is not one of vanity, or complacency, or self-love. It is the exaltation which is inseparable from the high en- deavor that one knows to be one's best, and worth while. There is indeed something of ecstasy in it, the feeling that Sir Galahad had when he went in search of the Holy Grail, the emotion of the mystic when it sweeps over him that in very truth he is the friend of God. This search for absolute beauty, not in the abstract, but as incarnated in one's self, is in reality the study and pursuit of perfection, what Arnold properly calls culture, and is the all- inclusive duty of the individual, as it is the most 170 INDIVIDUAL MORALITY inclusive guise of his personal good fortune. But while the tests are individual and the most im- mediate results are individual, the influence and service are no less social. This is so altogether obvious that one might hardly be excused for dwelling upon it, and dwelling upon it so persist- ently, if it were not that the study and pursuit of perfection, the putting of culture before every other end, is commonly represented as a proceed- ing so shamelessly selfish as to have nothing in common with morality, and much in common with its opposite. The contrary ideal is constantly held up for approval, the touching if not alto- gether practical ideal of poverty-stricken souls with nothing to give to society generously giv- ing their all ! But personal beauty, like personal strength, while it would be eminently worth while, even if one stood quite alone, the very last man in creation, finds an infinitely more fruitful soil both for its exercise and culture in the human relations which constitute the helpful and accept- able interplay in our actual world of men and women and children. Man does not stand alone, is not the last of his kind, and spends but a tiny fraction of the waking day apart from his fellows. He is a social animal both by nature and neces- sity. His beauty is therefore a social possession, as much a component of welfare as of good for- tune. To be appreciated, it must be seen ; and no 171 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE generous and sensitive man can see strength and beauty in his fellows without a distinct sense of pleasure. The informed mind must spend itself on human tasks, the tasks of the many. The sympathetic heart is the basis of good-fellowship. Even the reverent spirit, which seems to concern only the individual and the unseen, is reflected in a man's attitude towards all problems, touches all persons whom he touches, and becomes the encourager of reverence in others. In making beauty so all-inclusive a part of in- dividual morality, there would seem small room for the mention of accomplishment, yet accom- plishment deserves separate mention, for it is the necessary product of strength of body and beauty of spirit. Accomplishment is human performance of a worthy kind, the doing of something that adds to the pleasure and delight of mankind. It is eminently individual in the doing, eminently social in the fruition. Performance in general, in this material, spiritual world of ours, involves both ideas and objects, and when the perform- ance is human, it requires the motive power and the knowledge which make up so large a part of beauty, and the trained organs of the body, — eye and ear and voice and hand, — which make up so large a part of strength. The artist is the man of this superior endowment, and his works stand to future generations as the measure of our 172 INDIVIDUAL MORALITY civilization. He requires the inner eye of the beautiful spirit to conceive his work, the trained members of the strong, efficient body to execute it. Accomplishment is a part of human wealth, and therefore a part of morality. It is not at all the superficiality which men of business suppose it to be, the sort of thing to bid for women's praise, but a part of the integrity of fife, of the full measure of excellence which differentiates the moral man from the immoral man. It is not a matter of moral indifference whether we neg- lect this human accomplishment, this training of a strong and vital organism, and take to bookkeeping and commercial ventures. In the giving up of higher ends for lower ends, no amount of efficiency can compensate for the loss of worth. Men have so much in common outwardly, and so genuine a touch of brotherhood, that we are prone to forget how different in degree, how almost different in kind, are the several types of man that go to make up humanity. But man is just the sum of his faculties and qualities. It is this sum which makes his virtue or his vice, his wealth or his poverty. While his very charm, as we have been insisting all along, depends upon variety, upon the unique summation of qual- ities which each individual presents, it is true that only those combinations which can truth- 173 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE fully be said to include strength and beauty and accomplishment and goodness can be classed as moral. In the more primitive and unreflecting man, virtue is fortuitous, something he happens to have or not to have. But our present man, the heir of all the ages, knows in what virtue consists, that it consists in this perfecting of his nature in the most genuine and thoroughgoing fashion possible, and it is this knowledge which makes him responsible. The particular obligation of being accom- plished rests not only upon the fact that accom- plishment is an end in itself, a source of happiness both to the accomplished person himself and to those who see or hear his accomplishments, but also upon the very far-reaching fact, too little considered in our own day and generation, that the accompHshed personality opens the door to that wider knowledge and deeper insight upon which human beauty so largely depends, the beauty of mind and heart and spirit. It is not a matter of indifference as to whether one has the seeing eyes and hearing ear, and cultivated voice and trained and discriminating nose and tongue. These organs are the soul's ambassadors in the great outer world of matter and motion, the reporters who furnish the material out of which the individual panorama of life is to be built. If they fail to report fully and truly, to 174 INDIVIDUAL MORALITY report things as they are, the world which each man is thus forced to create for himself through his own activity is a partial, even a false world, in which the true relation of things is never perceived, and knowledge — the perception of relations — is rendered impossible. So when a man neglects the health and training of his facul- ties, for business, for more immediate pleasure, or for whatsoever end, he deliberately makes this larger world and larger knowledge impossible, and condemns himself to something distinctly less than the best, to a more limited experience. How truly tragic this curtailment is can be seen only too vividly when such a partialist is called upon to meet either leisure or old age. The petty business to which he gave his manhood is gone, and there remains only the unfurnished house. One meets the tragedy in every village which boasts its retired men of business, in every corner of Europe where the unenlightened seek to enjoy what they call success. The failure to become accomplished means a failure to come into the largest fulfillment of the self, the great- est happiness, and must be accounted an essential immorality. It was Socrates who said : — ^ The best man is he who most tries to perfect himself, and the happiest man is he who most feels that he is perfecting himself.' And Arnold may be further quoted when he 175 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE writesj ' Wilhelm von Humboldt, one of the most beautiful souls that have ever existed, used to say that one's business in life was, first, to perfect one's self by all the means in one's power, and secondly, to try and create in the world around one an aristocracy, the most numerous that one possibly could, of talents and character.' To be strong and beautiful and accompHshed and good seems to me the full formula of indi- vidual morality, a formula which has in it the vi- tality of infinite promise ; for strength and beauty and accomplishment and goodness are not shallow springs to be drunk dry in the hot summer of a single lifetime, but rather unfailing wells of ceaseless effort and attainment. Nor is the order accidental. In one sense, to be beautiful includes everything, the idealization of one's relations to one's self, to the neighbor, and to God. But it gains in impressiveness to have on the one side strength and on the other accomplishment. When one is all this, one is in the truest sense good, for one has satisfied the moral law, has manifested efficiency and the worth which means individual good fortune and social welfare. To be good is the general aim, of which strength and beauty and accomplishment are the special terms. It is properly mentioned last both because it deserves the emphasis of such position, and because it is the result, the summing up, of all those efforts 176 INDIVIDUAL MORALITY after perfection which constitute culture, the af- firmation of the larger self. But we must pass now to the more special aspects of the quest, and to the psychological method by which morality is attained. IX THE CARDINAL VIRTUES THE Cardinal Virtues of the ancient world, at least as far back as Aristotle, were Justice, Prudence, Temperance, and Fortitude. Human virtue turned upon these as upon a pivot. The Roman church retains these virtues unaltered, though it changes the order, making the sequence run Prudence, Fortitude, Temperance, and Jus- tice, a change significant of the different outlook between the ancient and the modern world, the change of emphasis from state duty to individ- ual duty. To antiquity, individual virtues like prudence, temperance, and fortitude apparently flowed out of the civic virtue of justice. To a later world, cause and effect are reversed, and social righteousness comes as the flower of per- sonal virtue. The minor morals are supposed to flow out of the cardinal virtues, and to be distinct from the three great theological virtues, Faith, Hope, and Charity, the greatest of which we are all supposed to know, whether or not we prac- tice it. These seven most august of virtues make an impressive series. The life which could exemplify 178 THE CARDINAL VIRTUES them all would indeed reach a high order of ex- cellence. Our modern man, seeking good fortune, would not wish to neglect one of them. But as a matter of daily method he shows a diminishing esteem for all these hard-and-fast distinctions. In attempting to make conduct square with these seven virtues, and do full justice to all of them, it soon becomes evident, not that they are in any way antagonistic, but rather that in many cases they so far overlap as to become distinctions with- out a difference, and that in all cases they are such vague terms, and open to such varying in- terpretation, that one can read into them either a narrow duty or a whole system of morals. This is especially true of the first and last of the vir- tues. Justice and Charity. Justice, in this latitu- dinarian sense, means everything, not only strict obedience to the clear letter of the law, which it is commonly limited to mean, but also an equally punctilious regard for all the requirements im- posed by the larger self, for all sides of the de- veloped human nature, generosity, consideration, and mercy, as well as the harsher virtues. To say of any one, ' He was a just man,' is to accord the highest praise, if by this one means that he satisfied all the demands of his own rich na- ture, for the larger content of justice is personal and subjective. So inclusive is the term that it might properly be used as synonymous with good 179 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE fortune, as the thing which the heart desires when the heart is informed. In a similar way, charity, and especially when it represents good-will or love, is the full measure of the law of human life. This flexibility of all but the most technical terms, this perplexing fluidity of language, is highly inconvenient if one wish to be a system- maker. It is indeed warmly resented by moralists of the pigeon-hole order as an unfair advantage on the part of those who decline to see life in compartments. It is persistently regarded as a dodging of the issues, when in reality it is simply a proper refusal to discuss issues until they have been sufficiently defined to make the discussion profitable. The newer moralists, with their more flexible view of things, are a natural product of the newer psychology. It is no longer possible to regard human life as made up of so many sepa- rate sensations, thoughts, impressions, impulses, to ticket off human qualities with capital letters, and count the analysis complete. The older psy- chology had this defect, it made life excessively granular, and ended by making it altogether incoherent, something that would not at all hold together. But psychology of late has come back from these unprofitable excursions into specula- tion, and is turning increasingly to experience for its proper data. And experience shows man to be, not a bundle of unrelated qifalities, but a 180 THE CARDINAL VIRTUES unit stream of consciousness. Life is flexible and fluid. One mood flows into a second, and this into a third. One set of interests shifts and another takes its place. The emphasis is forever changing, but life does not consist in the state that is past or in the state that is to come; it consists in just the movement by which the fu- ture becomes the present, and the present becomes the past. So human hf e, as an experience, is best figured under this simile of a stream. Modern psychology regards the mental life as a unit consciousness, essentially coherent and integral. Modern morality is necessarily psychological, and it shares this view of the unity and indivisi- bility of the thinking life. Morality is a fabric, of which the warp is efficiency and the woof is worth, but it is an integral fabric, never perfect, perhaps, but never wholly deficient, woven out of that continuous, varied, but essentially unit mate- rial, human conduct. The best conduct would include the cardinal virtues and all the minor morals that flow out of them, but it is not made up of these as so many ingredients, in definite and prescribed proportions. It is rather the visible expression of that stream of conscious- ness which represents individual existence, and is characterized by the same essential unity. It is more scientific and psychological to picture mo- rahty as a definite attitude towards the problems 181 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE of life, a tendency in thought and action which gives worth and efficiency to the Hfe as a whole. One who holds this view of morality, both towards himself and towards others, is not too deeply offended by small defects, or unduly im- pressed by capricious and extravagant virtues. The thing that counts is the man's general atti- tude towards life, and the certainty with which he expresses this attitude in action. If on the whole this attitude makes for good fortune and welfare, the man is a moral man. If it makes increasingly for good, he is a growing man. But if the tendency of his Hfe has not this upward trend, no meteoric virtues, cardinal or minor, can make the life other than a failure. Morality is of one piece. This is at the bottom of that astonishing statement of Jesus to the effect that he that is guilty of breaking one of the divine commandments is guilty of breaking them all. Men are not saints and sinners either alternately or in sections. They are what they are, individual manifestations of consciousness, and are sound or unsound according to its char- acter. Human conduct expresses this conscious- ness, is indeed the data from which we are able at all to reason back to the consciousness, and it possesses the same soundness or unsoundness. We have said that religion is a man's attitude towards life, towards the seen and the unseen. 182 THE CARDINAL VIRTUES It is a good religion when the attitude is good. It is a bad religion when the attitude is bad. But no man is without a religion of some sort, for no man can be devoid of a characteristic and recognizable attitude towards life. As the good attitude expresses itself in moral conduct, we may say that morality in action is true reli- gion. Salvation, as a practical operation, means just this attainment, maintenance, and deepen- ing of the good attitude. In the nature of things, salvation cannot come suddenly or com- pletely. One cannot pass from the state of not being saved one day to the state of being saved the next day. Salvation is a matter of degree, a work never wholly without beginning, and never wholly at an end. It is true that it pro- ceeds at unequal rates. Professor James has shown that the phenomenon of conversion is a genuine psychological event. Compared to the ordinary processes of life, it is cataclysmic in its action, a violent shifting of the centre of con- sciousness. All the facts of life remain the same, but some new fact is now added which suddenly alters the significance of things. The conscious- ness is so far changed that we have apparently to deal with a new and different man. Persons who have experienced this dramatic rebirth are aptly termed the ' twice-born.' The value of the experience depends not alone upon what atti- 183 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE tude it leads out of, but still more upon what attitude it leads into. No disaster can be more complete morally and spiritually than to be twice born and to stop there. Life is not so slender a possession that any shifting of the centre of consciousness, however violent, can exhaust its potentialities. Conversion may be the beginning of a series of wholesome and remarkable changes in a man's attitude towards life, as it was in the case of Paul, and has been in the case of multi- tudes of less distinguished converts. But the danger of conversion in less resourceful natures lies in its tendency to produce a final and static attitude, a complacency which regards the work of salvation as completed. In nearly all instances a failure to advance does not mean a safe stand- ing still, but a decided retrogression. The his- tory of conversions illustrates this tendency. Those persons who by reason of tempera- ment or circumstance have failed to experience conversion have been termed by contrast the ' once-born.' They represent the more usual, and it seems to me the more wholesome process of morality. In reahty, they have not been born twice, but many times, born anew each day, each hour, as consciousness becomes a larger, stronger, clearer stream, and the resultant attitude towards life a more intelligent, more efficient, and more worthy attitude. It is certainly noteworthy that 184 THE CARDINAL VIRTUES conversion is much more common among the ignorant masses, and is the chosen method of propaganda of those evangelists who devote themselves to the masses. I have just read that that excellent man, General Booth, made seventy- one conversions during his two days' stay in Bos- ton, and he is reported to have worked very hard for them. One cannot but hope that the illu- mination thus reported was a true inner light that may remain and grow increasingly brighter. And yet one must feel that morality, like geo- logy, does not make its real advances through this cataclysmic action, but rather through the continuous action of the gentler forces of nature, the line upon line and precept upon precept by which the intelligent moral seeker after good for- tune becomes more intelligent and more moral, and so progresses in his quest. It is also noticeable that culture, by the very continuousness and genuineness of its own study and pursuit of perfection, makes conversion psy- chologically less possible, and even in a sense undesirable. The spirit has its feast-days and fast- days, its ecstasies and depressions, its plenty and its drought, but the unfolding of the larger self, the attainment of the larger life, goes steadily forward by a series of constant rebirths and re- adjustments. To the twice-born this less noisy pursuit of righteousness, this ' religion of cul- 185 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE ture/ as it is called sometimes in admiration and sometimes in derision, may appear on the whole not so genuine and whole-souled as the more dramatic regeneration, but the final test of either movement must be its fruits, and by this the moralist shall know them. It is a question of temperament, and as such almost as little open to discussion as taste. Neither temperament may condemn the method of the other, — provided the results are good. But morality, founded upon intelligence and knowledge, must regard as the saner and more rational process that grad- ual and continuous change of attitude which marks the normal evolutipn of a human soul. In our practical judgments of men, it is the general attitude that we really take into the most serious consideration. Habitual wrong-doing in- dicates an unsocial and immoral attitude towards life, just as habitual right-doing bespeaks the good attitude. So marked is the popular empha- sis upon this general attitude that when even moderately good, it receives the stamp of a social approval which is either denied altogether, or bestowed most grudgingly, in the case of the mechanical and narrow-minded pursuit of some particular virtue or set of virtues. We even hear the dispraise of perfection, and odd-sounding chants to the glory of the imperfect. In reality, what is thus praised is the open-mindedness and 186 THE CARDINAL VIRTUES flexibility which promise in the end a far larger morahty, a far greater measure of perfection, than can be attained by the mechanical follow- ing of conventional methods. It is a somewhat common experience to meet persons of careless conduct, persons who do things which we our- selves should be quite unwilling to do, or to commend, but who yet seem toi us, even in our most judicial moods, to possess a larger and more cosmic morality than we have personally man- aged to compass. There is in this open-air, full- blooded morality of the world something infinitely more robust and endearing than can be found in the fragile morality of the cloister. Part of the charm is in its very human charity, the divine gift whose absence sometimes keeps the children of the kingdom out of the kingdom, and whose presence sometimes brings in the publicans and sinners. But the real greatness of this world-moral- ity lies in its dimensions, in the amount of human intercourse that has been fairly idealized. The more one sees of the world, the more one is dis- posed to award the palm of virtue, not to the provincialist, pursuing a narrow round of narrow duties, not to the partialist, neglecting most shamefully the other content of life in his devo- tion to some one specific duty, but to that larger person, the man of experience, who is ungrudg- 187 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE ingly meeting the world without fear and with- out reproach, and is developing, as naturally as the blade the full-grown ear, that generous and moral attitude toward life which makes for the fullest measure of good fortune and welfare. The danger in following any formula too ex- clusively, like the danger in conversion, is that one will stop there. There are many virtues, cardinal and other, which the world cannot at all do without and remain human and social, but which lead to moral disaster and wretchedness when pursued in this unintelligent fashion, as ends in themselves and quite out of relation to the whole of life. The man who elects a particu- lar virtue for his very own, or even a particular set of virtues, and sticks to them through thick and thin, is prone to develop a curiously vicious stubbornness which may lead him to neglect far weightier matters of the law, and may even end by wrecking his own life and the lives of those intimately associated with his. The history of Puritanism is full of these tragedies, and their shadows still hang over New England life. It has been said, not inaptly, that vice has this ad- vantage over virtue, that it is at least restrained by conscience. While the unintelligent pursuit of single vir- tues is fraught with grave individual dangers, it is no less disadvantageous socially. It tends 188 THE CARDINAL VIRTUES to bring into discredit the virtues themselves, — another ease of being murdered in the house of one's friends. In extreme cases, one is almost driven over to the opposite vices. Pedantry makes ignorance seem fairly lovable. Meanness turns extravagance into a virtue. Prudishness trans- forms carelessness into something of a merit. The corrective of all this blindness is the rea- sonable perspective which assigns to each moral function, each cardinal virtue, its proper and sub- ordinate place, and provides against our faiHng to see the forest for the trees. After so large a disclaimer against moral taHs- mans, it will be perfectly safe, I hope, to point out that there are nevertheless certain very spe- cific virtues which, when pursued broadly and intelligently, go to make up the very substance of the good attitude. The individual must show certain definite qualities, strength and beauty and accomplishment, — the sum of which is good- ness, — or he fails of morality. And we have seen that any one of these qualities, and espe- cially beauty, if interpreted broadly and flexi- bly enough, represents the full letter and spirit of the law, — a result not due to any stretching of language, but due solely to the monistic con- stitution of man himself, to the fact that he is a unit consciousness. And we have seen that the virtues which have sufficient catholicity to be 189 OF THE ^ UNIVERSITY THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE called cardinal have the same inclusiveness. They, too, present the same integrity of con- sciousness, since, interpreted broadly and flexibly enough, they are all-sufficient. From our own point of view, which makes the highest good reside in a personal good fortune pursued so intelligently as to lead to social welfare, the car- dinal virtues are essentially individualistic. They bear many honored names, — truth, honesty, courage, temperance, chastity, hope, reverence, love, — but they are all aspects of the one supreme cardinal virtue, — Knowledge. Such experiments in goodness as the world has so far made, feeble and inconclusive as they are, warrant the far-reaching generalization that if we were infinitely wise, we should biB infinitely good. The path to this supreme goodness must be the path to such supreme knowledge. The cardinal virtue in the good attitude must be just this practical, unquenchable desire to know things as they are, — the centuries-old search for the truth, to know it and to live it. Along with the dispraise of culture one hears also the dispraise of what is denominated ' mere knowledge,' and many other things are rated much more highly. But this disparagement of knowledge comes either from its enemies, who are not likely to give a disinterested account of it, or from those who mistake for it some very 190 THE CARDINAL VIRTUES questionable fragment. The duty of knowing is not an abstract duty to be admitted and then put aside, but a practical, daily obligation, which ought to influence a man in his choice of occu- pations, books, companions, amusement. Such a virtue, pursued intelligently and not pedantically, would turn a man from the meaningless things of life to the significant things, to the thoughts and activities that really count. The argument for knowledge is commonly either pleasure or worldly advantage, both per- fectly sound arguments, but falling short of the real and more inspiring compulsion. Knowledge pursued as mere intellectual pleasure is prone to lead to a very barren scholarship, to a trifling with the letter of the law and a profound igno- rance of the spirit. As such it may go hand in hand with the most complete degeneracy and decay, and may have nothing in common with so vital a thing as salvation and good fortune. Times of extreme individual and social corrup- tion have frequently been marked by what appears to be an elegant scholarship, a ripe cul- ture. But such knowledge proves on examination to be a highly superficial acquirement, a surface cleverness in matters of language and art, and not at all a genuine insight into life as a whole. As a toy, the pursuit of this sort of partial know- ledge has nothing more redeeming in it than the 191 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE pursuit of wealth or athletics or political power, and events have shown it to be not incompatible with great baseness of character. Yet knowledge is commonly presented as just this sort of thing, as something to be enjoyed as a separate intellectual possession rather than as something to be lived by. ' Knowledge is better than riches ' has a fine sound to it, par- ticularly as the supply is supposed to be more certain and more amply sufficient, but the very classification places it to most hearers among the things to be desired rather than among the neces- sities. So religion, as voiced by her less intelligent apostles, is prone to seize upon this unfruitful sort of knowledge as the representative of knowledge, and a thing so little related to righteousness as to be even antagonistic to it, a genuine obstacle. This denunciation of ' mere knowledge ' is per- fectly just, for the pursuit of it is as barren intel- lectually as it is morally, but the denunciation of the false article must not blind one to the sublime excellence of genuine knowledge. And this recalls Emerson's caution that men are so pro»e to mistake the means for the ends, that even natural history has its pedants, who mis- take classification for knowledge. Knowledge pursued for worldly advantage, and ending there, has as little to commend it as when applied as a veneer in making our some- 192 THE CARDINAL VIRTUES what raw youth presentable in society. The result is highly technical and mechanical, and has nothing in common with culture. It is a sort of stock in trade, the sort of stock selected by persons who for social reasons, or lack of capital, decline a more material commerce. It is well to be under no illusions regarding this technical knowledge. It has in it the possibilities of great service when it goes along with a fuller and more human knowledge, but taken alone, it is quite as likely as not to be the possession of out- and-out barbarians. We have all met these per- sons, and we know that they are not all engineers and chemists, electricians and doctors. The tech- nical equipment may be quite as offensive and narrow when classed as philosophy or pedagogy, theology or letters. The tendency of modern conditions to develop this technical proficiency at the expense of a more genuine and lovable culture has recently called out a strong protest from one of the most distinguished professors in the faculty at Berlin, the very home of this sort of specialism. It is le^ing those of us who care for human wealth to caution our young friends against too early specialization, to recommend to them a liberal and humane education, first of all, and a specialty only when it can be handled broadly and fliexibly enough not to obscure the more universal life. 193 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE The production of a narrow specialism in place of commendable knowledge or wisdom is quite inevitable in an age of material expansion. It is the handmaiden of imperialism, and a most docile handmaiden. Every vocation tends to take itself very seriously, and to bolster itself up with a curi- ous sort of professional pride, as a necessary and important part of the social order. Tolstoy has shown in his sad novel, Resurrectioriy that even the prostitute invests her calling with a certain social dignity, and comes to regard herself as a useful and necessary member of society. The demand for specialists, at whatever cost, is sure to be met as long as people fail to see that no sound social welfare can be built up at the sacri- fice of individual good fortune. The tendency of the moment to produce specialists surrounded with stenographers, telephones, and high fees may be a very strong tendency, and may get itself realized in the lives of many unreflective individuals, but this does not make it commend- able, any more than the statement of a somewhat hasty moralist, that all men are liars, makes lying permissible. ^ But there is discernible at the present time a distinct counter-current, due not so much to any recognition of the sanctity of individual integ- rity as to the discovery that extreme specialism defeats its own end. Looking too steadily at a 194 THE CARDINAL VIRTUES detail, losing sight of its function as a part of the whole, is quite as disastrous as that opposite habit of dealing only in glittering generalities. Both processes fail to discover the truth. It is coming to be remarked that the most fruitful discoveries and inventions are produced by those speciahsts who a-re armed first of all with a wide general knowledge, and are able to apply this larger outlook to the special problems. In signaling out knowledge, or wisdom, as the one cardinal virtue, the one that in reality includes all other major and minor virtues, one does not mean an idle erudition, a mass of ab- stract information, a technical equipment for the sake of the loaves and fishes, an acquaintance with one or more foreign languages without any- thing special to say in any of them, but one means that cosmic attitude of mind which leads one to seek to know things as they are, and to make one's thought and action partake of the same soundness and reality. In making know- ledge and virtue one, it is implied that know- ledge is compelling, that one cannot know the right and do the wrong, an implication already admitted and defended, not out of any over- reverence for knowledge, any mere idolatry, but for the simpler and more convincing reason that precisely this implication is psychologically necessary and unavoidable. We are always run- 195 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE ning up against that unescapable stubbornness, that a man cannot do anything which he believes to be to his disadvantage. Doing as one likes is the way of the world. Reaping what one sows is the nature of things. Liking to do what is right is the distinction of the wise. Happiness is the unavoidable portion, the harvest. The duty of becoming wise is thus shown to be the all-inclusive duty of the moral life. Wis- dom is the child of experience, the knowledge of things as they are. The moral argument for knowledge gives it precedence over all other pursuits and aims, makes routine, monotony, and dullness distinctly immoral, and forbids the con- tinued drinking at fountains which have long since lost their power to refresh. This view of knowledge is not accidental or capricious. It is not even voluntary. It is made necessary by our initial conception of right and wrong, the oppo- site polities which are stamped by their results, the one leading to welfare and the other to dis- aster. In giving morals this basis in human experience, one establishes the corollary that knowledge is the one cardinal virtue. The man who knows the meaning of truth and honesty and courage and temperance and chastity and hope and reverence and love, who knows what their denial means, by that very knowledge makes them a part of his own personal desire, a 196 THE CARDINAL VIRTUES part of his ideal of good fortune. These quali- ties are virtues, not by any taHsmanic power, but purely because the results are humanly desirable. If dishonesty and cowardice and debauchery and malice made the world better, and men and women happier, they would clearly be the virtues ; and their opposites, the vices. Wrong-doing is only psychologically possible by reason of this inversion of values. The man who says that he believes in honesty, but nevertheless continues to steal, is simply not telling the truth. He believes in honesty when it does not conflict with other desires, — which is quite a different thing from beHeving unreservedly in honesty. A fuller knowledge would have persuaded him against making the disastrous exception. One virtue there is, in this specified list, which seems, from the importance properly attached to it by all high-minded people, to deserve separate mention and discussion, and the more so since under extraordinary conditions its opposite may become the higher morality, and this is the vir- tue of truth-telling. A falsehood so badly man- aged as to deceive no one would have nothing to commend it from any point of view. But the successful falsehood appears at times so altogether convenient that even the man of knowledge might be tempted to use it, were he not re- strained by something more than a sense of 197 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE immediate consequences. Our instinct in favor of truth-telling and against all forms of prevari- cation is so strong an instinct that the earlier moralists fell into the easy mistake of supposing truth-telling to be inherently right and prevari- cating inherently wrong, and of ascribing the instinct to a conferred and infallible conscience. In spite of the instinct, the habit of lying is fairly well established in certain classes, and one is tempted to wish that there were some higher power to proscribe so detestable a vice. But it is important, both in the general interests of truth and of the foundations of the empirical morality, to make clear that truth-telling is inherently neither right nor wrong, but depends for its char- acter wholly upon the results. Where these are good, it is an unquestionable virtue. Under the extraordinary conditions where the results are not good, truth-telling may become one of those mechanical virtues which are in reality vices. The argument for truth-telling, like all argu- ments concerning human conduct, has its double aspect, individual and social. The individual reasons for truth-telling are many, but three at least may be properly pointed out. The first has to do with one's own clearness of vision, and is purely subjective. To see things as they are is the goal of the earnest intellectual life. It is an essential condition of this single-mindedness that 198 THE CARDINAL VIRTUES one shall also report things as one sees them with the utmost attainable accuracy. It would be fatal to this high requirement to introduce the least suspicion of deception. One could hardly expect to deceive others without coming ulti- mately to deceiving one's own self. And when this happens, we have the suicide of all trustworthy intellectual work. So knowledge demands of her votaries the most flawless truthfulness. A pre- varicating scientist becomes in the end a mere charlatan and his work without possible value. We all know that scientific investigators regard truth-telling as the one supreme virtue, and false- hood as the one unpardonable sin. This simple code has ennobled the scientific world in all countries and all times. A second reason is one of personal expediency. The affairs of the individual life are materially furthered by the confidence of one's fellows. A prudent man, whatever his view of abstract truth, soon recognizes that truthfulness, or at least a reputation for it, is the price of this confidence, and essential to the success of his enterprises. The business man who gave worthless cheques would soon find himself more embarrassed than the recipients of them. In more serious affairs, it is the same thing. The man whose word is not his bond is hopelessly bankrupt in all matters of social enterprise, a practical outcast. How 199 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE altogether powerful this prudential motive is can perhaps best be appreciated if one tries for a moment to imagine what life would be personally were one suddenly deprived of one's reputation for truthfulness. There are few of us who would have the courage to face so arid a desert. One may properly select for a third reason the preservation of one's own sense of self-respect. Social intercourse, in spite of its petty deceptions, is carried on upon the general assumption that men and women speak the truth. Quite apart from any fear of detection and consequent loss of confidence, there would be a genuine and very annoying feehng that one had taken an unfair advantage, had done something against the rules of the game, had cheated in effect, and had a very real stain upon one's honor. Such a feeling is intimately connected with one's sense of self- respect, and is too intolerable a wound to be lightly dealt. These are three out of many rea- sons, but they are fairly typical, and each alone is all-sufi&cient to make a man truthful. In practice, there is a fourth and still more powerful reason, and that is the belief that all deviations from strict truth-telling are offenses against conscience. Empirical morality does not neglect so strong an agent in human conduct as the human conscience. It has played too active a part in events, has aroused men to splendid hero- 200 THE CARDINAL VIRTUES isms, and incited them to brutal wrong-doing. Perhaps nothing in all the human make-up needs more chastening and rationalizing than just this inner voice of conscience. But the way to instruct the conscience is through the intelli- gence, for we may no longer regard the con- science as the primal endowment which the older moralists pictured it. We are forced to regard it wholly as a resultant, the characteristic moral color in a man's attitude towards life. It is his own name for the moral aspect of his instincts, and as such is compounded of his self-respect and his prudence and his desire to know things as they are. The individual argument for truth-telling might be summed up in the one statement that it furthers good fortune. And the social argu- ment is no less simple. It is that truth-telling furthers the social welfare. In primitive societies, where the idea of welfare is very rudimentary, truth-telling did not always prevail. It began apparently as a concession, the advantage which a man was willing to grant to his family, to his immediate friends, to the tribe, and gradually to the increasing circle of humankind. It took but small experience to show that the advantages of truth-telling were reciprocal. The concession became an obligation. The truth-habit cannot be said as yet to characterize diplomacy, or to be 201 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE very firmly established as between nation and nation, but in our more civilized communities it is the recognized pact between man and man, and represents his ideal of social intercourse. Those whose own hold upon the virtue is some- what precarious are nevertheless very prompt to denounce its absence in others. So general is the experience that falsehood makes all human rela- tions unnecessarily difficult and uncertain, that the feeling against it amounts to distinct instinct. It seems to us that we have the right to know the truth. One may withhold information, — that is a question of courtesy and good-will. But the substitution of a false statement, misinforma- tion, strikes a healthy-minded man as a direct in- jury, a direct infringement of his natural rights. From the nature of the case, falsehood can be punished by law only when it can be shown to have inflicted palpable injury to person or pro- perty. The mass of falsehood must go legally unpunished. It is fortunate that public opinion is so outspoken in its condemnation. The individual and social arguments for truth- telling are so overwhelming that it may be said to have become a part of the race instinct. One sees it contravened on all sides, but one also sees it honored in the most unexpected places, among men and women who have thrown other and perhaps more important morals to the winds. 202 THE CARDINAL VIRTUES The traditional honor among thieves, and the scrupulousness with which so-called ' debts of honor ' are paid by persons outside the conven- tional boundaries of morality are witnesses, I think, not so much to some unpolluted pigeon- hole of virtue in the persons themselves, as to the fact that falsehood means anarchy and dis- integration, that truthfulness and respect for con- tract are necessary, even in a world of rascals, to make the game go on at all and to have any sort of human relation possible. It seems impossible to exaggerate so funda- mental a virtue as truth-telling, and yet one sees it at times pursued so mechanically, and so much according to the mere letter, that the real spirit of truth is sacrificed. And one sees it not unf re- quently erected into so overshadowing a virtue, a cardinal virtue of almost more than the first magnitude, that the gentler virtues of courtesy and generosity, love and charity, are quite lost sight of. One feels almost justified in preferring a lovable liar. But here again the defect is not in the truth-telling, but in the general attitude towards life, the narrowness that made this the one virtue, and falsehood the one vice. I have said that there may arise conditions under which truth-telling and falsehood change places morally, the one becoming the vice and the other the virtue. But I have hastened to add that 203 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE the conditions are most extraordinary. It re- mains to inquire what they are. Since truth-tell- ing is neither right nor wrong inherently, but depends for its character wholly upon results, it is an easy sophism to justify minor prevarications Qn grounds of convenience and courtesy. The ends are held to justify the means. But it can be shown on the same grounds of daily expediency that there is more to be said against this petty lying than in favor of it. The oft-repeated lie becomes a habit, to be indulged in on very slight pretext of convenience, and finally without any pretext whatever. The result is a decided eclipse of one's own vision of things as they are, and a loss of confidence on the part of others so com- plete as to be permanently inconvenient. It is evi- dent that if lying be ever justifiable, it must be when done in the grand manner, as a very rare exception and for ends quite beyond the ordinary. Furthermore, it must be when ^ curious combina- tion of circumstances makes the major arguments for truth-telling no longer applicable. These major arguments, as we have seen, are the fur- therance of individual insight, what we have called the vision of things as they are, and the promotion of social welfare. The individual per- ception is never furthered by any form of un- truth. It is always hindered. To that extent, therefore, a lie is always and unequivocally bad. 204 THE CARDINAL VIRTUES There are, however, conditions under which the social welfare is hindered by the truth and pro- moted by a falsehood, but the conditions are altogether abnormal and exceptional. They never prevail within the social order, but only in times of violence, when the normal, healthy-minded person has to talk over the fence, as it were, with abnormal and unsocial forces. Three cases sug- gest themselves, — when we have to deal with an invading army, with criminals, or with crazy people. In none of these cases can one set up wholesome social relations. One has to do with unsocial, destructive forces, and morality requires the defeat of such forces. If by falsehood an invading army can be foiled, a criminal purpose brought to naught, a crazy impulse arrested, then falsehood is manifestly the higher morality. Happily, these cases are so rare that the aver- age man is not called upon to meet them even in the course of the traditional threescore years and ten. But their discussion is well worth while both to emphasize the fact that even so imperative a virtue as truth-telling must be accounted a means rather than an end of the moral life, and to point out that on individual and social grounds alike, any violation of truth requires extraordi- nary sanction. There remains a special form of falsehood, too easily condoned, which seems to me to require ftOS THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE particular mention. I mean the unintentional lie. The modern world calls it a mistake, and makes no great fuss over it. One is supposed to fulfill the law and the prophets if one tell what one believes to be the truth, even though the reported truth be all falsehood. Not so the ancient world. It esteemed the unintentional lie something worse than the intentional one, main- taining that the one deceived both the speaker and the hearer, while the other deceived only the hearer. There is something to be said in defense of both positions, but both represent an excess, the one placing undue emphasis on the motive, regardless of performance, and the other undue emphasis on perception, regardless of purpose. The unintentional liar has certainly one merit over the intentional one, that his general atti- tude may be said to be free from malice. He has at least a greater theoretical regard for the truth. But his attitude cannot be called blameless. In the end it makes decidedly for untruth and inac- curacy, for the unintentional lie tends to become habitual quite as surely as the intentional one. Moreover, the false iii formation is equally mis- leading whether circulated knowingly or un- knowingly, and capable of doing quite as much direct harm. It is scant comfort to the sufferer from it to learn that it was not intended. It recalls what Macaulay said when he was hit in the 206 THE CARDINAL VIRTUES face with an egg no longer fresh and then in- formed apologetically that it was meant for Mr. A. ' I wish/ said Macaulay, ^ that you had meant it for me and hit Mr. A ! ' This unintentional lying is so common because so commonly excused. Lying, indeed, is held to be too strong a term for it, since lying, they say, has come to mean deliberate falsehood. But by whatever name one knows it, it is highly repre- hensible, both from its mischievous effects in misleading others, and from its plain indication of the absence of knowledge and carefulness on the part of the liar himself. Nor may he be excused on the ground that his good intention promises better things in the future, for inaccu- racy, as has been pointed out, tends to become habitual quite as much as does deliberate lying. To modern eyes the intentional liar is quite as much of a rascal as the unintentional one, and even more. To the lying itself he adds the un- social willingness to lie, and to profit personally by the deception. His whole attitude towards life is most undesirable, and while it may be marked in the beginning by a more wholesome perception, there must result in the end that inevitable be- fogging of the vision which is one of the greatest subjective evils of the whole falsehood habit. It is worth remarking that in America the unintentional liar goes scot free. He may say or 207 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE publish whatever uncharitable and damaging thing he pleases about his neighbor, and unless it can be shown to be done with deliberate mal- ice, — a most difficult sort of proof to estab- lish, — he goes unpunished. This sort of liberty accounts for the license shown by our less princi- pled newspapers in their handling of all personal afPairs, and constitutes an abuse which demands immediate and strenuous redress. In England the unintentional liar is held accountable. When he publishes personal matters and misreports facts, he is open to legal action, whatever his own belief. It is maintained, and very properly, that it is his business to know the truth before he ventures to make it public. The moral life is not .a matter of compart- ments. It does not consist in the mechanical pursuit of one or two or three virtues, however fundamental they may be. It is an attitude of mind, a tendency in conduct. It is a man's point of view as expressed in his daily behavior. If it is to be summed up in any one cardinal virtue, the virtue chosen must be some such virtue as wisdom or love or charity, since these are not so much specific qualities as sources, the f oun- tainheads of all good qualities. In this sense it is quite literally true that love is the fulfilling of the law, for a soul so illumined is capable of all good deeds, and is incapable of evil. X THE DOCTRINE OF AUTOMATIC GOODNESS THE moral life has two distinct phases, the period before we eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and the period after we eat of it. One phase is unconscious and the other phase is conscious. Life itself, the world, is the schoolmaster during the first period, and a highly effective schoolmaster it is, since it whips even the most unreflective into some semblance of morality, and ends by creating a consciousness in the pupil strong enough to trans- form him into an assistant master. In the period of conscious morahty, we have man acting in con- junction with nature. From an historical point of view, both periods are deeply interesting. From the personal and human point of view, the second period is the more significant, for now it is that man seems no longer the mere plaything of fate, but to have a genuine hand in his own destiny. It cannot be said that a man ever sets out consciously to become moral, for he must already have made considerable progress in morahty to 209 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE recognize that there is such a problem. At that later stage in the operation when he takes a hand voluntarily, the process is one of becoming more moral, and when it is taken up seriously, it is in reality a problem in educational method. It is a unique problem, Hke that larger problem in education when a man has done with the official machinery of tutelage, — school, college, and uni- versity, — and becomes his own instructor. So in the process of morality, a man becomes both master and pupil, proposes the tasks, performs them, passes judgment on the performance. It is a relation in which it behooves the pupil to keep on excellent terms with the master, for there are no vacations, and examinations come any day and every day. As Stevenson puts the matter, ' Above all, let a man keep friends with himself, without capitulations or compromises.' We have tried to state the major task of indi- vidual moraHty and some of the minor ones, and to indicate the standards by which the perform- ance of them is to be judged. An equally prac- tical question, from the point of view of the seeker after good fortune, is the selection of an effective method. The doctrine of automatic goodness appears to offer such a method, and apparently the only one which promises genuine morality without loss of human charm. For it must be admitted at the outset that the quest of morality 210 DOCTRINE OF AUTOMATIC GOODNESS in this frank and conscious way has an unfortu- nate tendency to land one in priggishness, and the most besotted moralist never had the cour- age to call that good fortune. If we agree with Professor James that educa- tion, as a practical process, a method, consists in the organization of habits into fixed tendencies to behavior, it is very clear, I think, that educa- tion is only our human name for evolution, and includes the pursuit of goodness and of health and of riches and of all the other desires of the human heart, quite as properly as the pursuit of scholastic knowledge. As a definition it is complete, inasmuch as it is perfectly general. It is, however, simply a definition of means, and has nothing to say about ends. Such a process covers all education, whether good or bad, and all agencies inside the school and out. I am not disposed to quarrel with this inclusiveness, for according to my own way of thinking, much of our current education does consist in the organ- ization of bad habits ; and furthermore, one who studies the process at first hand must be increas- ingly persuaded that education does cover the whole twenty-four hours and concern itself with the whole fife, whether we find this inclusive- ness convenient or not. So admirable a defini- tion cannot easily be improved upon, but as a programme of action tending to morality, we may 211 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE amend it to read the organization of good habits into fixed tendencies to behavior. The more thor- ough the organization, the more pronounced the good fortune, the more assured the welfare. Habits are not exclusively human, nor are they necessarily or even generally marked by con- sciousness. We have of late been extending the conception to include not only animal and plant, but inanimate things as well. We speak in all seriousness of the habits of earth and air, fire and water. Practically, this is what we mean by the reign of natural law. Since the material world has these fixed habits, they constitute the very handle by which we come into control of material things. By knowing the set of conditions which evoke the habit, we have only to produce these and the habit itself is our servitor. Under certain definite and ascertainable conditions a current of electricity is generated in a coil of copper wire. We study this very curious habit, and the con- ditions which most fully call it forth, and pro- ceed to design and manufacture a dynamo. We may say in all reverence that it is through these inherent habits that God himself operates to transform the world. The habits are fixed, but they manifest themselves only under given con- ditions. In science we observe always this uni- formity in the action of natural law. It is the only thing that makes science possible, indeed 212 DOCTRINE OF AUTOMATIC GOODNESS the only thing that makes sanity possible. A world of out-and-out caprice, a world without fixed habits, would be a world of entire unreason. And yet the veriest pessimist would hesitate to call our present world monotonous. The field of habits is not a meagre territory. It is a vast region, so little explored that the surest thing in life is still the unexpected. There are millions of new and untried combinations of conditions, which will evoke an equal number of remarkable and novel habits. It is the field of discovery and experiment, a field which never before in the history of the world claimed so many earnest devotees, for never before has man had such wide control of the tyrant condition, and such large opportunity of disclosing new habits in matter and force. A discovery is the announcement of an ascertained habit. When other investigators test the habit and find that it holds, the news passes by common consent into our body of accepted truth. By so much is the intellectual wealth of the world increased. The charm of the empirical sciences, the sci- ences of experience, consists for many minds in just this pleasurable certainty. The test of sci- ence, according to Comte, is the power of pre- diction. It is perhaps less of a strain upon the common usage of words when we come to speak of the 213 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE habits of plants and animals. Yet there is no difference in kind. Habit is practically the reac- tion to stimulus. In the crystal world, we call the stimulus conditions, the conditions of temper- ature, pressure, moisture, and the like. In the organic world, we call the stimulus environment. In this world of life, the elements are more subtle and more flexible, and apparently offer more interesting fields of control, fields whose very margin only we have come to occupy, but there is discernible the same essential uniformity. Perhaps in all nature there is nothing that seems quite so capricious as plant hybrids, yet it has recently been shown that the habits of the hybrid are the mathematical mean of the habits of its progenitors. The results of control in the organic world have been so marvelous that it is hardly unreasonable to feel that man has it within his assured power to change the very face of nature. The agriculturist has brought about modifications of flowers and fruit, vegetables and grain, of which nature seems to offer no prototype. The scientific breeder has produced almost new species of domestic animals. The more primal and inflexible things endure, fire and water, rock and forest, binding the old world to the new, but they have been put to so changed uses that they might almost be said to have had a new soul developed in them. The 214 DOCTRINE OF AUTOMATIC GOODNESS more fluid organic world of herb and animal has been literally transformed. On all sides, totally new habits have been engendered or discovered. It is true that nature was doing this all along before man came, was organizing the chance occurrence into fixed habits. But the point of interest in these newer, man-imposed habits is that they have all of them a distinct and novel turn, that they all contribute to human conven- ience and service. This constitutes the marked difference between a civilized landscape and a wilderness. In the one, only those habits of the plant and animal world which are agreeable to man have been encouraged and developed. All nature ministers to beauty, to nourishment, to pro- tection. In the wilderness, it is quite otherwise. Man is the intruder, and there is an apparent indifference to his fate. The same human possi- bilities exist, but they are undeveloped. The old primal habits of brute force and plant sturdiness are still in possession. But even the wilderness owes its preservation to human plans and pur- poses. In this continuous sweep of evolution nature still operates, but she operates through her deputy, — man. This one condition changes the whole trend of the process. When we pass from the obvious world of habit in this non-human nature to our own more subtle human world, we enter a theatre vastly more 215 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE interesting and complex, vastly less obvious and elemental, but not one whit more startling. Nature has been imposing habits so imperious that they almost discourage one's faith in human freedom. The chemistry and physics of the human body, the matter and energy, have the fixed habits of the mineral world. As organisms, we have the habits of life and death, of growth and nutrition, of fatigue and sleep, of appetite and satisfaction, quite as well developed as have our brothers, the brutes. As members of the great world of matter and motion and life, we must share in the fixed habits of that world, and must meet the fate which those habits impose. Plants and animals of a certain set of habits sur- vive ; plants and animals of a different set perish. It is nature's way of settling accounts, of sepa- rating the fit from the unfit, of carrying on her own inscrutable process of evolution. Just now, as we have seen, the day of judgment for plant and animal is in man's hand. He decides which set of habits shall be accorded life and progeny, and which set death and extinction. We hardly appreciate how complete is this human tyranny, for we have grown up in the midst of it. I was once going over a beautifully cultivated farm in Pennsylvania, and when we came to the boundary, the farmer looked over into an adjoining field and pointed out to me a 216 DOCTRINE OF AUTOMATIC GOODNESS flourishing group of weeds with a trench dug completely around them. Then he added that he would not have them on his own place for five hundred dollars, that they were illegitimate, and that if they spread to his fields, the law would grant him damages. I beheve the obnoxious plants were Canada thistles, but it sounded odd to hear them spoken of as illegitimate. Certain animals are also contraband. As we all know, the mongoose is forbidden, unless it come as Rikki- Tikki-Tavi and between the covers of a book. Legislation, as well as public and private opinion, is thus taking a hand in organic evolution, say- ing not so much what shall as what shall not be fostered in the way of plant and animal habits. But meanwhile nature has been dealing with man in precisely the same fashion. It is not a hazard, the type of man that becomes increasingly representative. Nature's earliest ministrations seemed as little human as in the animal world pure and simple. The set of habits which then brought dominance would now lead to the gallows, for they were the habits of untempered force. The survival of the fittest seems at first sight a blind brute process. But in reahty it is essentially intellectual and spiritual, for fitness is determined in the end by the Zeit-Geist, and not by mere physical environment. Taken in sufficiently long sweeps, evolution and education mean the same 217 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE thing, the unfolding and perfecting of the human spirit. Just as the required habits in the plant and animal world are now the habits of human usa- bleness, so the required habits in the human world are now social and spiritual, have to do with the furtherance of a strictly human excellence, the excellence of strength and beauty and accom- plishment and goodness. The environment is no longer favorable to the habits of untempered force. When they appear, they are branded as crime, and society punishes them, even to the extent of the death penalty. Nature now demands habits which make for the enrichment of human inter- course and welfare. The men who have these human social habits bear the very stamp of na- ture's approval in the radiant glory of their lives. The men who fail of these habits never really taste of life. They grow morbid and dyspeptic, die a hundred deaths, and finally end quite be- lieving that the game was not worth the candle. We may say, I think, that the habits exacted of the successful man by nature are passing over a scale of which at least four magnitudes are now perceptible, — individualistic, domestic, social, and psychic. Mere survival demands highly individualistic habits. A man must live, even if his one purpose be altruism. In more savage times, the funda- 218 DOCTRINE OF AUTOMATIC GOODNESS mental virtues must be so strongly self-preserving that there is small chance for the larger habits. Even in civilized society, in the great republic of to-day, one still sees men who have not got beyond this narrow individualism, but they do not represent either the happy or the successful portion of mankind. Human intercourse makes up too large a part of modern life to be neglected without suffering shipwreck. Indeed, I know of nothing that so completely defeats its own end as that self-centred view of life wiiich desires to receive, but not to give. The selfishness which keeps a man from ideal participation in the lives of other persons robs him more gravely than it can possibly rob them. It was a tremendous advance when to the strictly individualistic habits were added distinctly domestic ones. Not only did the concern for a family group bring out new powers in the man himself, but it surrounded him with a care and protection for which no equivalent or substitute has yet been found. The only child and the bachelor escape a discipline which may have its trying sides, but which in the history of the race has played a truly beneficent and educational part. It is much to be regretted, however, that the majority of our people stop here. They are contented with the exercise of individual and domestic virtue, and this world of limited habit 219 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE has even more criers-up than runners-down. It is represented by the men who say frankly that it is cheaper to be badly governed than to take the time from their business to put municipal affairs in order, the men who spend their days over the bread-and-butter problem almost exclusively, and who so far fatigue themselves that at night they take to slippers and creature comforts. It is repre- sented by the women who audibly pride them- selves on the small part they take in life, who belong perhaps to anti-suffrage societies and other obstructing bodies, and for whom marriage means total immersion in a very narrow round of home duties. Where habit thus stops 'at one's own front door, it simply means that individual selfishness has given place to family selfishness. I am not insensible to the peace and beauty of these fireside pictures, and I should be quite content with them as the goal of human endea- vor, if they showed or could show the highest type of individual, — for after all, what nature is after is the perfection of the individual, — but one knows beyond peradventure that this is not the case. The exclusion of the larger world- interests makes smaller men and women. These lives without vista are the lives which invite an intolerable ennui, and when the home is broken up by death or marriage or other circumstances, 220 DOCTRINE OF AUTOMATIC GOODNESS as for nine-tenths of us it is ultimately bound to be, the survivors finish the journey with no hand on the rudder, essentially shipwrecked. Furthermore, as a matter of mere self-interest, the limited habit is bad, even disastrous, for into these smaller lives the larger opportunities do not come. A world for which you have no gen- uine concern very naturally and properly re- venges itself by manifesting very little concern for you. The most potent cause of failure in life is selfishness. How many young men one can re- call, men of education, family, natural abiHty, of every endowment indeed except the warm heart, who are making precious little out of their lives in the way of character or position or money, for the very simple reason that in their excessive egoism they fail to come into generous and human relation with their fellows. These experi- ments in selfishness, whether made by others or by one's self, abundantly prove that it is not the path to human worth and happiness. As we have said, the most thoroughgoing and success- ful selfishness is an enlightened altruism. Or to put it once more into our preferred formula, individual good fortune and social welfare are essentially the same thing. The world is beginning to find this out, to find that the larger life with its swing of events and rush of fresh air is the life to be desired. One 221 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE sees on all sides, and especially in our older and more congested communities, the appearance of a set of habits which are distinctly social, a gen- uine, practical concern for the neighbor, for the nation, and in the largest souls for international- ism, for man himself, regardless of race or creed or color. These social habits are growing, and not because men are growing more saintly, more other-worldly, more liable to die young, but for the better reason that they are growing more divinely human and more intelligent. The mere possession of a body is not such a tremendous possession. At best it cannot grow much beyond six feet or last much over seventy years. The average age of the world is indeed not over forty. But the spirit which centres in the body has in it the possibility of tremendous expansion. In a world which is made up of a very small ingre- dient of matter and motion and a very large ingredient of consciousness, of intellect, the more promising field for expansion is in this human world of knowing and feeling and being, the world of human, social intercourse. The worth of social-mindedness does not depend upon the sacrifice of the individual, but upon his fullest seK-realization. It might seem as if habits so inclusive as to take in the known human world in their interest and sympathy might satisfy the most earnest 222' DOCTRINE OF AUTOMATIC GOODNESS apostle of the larger life ; but if we are to accept the prophecy of the most evolved souls in our midst, there is now emerging a fourth and very distinct set of habits, the habits we call psychic. They have to do with the world of pure under- standing and thought, that world in which man finds his most abiding pleasures and reaches his widest control. The recognition of these habits and their cultivation is as characteristic of our modern intellectual life as concentration is of our industrial activity. This psychic power shows itself in our current transcendentalism, in the spilling over of the contents of life from the narrower limits of the objectively known into that freer space which becomes increasingly real to the persistent voyager. So distinct are these psychic habits from the ordinary individualistic habits of our e very-day world that they appear to the majority as a mere fantasy, a cobweb tis- sue that melts away before a heartier, diet and more vigorous exercise. But their recurrence and extension make it impossible to dismiss them in this cavalier fashion. A juicy beefsteak does not always rout them. Just now they are of par- ticular social interest, because they appear to be at the bottom of that profound religious revival which is sweeping over the intellectual world, a revival not prompted by any vulgar individualistic fears either for the present or the hereafter, but 223 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE prompted by that deeper sentiment which dis- covers in the unseen an opportunity for still wider interests and larger life. It is a natural reaction against the contracting influence of that materialism which was, but is no longer, the creed of science. It would be untrue to the fact to represent these sets of habits as so many concentric wrap- pings which a man puts on much as he does the various articles of his apparel. They are far more intimate than that. And apparently nature demands that in making new conquests we shall not lose our hold upon the old. The final set of habits, so golden as to come safely out of the crucible of events, must comprise in their ensem- ble the best in each group, — must have indi- vidual integrity, domestic virtue, social worth, and psychic power. This, as I understand it, is the real process of evolution, the unfolding and perfecting of the human spirit through the organization and extension of habit. And this, too, is the inner content of education, whether nature's schooling, or the unconscious pressure of society, or the conscious influence of the pro- fessed teacher. The impressing of habits is the main business of life, whether the process be called evolution or education, and while it is a business which diminishes in activity both with the approach of sleep and old age, it neverthe- 224 DOCTRINE OF AUTOMATIC GOODNESS less covers the whole of the twenty-four hours and the whole of the normal lifetime. Just as the process itself is inevitable, so, willy- niUy, we are all of us educators. The school- masters need not be so proud. Everybody is doing quite the same thing, and the effectiveness of the operation depends not upon whether one stand in a schoolroom, but upon whether one have a strong and impressive personality. By what we do, by what we omit to do, we are all of us reacting upon the plastic human material about us, giving some habits added persistence, weakening or breaking down other habits, even creating altogether new habits. It is a serious business, this living, for the habits we have formed, and are forming, not only affect our- selves, but have a thousand reflections elsewhere. Men are so many bundles of habits, just as one chemical element is distinguished from another by its characteristic bundle of qualities. Some- how or other, the qualities are wrapped up in the element itself and confer individuality. So habits are registered and fixed in the organism itself, and in their aggregate constitute the man. It is this that gives them their life-and-death impor- tance. In dealing with them, we are not dealing with mere will-o'-the-wisps, with capricious things which a man may put on and off, like a top coat in variable weather. We are deahng with definite 225 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE states and conditions of organic tissue, with an architectural structure which has a surprising amount of obstinacy about it, which can be changed in any large way only by a renovation almost as thorough as if we were transforming a Greek temple into a Gothic cathedral. We have no direct experience of an intelligence pure and simple not connected with matter, with brain tissue and spinal cord. We know, too, that as far as we are able to follow such subtle and elusive things, there is no emotion, no impulse, no thought, no conscious act, which has not its corresponding molecular activity in the brain. Each event in the intellectual life is accompanied by a parallel event in the bodily life. We need not enter upon the vexed question as to whether the relation is that of cause and effect, and which is the cause and which the effect, or whether the relation is an inscrutable parallelism, a ' world- riddle.' The matter of present importance is that this parallelism is assuredly established, and that to ignore it is to reckon without one's host. Separate acts and thoughts are registered, and by repeated registration turn into those stubborn things, sometimes ugly and sometimes beneficent, which we call fixed habits. If we use the rather vague term of ' brain path ' for the molecular changes accompanying any given act or emotion or thought, we know by experience that these 226 DOCTRINE OF AUTOMATIC GOODNESS paths tend to become established, and that a diminishing impulse is needed to set the changes into operation. Repetition grows easier and easier, until finally the activity attracts so little o£ our attention that it ends by becoming automatic. A habit is thus impressed upon the organism, as fixed and certain for the time being as the habit of the diamond to crystallize in isometric solids. So firmly impressed are these tendencies to behavior, impressed in the life tissue itself, that rehabilitation in any thoroughgoing sense is sometimes practically impossible. The brain paths have become ruts, and the winter of long usage and old age has frozen them beyond the power of any leveling. Since habits do not have their home in an immaterial intention, but in the bodily tissue it- self, wrapped up in the destiny which each man creates in his own body, it is evident that the time to impress habits is in early Hf e, in childhood and youth, when the material is still plastic. Our brain physiologists agree with our moralists in pointing out this most important social truth. It is hard to teach old dogs new tricks. In the shap- ing of this plastic child-material, there is a veri- table predestination. These considerations are at the foundation of my own profound concern for what is now being called organic education, — manual training, g3rmnastic, music, and art, — for 227 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE it represents a form of upbuilding both of the organism and of the human spirit which, when taken at the flood, leads on to the good for- tune of an accomplished personality, but omit- ted, means hfe-long poverty. This registration of habit is very obvious in those arts and dexterities which need the trained organ, the eye and hand, voice and ear. It is less obvious, but equally assured, in all the affairs of the spirit, for these habits are also firmly registered in the physical part of us. As Dr. Carpenter puts the case : ^ Our nervous systems have grown to the way in which they have been exercised, just as a sheet of paper or a coat once creased or folded tends to fall forever afterwards into the same identical folds.' Illustrations of the compelling force of habit abound on all sides. We know the ill-bred man, whose manners, dress, intonation, point of view, ambitions, morals even, offend us at every turn, who is perhaps mortified at his own shortcomings, and yet can no more help them than can the well-bred man his graciousness. We know that had Flavins been anything of a psychologist, he never would have been obliged to ask the several trades of the Roman workmen, for we all carry the signs of our professions about with us, the mannerisms of the teacher, writer, doctor, priest, lawyer, or tradesman. The momentousness of it 228 DOCTRINE OF AUTOMATIC GOODNESS is, that when we elect one set of habits, we make another set forever impossible. Once into the teens, and it is hardly worth while to attempt the violin ; once out of them, the piano. The work- ing impulses of hf e must be gathered by the time one is forty. Beyond that point, one may con- cern one's self with many new interests, but it will always be more or less from the outside. Looking backward, a man can see how a single bad habit, perhaps an ingrained prejudice, a nar- row view of duty, a bit of congenital obstinacy, has kept him from great good ; how another habit, some openness of mind, some instilled generosity, has carried him to the very gates of heaven. When one thinks about these things, one is led to wish that there may be some truth in reincarnation, and that somewhere, in a re- newed youth, one may acquire those beneficent habits too feebly grasped in the present. But one must not dwell too hopelessly upon personal limitations. Our problem, as I have said, is not how far we should go if we had seven- league boots, but how far we are actually going in our present factory-made shoes. It is rather the brighter side of habit that the seeker after good fortune must needs emphasize, — the automatic goodness of life in place of the automatic bad- ness. And there are truly a lot of rosy things to be said. To quote Professor James once more : 229 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE ' People talk of the smoking-habit and the swear- ing-habit and the drinking-habit, but not of the abstention-habit or the moderation-habit or the courage-habit. But the fact is that our virtues are habits as much as our vices. As we become permanent drunkards by so many separate drinks, so we become saints in the moral, and authorities and experts in the practical and scientific spheres by so many separate acts and hours of work.' This is the helpful and tonic view. One's ner- vous system can be made into one's good angel quite as readily as into one's devil. It is the force of habit that saves the present moment. One would become a precious prig if before each act, however trivial, one were obliged to pause and reflect, obliged to remember to do what is right. And furthermore, one would never get anywhere. Heaven would be for some more nimble fellow. One would be forever at the task of holding on to what little virtue one had got, but any progress in virtue would be quite impossible. Happily, none of us is condemned to such a hopeless, arid task. On the contrary, each ac- quired virtue may be made a habit, and so turned over to the unconscious and automatic. Just as so many of the bodily functions have been given over to the guardianship of the subconscious self, a servitor with quarters in the spinal column or 230 DOCTRINE OF AUTOMATIC GOODNESS somewhere else, so the intellectual and spiritual functions, when they have traced out for them- selves sufficiently well-defined paths in the ner- vous tissue, may be banished from consciousness, — in fact, betake themselves to automatism of their own accord, — and the attention is left free to concern itself with new conquests. It is a curious weakness in Kant's system of morals, and indeed in much of our theological morality, that the element of continued effort is so much insisted upon. We must do the right thing, not from good nature, not from a whole- some, rational spirit, but, if you please, from a conscious sense of duty, indeed against the natu- ral inclination, or the act has no moral worth. This is most disagreeable doctrine, and quite unpsychological into the bargain. For myself, I should much prefer that you would be decent to me because you wanted to be, and I am very sure that your goodness would thereby gain con- siderable graciousness. One would almost choose to be wicked and be sincere about it, rather than to be pseudo-good in this hypocritical fashion. It is fortunate that the statement is the thing at fault, and that goodness itself is not tainted with any such hideous necessity. There is plenty of room for effort in the moral life, continuous, persistent, strenuous effort; but to make the life progressive and worth while, the effort must 231 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE be applied to new problems, and fresh victories must constantly succeed old ones. When moral effort stands stubbornly hitched to the same old problems, life takes on a forbidding, puritanical aspect, and heaven is pretty far off. Our gains in automatic goodness have added dignity in that they are not confined to the indi- vidual; they become the heritage of the race. The good habit persisted in long enough to sink below the threshold of consciousness and become automatic may or may not be directly trans- mitted to the next generation, but in any case, it becomes a part of that good expectation into which the next generation is born. Other things being equal, one would prefer to have a child educated in an old and socially-minded commu- nity like New England, rather than in districts less well organized and more given over to anar- chy, for the current social expectation is most important in its influence on the individual. We ourselves are much beholden to this right- doing in the past. It is in no spirit of self-con- scious virtue that we now refrain from the grosser immoralities, from the nine negations of the deca- logue. It is our good fortune that a long line of painstaking ancestors refrained from murder and theft and the bearing of false witness and the committing of adultery and those special and obvious forms of unrighteousness which appar- 232 DOCTRINE OF AUTOMATIC GOODNESS ently the ancient Hebrews were especially prone to, since they had to be commanded so explicitly to refrain from them. This restraint has become in us a habit, and it is a matter of genuine surprise to us that people should want to kill and steal and do all the other things which repel rather than attract ourselves. Our own moral struggle is no less real, but it has been transferred to distinctly higher grounds. The conflict now is more subtle, not so much a fight with the negations, with the things a man must not do, as the more positive fight against what we may call the immorality of the second- best, the fight not to do the thing less excellently than we are capable of doing it. I know a man who paints so well that his friends wish he would paint better. And I suppose that all of us who read this page are so admirable that it 's a hea- ven's pity we are not more admirable. I do not mean at all to belittle this gracious vantage-ground. It is a great gain if it be taken as an opportunity rather than as a sedative. There are many less-evolved people who have not got so far as this. Mr. Lumholz tells the story of an Australian planter whose native servant, when they reached a narrow path in the jungle, begged that he be allowed to go first, lest he be tempted to kill the master. The newspapers every day record a similar savagery in our midst. 233 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE A lady teaching in one of the truant schools in New York City recently told me that she never dared to turn her back to the class, for the in- stinct to throw things on the part of the boys made it positively unsafe. It is a grave reflection, the dreadful things that we people who count ourselves somewhat civilized might still be doing had our own set of habits been differently organized. And it is a chastening reflection, the thought of the very unfavorable light in which much of our present conduct must appear from the point of view of a higher existence. It need hardly be added that in this hymn to the good goddess of habit we have in mind not only outer acts, but still more the making habitual of those inner states from which the right acts flow, the feelings, attitudes, modes of thought. But the great point is, that this quest of the moral life, this cultivation of the set of habits which represent human evolution at its best, need be self-conscious only when breaking new ground. It is quite possible to wrap up each moral gain in the fibres of the organism itself. The minor moralities may be disposed of, one by one, quite as completely as the more obvious moralities with which our ancestors struggled. It is no longer necessary to remember to breathe, or to balance 234 DOCTRINE OF AUTOMATIC GOODNESS one's self in standing and walking. The average man has no temptation either to kill or to steal. So the time is surely coming when we shall have made a habit of justice and of charity. The daily right-doing in the way of food and drink and personal hygiene and manner of thought and way of talk and all the rest may be made quite automatic, and the conscious part of the man, his real life, left free for higher endeavors. However many victories we may win, we shall never have occasion, in this incarnation at least, to shed the tears of Alexander. The moral life is a life of continuous effort, but it is effort applied continuously to new objects. By thus building up a magnificent moral back- ground, a background of assured social habit, of good breeding in the largest sense of that term, the objects of immediate conscious striving need not at any one time be sufficiently great to confuse the seeker after good fortune, or to interfere with wholesome living in the present moment, which is, after all, the highest manifes- tation of morality. I am disposed to go one step further, and to believe that the very habit of striving may itself be made automatic, and may pass quite out of consciousness, for I have met these serene spirits, men and women of the radiant life, who have about them the quiet, unconscious habit of suc- 235 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE cess. The quest of the larger life has become in them the quest of excellence in all things, a fixed habit of heart and mind. They have become once more simple-minded and spontaneous, for they have carried knowledge beyond the point of mere sophistication to the point of character. And when the illumination has accomplished this, it has accomplished its perfect work. The world of effort is now old enough for man to allow him- self some taste of this realization, to enter, since he is bidden, into the kingdom of heaven. For the kingdom of heaven, be it remembered, is eternally within. Such in outline is the doctrine of automatic goodness. I am suitably aware that there is here presented little that is new. The doctrine of automatic goodness, of the ingrained goodness which is ours or is not ours through the available force of habit, is only a special statement of the great process of human evolution ; is only a modern dress for the old Pauline doctrine of growing in grace ; is only a partial rendering of the sublime Bud- dhist discipline of the Path. It is a commonplace of philosophy, at least since the time of Kant, that nature is not a fixed experience, but that her content and significance, the essential part of her, depend upon the qualities of the perceiving mind. Each soul, through the DOCTRINE OF AUTOMATIC GOODNESS activity of the understanding, creates its own world. Happy the soul that by contact with great thoughts learns what it is that makes a world fair, and by its OT^n activity in the organization and extension of habit enters into this good fortune. The cult of automatic goodness has never been without earnest practitioners, — Be ye therefore perfect, even as God is perfect. It is too simple a scheme of salvation to be much in favor with dogmatic theology, but, nevertheless, it is the practical side of all true religion, the making habitual of all that is profoundly desirable in human life. An interesting and in some respects a curious outbreak of the cult is now making its appear- ance in various quarters of the world. It has come with the force of a discovery, and has been named most inappropriately the New' Thought. I recently received a copy of a little journal, published in some obscure corner, which contains, in addition to its own special propaganda, the advertisements of a score or more of books and periodicals, hailing from all sections of the coun- try and proposing the attainment of all sorts of human good, — of health, of worldly prosperity, of the serene spirit. The method is in all cases the same, — the making habitual of certain help- ful attitudes of mind. 237 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE With some pleasant exceptions, the literature of the New Thought has a tendency to offend both one's literary instincts and one's sense of financial decency. Too much of it seems to have for its major motive the disposition of very cheaply got-up books at very high prices. It is v^ell to acknowledge all this with perfect frank- ness, for in spite of it, the movement deserves serious attention and respect. The vulgarisms will drop off, and the thinly disguised bid for money-profit will be discredited. The underlying truth remains. Salvation is a matter of individ- ual effort, and it does consist, not in dallying with temptations and the undesirable, but in steadfastly wrapping up in one's very organism those habits of conduct and tendencies to be- havior which are distinctly good. It may seem like bringing much into one net to point out that that part of the movement known as Christian Science which is sound and defensible falls into precisely the same cate- gory, — the organization of a certain set of hab- its, — and is much less modern and unique than is commonly supposed. In tilting against such established disagreeables as sin, sickness, and death, this aspect of the New Thought has cer- tainly set itself a pretty stiff task. The discipline of time will doubtless correct the aims and atti- tude of the whole movement. It is reasonable 238 DOCTRINE OF AUTOMATIC GOODNESS to believe that Christian Science will some day throw off its exclusive claim to the narrow path, will gladly acknowledge its kinship with the world-effort after righteousness, will mix with its excessive subjectivity such objective practice as the doctrine of cause and effect teaches, and will so attract to itself the undivided sympathy of more careful thinkers. Experience justifies an entire faith in our ability to make automatic the habits of good health and wholesome well-being, the serene mind and lofty ideal. In spite of all that is hideous in our modern life, we are beginning to realize what habits make for good fortune and welfare, and are beginning to cultivate them. Better medicine than any ever prescribed by physician is the simple conviction that in place of asking sympathy for illness, a man ought to be heartily ashamed of himself for the lack of practical intelligence which illness denotes. It is the same in the more subtle matters of the spirit. Happiness is an attitude of mind, and so are love and charity and justice and all the cardi- nal and minor virtues, and they are as open to cultivation as flowers in a garden. One must first believe that they are worth cultivating, and then proceed to the task by making habit- ual both the good and the search for the good. Finally, to escape that moral preoccupation which 239 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE means entire defeat, one must see that the good habits become automatic, in order that one may be free both for the tasks of a larger goodness and the opportunities of present comradeship. It must be remembered that the postponement of attainment, of present reaHzation, of happiness, of helpful fellowship, also becomes habitual. Through excess of preparation, an obstructing self-consciousness, one may fail in the real art of living. Each day lost to sincerity increases the probability that to-morrow will also be lost. It is the high office of habit, and especially of habit grown automatic, to clear the ground and save the present moment. XI SOCIAL WELFARE INDIVIDUAL good fortune becomes a curi- ously fantastic thing when unchastened by that larger view of life, the idea of social welfare. It is not, as commonly supposed, good fortune at the expense of welfare. The defect is in the fortune itself, a defect which is brought to light only when the test of welfare is applied. And it is this defect in the individual destiny which constitutes the defect in the social welfare. But this is only to say once more that there is essen- tially no conflict between intelHgent egoism and intelligent altruism ; that there can be no dis- cernible welfare in a group of men which is not possessed by the individual components of the group. The failure to make good fortune square with social welfare is responsible for a large part of the abundant criticism which has been hurled against the setting up of individual good fortune, or personal happiness, as the goal of the moral life. But this criticism, as I have been attempt- ing with so much iteration to point out, is in reality not directed against genuine good for- 241 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE tune, genuine happiness, but against so false a substitute that, if attained, it would be indi- vidual disaster rather than individual good for- tune. Many of the ends of conduct proposed by individual fortune-hunters, and actually attained, are eminently unsocial, but no one has been able to show that such ends contributed to the genuine well-being of the individual himself. On the contrary, all informed opinion unites in pitying the concrete evil-doer, the individual, rather than the abstract sufPerer, the public. Even if the offense be so venial that the destiny of the wrong-doer remain outwardly tolerable, or even apparently desirable to persons still less fortunate, it can be shown in every case that such a destiny is at least a failure in this, that the larger measure of happiness, the truer good fortune, is necessarily and completely unrealized. Since all values are relative, the thing that is may be a genuine disaster when compared with the more ideal thing, the thing that might have been. The purpose in once more reviewing this opti- mistic and disciplinary view of wrong-doing is to point out that just as individual good fortune becomes unsound and fantastic apart from the idea of welfare, so the conception of social wel- fare becomes inverted and tyrannous just as soon as it fails to square most rigidly with the ideas of 242 SOCIAL WELFARE personal good fortune and individual happiness. From the very nature of the case, it could not be otherwise. If the single drops of water be robbed of weight, the whole ocean ceases to weigh any- thing. No sum can be made up out of genuine zeros. Those who have discarded the grotesque fancy that represents society as a distinct organism with a destiny and welfare different in kind from the destiny and welfare of its component men, women, and children, discard with it the impossible thought that the public good is some- thing separate from the private good. If I and my neighbors be unhappy, it is altogether futile to assure us that the social welfare is nevertheless all right. We have contrary proof in our own private grief. I propose to apply this test of personal well-being in judging the reputed pros- perity of a country which claims with reason to be the greatest and most powerful country of modern times. It is needless to say that this country is America. In applying such a test, the on-looker may properly object that no one man, however keen his social instinct, however indefatigable a trav- eler he may be, however wide a reader, how- ever varied a worker and thoroughgoing an experimentalist, — that no one man, whatever his equipment, can accurately measure so large a 243 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE thing as the personal well-being of eighty million people. The objection is quite sound, but the measurement, it seems, has already been made for us. We can all read for ourselves, and from a score or more of records. We might, for ex- ample, select our architecture as being a quite infalHble guide to the sentiment of the people. It is a guide because it expresses most practically our ideas of domestic comfort and public dignity. And though not a flattering guide, it is eminently trustworthy because devoid of any such ulterior motive as serving for a social standard. Or we might select any other unsophisticated witness, — the stage, the pulpit, the school, the highways, the water fronts, dress, sign-boards, the markets, railway service. All these reflect American life, and proclaim its quality. But I mean to select a still better measuring-rod, one that unites in pre- sentation and deliberate comment all these various expressions of the national feeling, and does it more completely than any other single witness, — the newspaper. Whatever our feeling for the newspaper, or against it, we must admit that it has attracted to its service some of the brightest minds of the day, and that no better English is being put into print than can be found in the editorial columns of the better papers. Furthermore, it must be admitted that whatever the minority opinion may 244 SOCIAL WELFARE be, the verdict of the majority unequivocally pronounces the present to be highly prosperous times. It seems fair, therefore, to regard the newspaper as a mirror not only of our national life, but also of our national prosperity. And what image does the newspaper disclose ? For some months past I have been making such a deliberate study of the newspaper, reading it every day, except Sunday, and sometimes both morning and evening. And I have chosen, not the journals of doubtful reputation, but the best put forth by our very respectable and very civil- ized city of Boston. The general effect of this daily reading of newspapers is to discourage optimism. The prosperity which one expected to find reflected column after column turns out to be doubtful or more than doubtful. Let us take this particular morning as a concrete instance, since the news is largely national and local. It is Monday morning, and one would expect some- thing of the world a little better than the aver- age, since the weather of late has been good and yesterday was a rest-day. On the first page one reads an account of the arrest of two men charged with murder ; the assault and robbery of two men in Lynn ; the shooting of a man in Maine ; the arrest of a millionaire swindler in New York ; the probability of a large strike among the mill hands at Lowell; the investigation of 245 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE election frauds in Boston ; the shooting of a girl by her lover down in Providence. The other pages, though not devoid of murder and assault, are less given over to deeds of violence. As it is Monday, one page is devoted to sermons, of which it cannot be said that all are in taste, since the names of at least two private persons still living are used to point a moral. The editorial page is more cheery, though even here one reads sepa- rate articles on doubtful evidence ; industrial dis- turbances ; injunctions ; the degradation of a great city ; a United States Senator who is unable to grasp economic questions, and the continued wrong-doing of Pennsylvania. Then follows a long article on national affairs, in which it is stated that ^ there is no more misleading, deceiv- ing, wholly selfish mental atmosphere in the country than that of Washington,' — which is miaking things rather bad at the centre. There is much else in the paper that is non-committal, or even meritorious, such as the acquisition of a famous picture by the Museum, but taking the whole twelve pages, one is shocked to find that the major part of the news is news of violence and disorder, — burglary, arson, murder, window- smashing, strikes, assaults, municipal corruption, street-shooting, and the like. Such is the picture of our prosperity as pre- sented by the newspaper. And it must be re- 246 SOCIAL WELFARE membered that I am writing in what every one concedes to be very prosperous times, on the very day, indeed, when one of our industrial monopolies writes out a quarterly dividend of eight millions for one shareholder and three millions for another. It cannot be said that this picture of American manners and morals pre- sents either social welfare or individual hap- piness. Nor can one doubt the trustworthiness of the picture, since it comes to us at first hand. Coming back now from this not very encour- aging excursion into the concrete to a more abstract and general treatment, it must be re- membered that the test of prosperity, of social welfare, is a definite and ascertainable standard. The community which fails of human happiness cannot boast of social welfare. Prosperity, to be genuine, must be vouched for, not by well-fed and comfortable on-lookers, not by partisan news- papers, not by demagogues bent on flattering the mass of voters, not even by the outcry of the multitude, but by something much more fun- damental, — by the happiness of myself and neighbors. And this happiness of ours depends upon our human wealth, — our health and beauty and accomplishment, — upon the ideality of our relations with other persons, upon the charm and wholesomeness of our surroundings, upon the 247 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE significance and reasonableness of our daily toil, upon the satisfactions of our leisure hours, upon the reverence of our intercourse with the unseen, upon our attitude towards life generally. All who work for the furtherance of social welfare doubtless work in a vague way for just these ends. Certainly no one would deny them. All friends of civilization mean eventually to get around to persons. But meanwhile, the direct concern of the majority is for things, for the things which they imagine ought to mean good fortune for the individual. This is the fatal defect in much of our public activity, in our phi- lanthropy, in our legislation, in our attempts at neighborliness, in our dealings with our own family, even with ourselves. It is the radical defect in the social part of our morality. What, for example, is the common acceptation of the attractive term, ^ good times ' ? Does it mean that the national life is marked by a sound happi- ness ; that our men and women and children are beautiful, lovable persons ; that there has just been some promising advance in education ; that a magnificent picture has been painted, a noble symphony composed, a great book writ- ten ; that our cities and suburbs and farmyards have thrown off their squalor and put on beauty; that religion has received widespread application in the affairs of daily life ; that the nation has 248 SOCIAL WELFARE surpassed other nations in justice and magnan- imity ; that America has been quickened and inspired along the line of a more godlike emo- tion and thought and deed, expanded in effi- ciency and worth ? So promising a situation as this would surely deserve to be called ' good times.' But it seems that the term, for all its pleasant sound, means nothing so delightful and human as this. What it does mean is an expan- sive state of the financial mind, stocks booming, profits large, wages tolerable, men and women and even children working long hours in fac- tory, mill, and mine, — in a word, tremendous human fatigue. It means unrest and excitement, with a curious inflation of values. It means so many miles of railroad built, such and such gross tonnage at our several ports, so much manipulation of products. It means this and much else, but all of it material, all measured in terms of things, big performance in wood and metal, brick and stone, with that sentimental trifle, human happiness, not counted in. One who is not blinded by the excitement of the game cannot look soberly upon such a mani- festation of national life and call it good. Nor can one call the times which produce it good. Our fears may be temporarily hushed by the spectacle of so much wealth, the prospect of such unlimited and meaningless toil, the assurance of 249 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE a continuance of physical life, the holding of a ticket, probably blank, in the industrial lottery. But the heart is not satisfied. The better part of the man is not fed and nourished. In the real things of life there is widespread poverty, in spite of this cheery cry of good times. Even if one accepted this sort of prosperity, and gloried in it, there remains the unavoidable reflection that, as a matter of statistical certainty, the times to-morrow will be bad. Social welfare, resting on the sole foundation of things, seems destined to this perpetual see-saw, plenty and drought, drought and plenty, but in neither case any great show of happiness. Familiarity with social wretchedness breeds a certain indifference. The absence of happiness is accepted as a matter of course, and is even jus- tified by morbid and sickly souls as inevitable and salutary. But, the scales once fallen from our eyes, we shall blush for our indifference. Social welfare, unchastened by the idea of indi- vidual good fortune, is a hideous thing, and opens the door to as many mischiefs as the most unbridled self-indulgence of individuals. The offenders are also individuals, and must be indi- viduals, since these alone are capable of action, but they are individuals under the dominance of a false idea, and upheld by an uninstructed pub- lic opinion. So long as we all hold to the fallacy 250 SOCIAL WELFARE that prosperity is impersonal and material instead of being personal and spiritual, is a wealth in things instead of a wealth in persons, we shall go on consenting to the sacrifice of individuals, to our own sacrifice if we have not the wit to resist, for we shall all want this so-called pros- perity to continue. On all sides one sees this sacrifice, this virtual suicide from the point of view of the individual, this virtual murder from the point of view of society. But the popular verdict is not so clarifying. It has things in mind, not persons, and declares that the victim died at his post, died at his post of duty, — the man who esteemed the bookkeeping of some altogether unimportant and unnecessary firm or corporation more sacred than his own health and life ; the factory worker who chose poison and wages in place of wholesome outdoor life on his own initiative; the Tommy Atkins who played soldier and let himself be shot in some commer- cial war or debt-collecting enterprise in the trop- ics ; the whole army of persons laying down their health and sanity and life on the altar of things, in the service of false causes. It is our too great familiarity with this tragedy of the milHons that makes us indifferent. But there come moments of keener moral vision. After a wholesome summer in the open, the re- turn to town means for sensitive souls a distinct 251 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE illness, a species of acclimatization fever brought on not alone by the bad air and bad smell of the city, but still more by the spectacle of human misery that one sees on all sides, — human misery and degradation, the wan, pinched faces of tired men and women and children, the pathetic droop of the shoulders, the suffering eyes. Or, if one be so fortunate as to live in the country among more agreeable sights and sounds, the occasional journey to town, if it take place during the so- called ' rush hours,' and especially the night rush hours, when the burden and heat of the hard day have left their tragic impress on the faces of the workers, even this passing contact produces a spiritual heart-failure, and makes one wonder how anything so desirable as social wel- fare can be gained from such evident personal poverty. And on a holiday, as we all know, gentler folk keep their children and womenkind at home, for they like neither the manners nor the morals of the multitude. These are not agreeable pictures, and there are many comfortable and well-to-do persons who not only shut their eyes very tight to them, but feel an open impatience with those who de- cline to do the same. This established order, so full of comfort and luxury and play for the profit-takers, has been incorporated by many with the thirty-nine articles, and made an object 252 ^ OF THE UNIVERSI SOCIAL WELFARE " of almost religious belief. It becomes profane to question the beneficence of a regime which means the piling-up of material wealth at the cost of human health and honor and happiness and life, for this material wealth, this big per- formance in things, is the accredited symbol of prosperity, of ' good times,* of social welfare. This sort of brute prosperity, material achieve-, ment at the price of human well-being, rests upon an idea, and can be reformed and humanized only by recasting the idea. The present indus- trial world, with its vast equipment of things, with its apparatus costing a hundred times more than the habitations and personal equipment of the human workers, seems well intrenched. But it is held together by something at once more powerful and more easily dissolved than nails and cement and tie-rods, — it is held together by the consenting idea. Once withdraw this consent, and the fabric vanishes. Many proposed recastings of the welfare idea have been thrown aside by the practical world as idle sentiment, the tiresome vagaries of dreamers, and some of these recastings, despite their good intention, have deserved precisely such a fate. But the judgment of morality, the impartial, bal- anced, unemotional measuring-rod of human con- duct, may not be disposed of in this way. And morality, as we have seen, is the compound of 253 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE efficiency and worth, the successful adjustment of human activity to the attainment of an individ- ual good fortune, a personal happiness so gen- uine and universal as to deserve collectively the name of social welfare. Prosperity, as commonly conceived, is an out- and-out denial of morality, for it is not expressed in the essential moral terms. It is not expressed in terms of human emotion, of genuine welfare, but in the impossible terms of accumulation. The things which now represent prosperity can- not logically represent it, for at best they are only means, and cannot by any sophism be made to figure as ends. It takes only a little reflec- tion to perceive the impossibility of the standard. If our wealth of things were so distributed, and possessed the necessary utility and beauty to make our people really happy, then the things them- selves might stand as the outward symbols of this inner contentment. But the most unob- servant of us know that this is not the present state of affairs. We know very well that the ma- jority of the things produced are not beautiful, not even useful, that the tenure of possession is precarious even for those financially on top, that investments are roses with very large thorns to them, that distribution does not follow a moral formula, that most of our people lead a hand-to- mouth existence in hired tenements so squalid 254 SOCIAL WELFARE and repulsive that they might fitly be the sym- bol of unhappiness. Still more to the point, we all know that a wealth of things may go along with happiness, but does not produce it. Our so-called wealthy persons, as a class, are not par- ticularly happy persons. Genuine good fortune demands as a basis the material possessions essen- tial to health and comfort, but it is primarily an attitude of mind, something better served by human wealth — strength and beauty and accom- plishment and goodness — than by any amount of accumulated things. The current idea of prosperity being quite untenable and indefensible, it remains for moral- ity to point out the truer welfare, and to indicate a practical method by which it may be gained. If we accept the moral idea of welfare already suggested, the idea which makes prosperity per- sonal and human rather than impersonal and material, the idea that the public good consists in nothing more occult than individual good for- tune so chastened and informed as to be genuine happiness, then it is very clear that the moral pursuit of social welfare, of prosperity, is first and last and always the pursuit of human wealth. Social welfare is not a fixed goal. It is a process, the making a human world more human. Let our people once lay firm hold upon the idea that life is the sacred possession, the perfecting of 255 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE life the real wealth, and that false idea of pros- perity which we as a nation are now following, the false idea which leads to our present violence and disorder, becomes at once impossible, and the new and better day has dawned. It is both unprofitable and unjust to hold any one class, or any institution, or any industrial combination, or any aspect of legislation, respon- sible for the immense human disaster which is to-day the portion of the great majority of our people. The exploiters and the exploited both consent to the idea. In reality, they are prison- ers of the same false standard ; each man is his own jailer. Emancipation cannot come by any general proclamation. The work of liberation must be individual, must come as a personal sal- vation. It is only one by one that we can enter the kingdom of heaven. The kingdom may not be taken by violence. We may not proclaim it as the result of a mass meeting. The matters of real concern in America to-day are those quiet forces which are at work changing men's ideas. Each one of us who discovers in what gen- uine good fortune consists, and is faithful to the vision, has done his utmost in promoting social welfare. Yet there is much corporate action in which man appears to operate impersonally. In legisla- tion, in domestic matters, in teaching, in working, 256 SOCIAL WELFARE in the mite which each contributes to public opinion, we are called upon to satisfy the demands of a general welfare rather than of an individual good fortune. But however much obscured, the old moral requirements remain inviolate. Social welfare is a meaningless term unless expressed as individual good fortune, and no fortune is good unless it be individual and self -chosen. We make a sad mess of it in our corporate action when we neglect either one of these seemingly difficult conditions. We have seen how great the disas- ter is when we omit human happiness, and it is equally great when we try to make others happy according to our own notions of happiness. As Miss Etchingham remarks, people are amused only by what amuses them. So we must always be harking back to the salutary restraint of the Prologue, that people are satisfied only by what satisfies them. But just as it is darkest before the dawn, so the very confusion and tangle of this situation prepares the solution, — there is only one path to social welfare, and that is the liberation of the individual to work out his own good fortune, unhampered by any one, unhamper- ing any one. In a word, the cardinal virtue of society, the essential condition of welfare, is Freedom, No body of men, whether grave senators or hilarious representatives, sober churchmen or 257 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE learned schoolmasters, can specify my good for- tune, can bring it to me ready made, can bestow it upon me, or can keep me out of it. They can help me discover in what good fortune properly consists, and by removing obstacles and devel- oping opportunities, they can help me attain it, but that is all. Each man must settle his own accounts with the universe. It is essentially an individual thing to live, an affair between nature and man, not between nature and men. It is a unique adventure, in which defeat is certain if a man decline to meet Hfe single-handed, to face the adventure in the awful solitude of his own personality. The one proper function of all public activity is liberation, not prescription, and this whether the activity come under the head of church or state, school or family, industry or art. The work of social welfare is the work of bringing freedom. It is for each individual to work out his own salvation. No one can do it for him. No system of patronage, no imposing of ideals on the part of one class towards another, no im- perial rule, however beneficent, no paternalism, no patting on the back, no coddling, no self- constituted providence, can take the place of sturdy, manly independence. Even the mistakes of independence are more valuable and more educative than the noiseless, perfect mechanism 258 SOCIAL WELFARE of an outwardly imposed rule. With all its blun- dering, democracy is better than imperialism. It is worth remarking that in the Garden of Eden there was no fence around the tree of the know- ledge of good and evil. Public morality has always this double aspect, — a negative side, the removing of obstacles ; and a positive side, the setting up of opportuni- ties. Freedom includes these affirmations quite as strenuously as the negations. Progress is in- deed just this broader interpretation. Freedom is a very idle word if it mean only the absence of detaining hands and prison walls. It must include helping hands and the possession of the instruments necessary to the carrying out of life's purposes. This giving flexibility — a very whole- some and legitimate flexibility — to our idea of freedom transforms what might otherwise be a too rigid cardinal virtue of the social type into the high morality of a general helpful attitude of mind, just as the giving flexibility to justice or charity or love enlarges any one of these car- dinal virtues into the full measure of individual morality. On the negative side of freedom, public moral- ity evidently requires non-interference for each individual. He must be free in all matters of dress, diet, shelter, occupation, belief, speech, in buying and selling, in sending and receiving 259 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE intelligence, in the transportation of himself and his belongings, in marriage and friendship, in the protection of person and property. In all these and similar matters, the individual must not be interfered with, nor must he interfere with others. In all matters that concern himself alone, — the list is very short, however — he may properly claim the right of doing as he pleases. In aU matters that concern others, — the much longer list, — he may proceed only with the free per- mission of the persons involved. Civilized socie- ties make some approach to the fulfillment of this negative side of morality, the police function. But the success in our own country is still very partial, how partial may be realized by the study of a single day's events, or by that somewhat dis- couraging study of the newspaper attempted in the earlier part of the chapter. In America, a man is nominally free in dress, diet, shelter, occu- pation, belief, and speech, with the proper restric- tions that some dress is required of him in public, his shelter may not be a menace to surrounding structures, his occupation may not pollute the air or highway, or his speech create uproar and dis- order. Curiously, he is not free in his buying and selling. The state sets up a protective tariff, not to provide a revenue for the carrying out of its own approved activities, but for the express pur- pose of interfering with free trade. The motive 260 SOCIAL WELFARE, is not personal aggression, but an application of the belief that prosperity is impersonal and mate- rial, and may be furthered by paternal interfer- ence. The policy has been defended by able writers, but morally belongs to a class of mediaeval prohibitions which we are rapidly outgrowing because the doctrine of social freedom shows them to be indefensible. In matters of intercourse and transportation, a man is nominally free, and in his personal rela- tions, but he has little assurance of protection to either his person or property. In to-day's paper, to turn once more to our accepted mirror of the good times upon which we are fallen, one reads of a highly respectable passenger shot dead by masked robbers on a trolley car near Los Angeles, and the railroad company offering a reward of a thousand dollars apiece for the apprehension of the murderers, so little assured is it that the state will manage the business successfully. In the matter of property, there are few of us will- ing to carry any amount of money about us, or to keep it in the house. We have locks on all our doors, fasteners on all our windows, burglar alarms in unexpected places. We hire private watchmen, we have recourse to private detectives, we keep our own eyes open for anything that is suspicious. It cannot be said that we are in a position .to press our civilization upon other 261 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE peoples when our own daily home life is still so touched with barbarism. In its negative or police function, our public morality leaves much to be desired. The setting up of opportunities, the positive side of social welfare, is naturally a later devel- opment than the more obvious police function. In America and elsewhere, society has made a brave beginning. Freedom interpreted positively means the liberation of man from the tyranny of things, from time and distance, ignorance and disease, privation and disaster. It means the open- ing of wider fields of activity for work and play and research, the making possible of a larger life. In a broad way it may be said that anarchy and socialism represent the negative and positive aspects of freedom. Anarchy lays undue stress upon non-interference ; socialism lays large stress upon opportunity. Both are capable of an ex- treme statement which carries them quite outside of social welfare. But both are capable of a rational interpretation which makes them neces- sary elements of freedom. It is interesting to note that modern society, as it grows in morality, shows a distinct tendency to realize the best in these apparently irreconcilable movements. As a matter of actual material achievement, society has perhaps gained its widest positive vic- tory in the line of intercourse, the sending and 262 SOCIAL WELFARE receiving of intelligence, and in the transporta- tion of small goods. For a purely nominal sum, the post-of&ce annihilates distance for letters and parcels, and adds immensely to welfare and opportunity. The telegraph and telephone, joint annihilators of distance and time, are not yet installed as social liberators, but remain efficient servitors with chained hands and feet, saturated with the idea of private profit rather than the idea of public liberation. The railroads are in much the same case, annihilators of distance for both persons and goods, but still charging what the traffic will bear, and untouched by the idea of their larger function of liberation. If telegraph and telephone and railroad could exist as private enterprises, one could properly demand no public function of them, however desirable it might be on the ground of social opportunity. But they can exist at all only by virtue of a public right which is too high a pre- rogative to be justly delegated to any private person or corporation, — the right of eminent domain. In surrendering his land, possibly his very house, in consenting that the highways be used for the public utilities, the individual has ample right to demand that these utihties shall be administered wholly for the public good. When they are administered for private profit, social morality is violated. 263 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE In the way of positive liberation, society is also doing strenuous work in abolishing igno- rance and furthering knowledge, a work carried out by the public school, public surveys, scien- tific bureaus, experiment stations, and all the increasing machinery of socially supported inves- tigation. This work is sometimes condemned as unwarranted paternalism, and may indeed easily err on that side, but at its best and looked at in a broader spirit, it may justly be welcomed as furthering the freedom of opportunity, and so contributing to social welfare. The same may also be said of public highways, public illumina- tion, playgrounds, parks, baths, sanitation, light- houses, river and harbor improvements, and all the other enginery by which society as a whole unites to diminish the tyranny of things and increase the positive freedom of the individual. The whole question is a very large one, and its details demand always the judicial temper. What we all want, anarchist and socialist alike, what morality wants, is the largest possible measure of true freedom. The discussion does not turn upon the social end, but upon the method. This can hardly be known a priori ; it must be dis- covered by experience. In its earher and less- informed stages, the social work of enlarging opportunity will doubtless be accompanied by a certain amount of aggression. This may be tol- 264 SOCIAL WELFARE erated en route, until we learn better, but never as a permanent policy. The true test is not that coarse generalization so often applied to social brutalities, — the good of the many at the ex- pense of the few, — for no moral man would be willing to accept advantages at such a price. Even if he were, his diminished social sensitive- ness would in the end more than compensate for any supposed initial good. It is not unfair to compare this sort of social action with what we have already considered and condemned, the He of convenience. Indeed, the same generalization may properly hold that the good of any individual member of the group may be morally sacrificed only under those extraordinary circumstances when the group as a whole is plainly in jeop- ardy. With the progress of civilization, such circumstances are increasingly rare. Society in the long run can deal with its criminal and insane classes without asking further sacrifice from the individual than his share of taxation. In the very rare case of an invading army, the vol- unteers who fall in the social defense may properly be said to have gained self-realization rather than to have suffered self-sacrifice. The true test of all this debated social action is the moral test of social welfare. Warfare is plainly outside the social order. Within the social order, welfare is never gained at the sacrifice of the individual. ^65 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE In our American handling of these social problems of opportunity, two separate adminis- trative methods are employed. All the social activities now undertaken are considered to be for the public good, but they are supported in two distinctly different ways. The post-office, in spite of the fact that, by promoting intercourse and disseminating information, it serves society quite as vitally as any of the other public agencies, is nevertheless practically self-supporting. Those who use the post-office pay for it, and pay in exact proportion to their use. The other public agencies are supported by taxation. The indi- vidual pays for their support quite regardless of his personal use of them. Yet it cannot be said that they promote welfare any more keenly than the post-office does. In many cases it might reasonably be contended that they are less gen- erally useful. This situation certainly suggests the question as to why all these social agencies are not on the same administrative footing, — why the post-office is not, like the pubHc school and all the rest, supported by taxation ; or why the public school and all the rest are not, like the post-office, supported by fixed, nominal charges. There seems no reason in the case of such similar utilities why the method of support should not be uniform. Which uniformity is desirable is another question. Morality can suggest only that while the 266 SOCIAL WELFARE ideal of self-support better satisfies the require- ments of formal justice, — that those who make use of social opportunities should pay for them proportionately, — the ultimate question of right and wrong can emerge only from an increased social experience. It may be, as the taxationist contends, that all individual good fortune is so heightened by any general increase of oppor- tunity and resulting intelligence that the contri- butions levied by society are abundantly justified. If this be so, the principle is capable of almost indefinite extension, and we stand at the be- ginning of a social history more intricate and remarkable than all the political history that has gone before. Whatever method may finally declare itself as the most ef&cient, the moral end remains the same, — individual good fortune. To accept this human view of welfare is to part company once for all with that profit-tainted view of society which now makes life so unnecessarily difficult. The function of a moral society is the setting up of opportunity, the liberation of the individ- ual from the tyranny of things, the minimizing of effort in the sustenance of mere animal life, food and clothing and shelter, so that the human life may begin the quest of strength and beauty and accomplishment and goodness. All social activities that make for this human wealth are 267 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE moral : all that make against human wealth are immoral. But just as prosperity is individual, and not at all the mass phenomenon that it is commonly represented to be, so the work of socializing and humanizing the world is essentially indi- vidual, not a mass effort directed to mass results. It must be carried out by individuals operating upon individuals. And the first individual to begin with is manifestly one's self. The pledge of good fortune might helpfully read : — 1. I promise to treat myself as an individual ; to seek the good fortune of strength and beauty and accomplishment and goodness ; to place human considerations before material considera- tions ; to decline all profit gained at the expense of men and women and children ; to work only for human wealth. 2. I promise to treat others as individuals ; to help them in their quest of personal good for- tune ; to put no obstacles in their way ; to remove all obstacles that I can ; to treat their efforts after perfection seriously and sympathetically; to avoid personal ridicule and disparagement ; to cultivate a universal comradeship. 3. I promise to further social welfare ; to pro- mote the idea that prosperity consists essentially in persons and only incidentally in things ; to be true to this faith in public and in private, in 268 SOCIAL WELFARE work and in play ; to help, so far as I can, the freedom of non-interference and of opportunity ; to seek in all social intercourse the seriousness and beauty of a high purpose. Such a pledge is essentially a unit pledge, for one's duties to the self, to the neighbor, to a more abstract society, are at heart one and the same thing, — an unfaltering regard for persons. Yet each relation sheds light upon the other relations, and makes the more complete morality possible. It is also true that the greatest moral obscurity is apt to prevail in those relations which affect persons with whom we do not come in personal contact. A man may lead a fairly clean life in his own person, may be reasonably just and con- siderate in his treatment of friends, acquaint- ances, servants, and yet fail most miserably in his dealings with that less personal public, whose hand he does not touch and whose eye he does not catch. This particular failure in morality is the one most natural to modern conditions. It is favored by the ' anonymousness ' of large cities, by the crowd of persons who serve us without ever being seen, by the magnitude of current business operations, by the substitution of corporations and trusts for more personal proprietors and firms. Modern inventions have favored this anonymousness, this impersonal; THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE wholesale way of conducting affairs. The rail- road, the telegraph, telephone, and cable, the ste- nographer, 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 South- ern 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 theoreti- cally, and if history bear credible witness, impos- sible practically. It is bread and the circus and doomsday. Instead of things being in the saddle and riding mankind, as Emerson justly com- plains, we must reverse the matter and have man- kind securely in the saddle. 270 SOCIAL WELFARE 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 com- mit 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 cer- tain 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 cardi- nal 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 wel- fare. But public morality is that general attitude towards public questions which enables the indi- vidual 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 com- munity which could make the central, dominant motive in all its activity an intelligent desire to further human wealth, to promote the freedom of 271 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE non-interference and opportunity, would attain quite unavoidably its own more abstract end, social welfare. But after all, the problem is indi- vidual. 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 indi- vidual 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 neces- sary. The nation is made up of a multitude of men, and though the individual man dies, man- kind 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 272 SOCIAL WELFARE 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 un- worthy 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 pur- suit 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- TIONS CIVILIZATION has developed four institu- tions now so well organized and so appar- ently 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 diffi- cult for him to imagine a life devoid of an}'^ 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 institu- tions have a sacredness which well-nigh excludes them from discussion, and makes every proposi- tion 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 insti- tute 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 274 THE FOUR INSTITUTIONS be at any time dispensed with. Were the pe- culiar institutions which now officially embody these elements essential to their preservation and expansion, all moral persons would unhesitat- ingly ascribe to the institutions themselves the same permanent and abiding character. But we have in our midst a company of alert, and on the whole intelligent persons, who unre- servedly admit the first series of facts, that affec- tion, opportunity, duty, and right are necessary elements of the moral life, but who resolutely deny the second series of facts, that the insti- tutions which have fostered these elements in the past are necessary to their preservation in the present or their expansion in the future. The state, the church, the school, and the family have all been called in question. The philosophical anarchist — not at all to be confounded with the gentlemen who carry a red flag — has asked for the abolition of the state on the ground that it is now an outgrown institution, which evolution has distinctly left behind, and that the next step for- ward is to be into a still more unqualified indi- vidual freedom. The free-religious man, as well as the agnostic, would abolish the church on the ground that it stands between man and the un- known with a ritual which obstructs rather than promotes the soul's growth, and brings too defi- nite news from a world essentially unknowable. 275 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE A few radical thinkers would have done with the school as a humanly crippling institution, and would send mankind back to the natural dis- cipline of daily work and play. A considerable company of men and women of pronounced indi- vidualistic tendencies would do away with the family on the ground that it is an obstruction to individual development and growth. Between these extreme groups — the conserva- tives, who would keep everything just as it is, and the radicals, who would abolish one or more of the established institutions — there is natu- rally a wide gulf fixed ; but whatever our own predilections, it would be disloyal to the fact to believe that all virtue is to be found on either side. Conservatism, being the creed of the ma- jority, needs the less defending. It always has been the home of gentleness and worth, as well as of narrow-mindedness and bigotry. Radical- ism, the creed of the minority, needs the more consideration, for it has necessarily harbored strange bedfellows, those below the social level and those above, degenerates and saints. Since partisanship for any or all of the four institu- tions touches the deepest feelings and prejudices, it may give a desirable mental flexibility to remember that the typical opponents of each institution have been among the best minds of the two hemispheres. Anarchy is represented by 276 THE FOUR INSTITUTIONS so distinguished an advocate as Prince Kropot- kin ; free religion by no less a person than Mr. Emerson ; anti-scholasticism by so cosmopolitan a force as Count Tolstoy. It is more difficult to select an admirable example of the anti-family cult, for too often its votaries have become en- meshed in the scandals of free love, but it is per- missible to point out that in every community some of the best types of men and women are to be found among those persons who have not, as the world phrases it, been disappointed in love, but who have deliberately elected bachelorhood and spinsterhood as the more favorable condition for the unfolding of the spirit. And their com- pany appears to be increasing. It is also signifi- cant that the transient family as opposed to the fixed family is more common than formerly. On all sides one sees experiments in adoption, not alone of sons and daughters, but also of brothers and sisters, and other relatives, as well as the many voluntary associations between men and men, and women and women. Mr. Meredith's suggestion of ten-year marriages, whether we take it seriously or not, is at least significant of a growing feeling that family life may be a tyranny as well as a blessing. Perhaps Mr. Mere- dith may serve as our eminent exponent of the family seceder. We have tried to present morality as a dispas- 277 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE sionate scrutiny of human life, bent on seeing things as they are, and so discovering what is essentially right and what is essentially wrong in human conduct. Nowhere will this dispassion- ateness be more needed than in attempting to measure the morality of family, school, church, and state, and especially if the measurement is to be at all thoroughgoing. All these institu- tions have aroused in their defense, or for their attack, the fiercest passions of which mankind is capable. But morality does not share this pas- sion. To morality, none of these four institu- tions is sacred in itself. They are simply modes of organized conduct, and as such are open to the criticism of efficiency and worth. If they make individuals larger and happier persons, if they make the social tissue sounder, they are moral institutions. If they fail to do this, or operate in a reverse direction, they are immoral. Historically, all these institutions have been both moral and immoral. As a present experience they are both moral and immoral. There have been and are families where the affections are starved and degraded ; schools where opportuni- ties are withheld ; churches where duties are obscured ; states where justice is denied. In the face of these past and present facts, it is idle to proclaim such institutions sacred. The most that one can say is that the ideal family is sacred, the 278 THE FOUR INSTITUTIONS ideal school, the ideal church, the ideal state. But this is to pass into that region of absolute moralities, where the human spirit, however free its respiration, must forever remember that it is breathing the atmosphere of what may be, rather than of what is. In reality, the family, school, church, and state are very human institutions, and are subject to the same frailties that all human conduct is subject to. To remove them from wholesome and thoroughgoing criticism is to make impossible the higher excellence of which each is capable. But even if they all came up to the ideal requirements, it would still be an immorality to regard the institutions as final- ities. For, meanwhile, morality is advancing to new insights and higher standards. It is salutary to remember that no institution can be both static and moral. If there be a super-family, a super-school, a super-church, a super-state, which will further individual good fortune and social welfare more efficiently than their established prototypes further them, then it is to the new order that morality is pledged. Historically, we have come out of positions once approved and canonized into positions now recognized to be distinctly superior. Much of the heart-burn of old age comes about from a failure to recognize the changed face of duty. The younger genera- tion does not do what the older generation did, 279 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE and ought not to do it. False judgments are reached by applying outworn standards to pre- sent events. In the same way, false historical estimates are made current by applying con- temporary standards to bygone events. Both mistakes tend to belittle the genuine morality of the world. It is simply, then, as contemporary hum^ con- duct that we propose to examine very briefly the morality of these institutions, beginning with the most intimate and concrete of the four, — the family. As society is now constituted, all children of normal and approved circumstance are born in wedlock, and so begin life as members of a fam- ily. The relations of parent and child, brother and sister, thus set up are regarded by the state as permanent, and are terminated only at death. The normal man has no experience of life out- side of the family, and can only speculate as to what it would mean to be free from both the obligations and opportunities of family life. He has mother and father, brothers and sisters. Outside of this intimate group he has the more diluted family ties represented by grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins, and later in life, per- haps nieces and nephews. So far, these relation- ships are quite involuntary. They are the ties which a man does not elect, however precious 280 THE FOUR INSTITUTIONS he may count them, but to which he is merely born. The average man is thus a member of a particular human group, and stands to other members of the same group in relations of di- minishing intimacy. With sensitive, high-minded men, blood is always thicker than water. There is an agreeable sense of family obligation which would make a man alive to the needs of those nearest of kin. This concern will naturally be more alert in regard to one's immediate family, — mother and father, sister and brother. It is the result of complex feeling. At its best, it comes from that genuine and deep affection which is prompted by a knowledge of the excellence of its object, an excellence better perc^ved in the intimacy of family life than by an outside and alien observer. Later, there comes a desire to make some return for the large benefits enjoyed as a member of the group, for the love and loyal devotion which made early life so full of hap- piness and opportunity. In more calculating minds, there is perhaps a feeling of mutual de- pendence ; a man would admit family claims in the same spirit that he would expect, in case of need, to have them admitted by other members of the group. In happy family life these feel- ings are seldom or never analyzed. The relation is so natural and so beneficent that it is taken 281 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE for granted, and each tries to do his share with- out at all asking why. The family relation and its obligations have become instincts. Those who look persistently on this bright and beautiful side of family life are impatient of all doubt as to its morality and social utility. Yet there is a darker side which morality may not ignore. That very intimacy of family life which makes possible the best fruits of the affections also makes possible the exercise of the most un- bridled selfishness. Parents of smaller mind are especially prone to violate the principle of free- dom — the cardinal social virtue — in dealing with their own children. Often the injustice is due to a failure of the imagination. It is difficult to realize that these children, once so helpless, once so dependent upon the wise decision of father and mother for each small event of the day, are now distinct personalities, and are devel- oping needs of increasing urgency. Sometimes, with the best intentions in the world, parents grow into a tyrannous attitude of mind, which makes any moral relation impossible. That chil- dren have distinct rights, rights which become more imperative with each added year, is a mod- ern conception of large moral value. Looking at the matter solely from the child's point of view (since we are now considering only the involun- tary family relations), it is clear that as he was 282 THE FOUR INSTITUTIONS brought into the world without his own consent, without in any way being consulted, there can be no defensible theory of contract, of reciprocal obligation on the part of the child. In early years all the obligation is properly on the side of the parents. Little children, through their active affections, are led to give much, but it must be accepted as an out-and-out gift, not as a pretty duty. A reciprocal obligation on their part can be created later in life only when the parents by wise care and forethought have rendered a ser- vice worthy of honest gratitude. The obedience of children, the so-called duty of children to pai^ ents, are social conveniences of a high order, but they may easily be stretched to the point of out-and-out immorality. A wise parent will properly exercise a large control over his own child to keep him from harm, and to open wide the door of opportunity. But the limit of this control is determined by the child's own good. Such control may never be morally exercised for the parent's good, may never be arbitrary, and may never extend be- yond the narrow territory of necessity. The ultimate problem of each child is to work out his own destiny, to achieve his own indi- vidual good fortune. Parental control starts out necessarily with an absolutism limited only by the prohibition to take life, but morally this 283 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE control must be gradually given over, and just as soon as safety allows, must be given over alto- gether. The son and daughter have not only the right, but the moral obligation, to decide for themselves all the questions of adult life, — whom they will marry, what they will do, where they will live, what they will believe, with whom they will associate. All wise parents would wish, by heredity and early training and later counsel, to help their children to determine wisely these vital questions, just as children happily impressed with the goodness and wisdom of their parents would naturally seek their advice and guidance in such matters. But parents may give advice only under precisely the same conditions that other wise and interested persons may give it, — that is to say, without insisting that the advice be followed. And young people may heed advice only when it comes without compulsion, and leaves unim- paired their own inalienable moral responsibility. When the necessary coercion of earlier years is carried over into young manhood and woman- hood, the family relation becomes distinctly im- moral both for those who exercise the pressure and those who submit to it. Human life is too august a thing to be delegated to another, even to a parent, or brother, or sister. Life belongs, inviolate, to the liver of the life. This immoral family pressure is more apt to be tyrannous with 284 THE FOUR INSTITUTIONS girls than with boys, and more apt to be yielded to. Somehow it is realized that boys must make their own way in the world, and that leading- strings from either parent mean ultimate decrease of power and character. And boys have a way of pressing this claim, so that it may not be read- ily ignored. In the case of children of mature years who remain at home and accept support from the family purse, there is naturally a greater obligation of compHance than in the case of chil- dren who are self-supporting, but the obligation is carried too far when it involves loss of spiritual independence. Even with the best of good feeling on all sides, family relations are difficult to adjust. To be successful, the adjustments must be made on strictly moral grounds, — an unfaltering respect for individual rights, an unfaltering assertion of individual integrity. Too often the family is an essentially immoral institution, where discourtesy, oppression, even brutality, are freely indulged in, where manners and morals appear as it were in undress. The very privacy of the family covers up much wrong-doing. It is notorious that busi- ness relations within the family are, on the whole, less successful and scrupulous than between strangers. That the family can be made the very condition for the display of all that is finest and most beautiful in human life, the nearest ap- 285 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE proach that man can make to a heaven on earth, makes any degradation and defilement of the family relations the more serious offense. These considerations apply primarily to the relations within the family group to which a man is born, the involuntary relations. The moral problem becomes vastly more delicate and com- plicated when we consider the family relations which a man creates for himself in marriage and parenthood. The relation between man and woman, as man and woman, is the most funda- mental of all human relations, for upon it depends the continuance of the race, as well as the hap- piness and perfection of the individuals them- selves. If the primitive morality of self-preserva- tion apply to society as well as to the individual, it is clear that the social tissue is sound only when it offers conditions favorable to the birth of a new generation, but it is a far cry from this statement to the preposterous doctrine that mar- riage and parenthood are therefore social duties. The whole question of marriage and parent- hood must be decided by men and women on purely individual grounds, and no decision is a priori moral. The nloral quality of the deci- sion depends upon circumstances. If marriage mean the deepening and broadening and height- ening of the individual life, as for many persons it undoubtedly does, and if wholesome, beautiful 286 THE FOUR INSTITUTIONS children can be brought forth in love and joy, then marriage and parenthood represent a genu- ine morality, and their omission involves the immorality of the second-best. In general, the possession of a normal function implies satisfaction and propriety in its exercise. The cycle of life for all organisms is the simple pentagon, birth, nutrition, growth, reproduction, death. In normal men and women, the reproduc- tive instinct is a part of the sound animal inher- itance, and obedience to it stands for the whole- some fulfillment of life's purposes. This instinct for parenthood is the basis of the family life. In the beginning, it may well have been a purely animal function. Potentially, however, it was an ideal basis, for in the intimacy of the family have grown up those sentiments and emotions which now glorify our human life. Reproduction, from the social point of view, remains the fundamental element in marriage. The old English law provides that a man may divorce his wife on the sole ground of barren- ness. But individually, the desire for children is only one out of many emotions, and in the case of the most developed men and women is not even the major one. Along with this reproduc- tive instinct, obscuring it, even supplanting it, go the more disinterested non-sexual love, the genu- ine comradeship, the community of intellectual 287 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE and spiritual interest, which at their best would separately make of marriage a high adventure in good fortune. Our older family life, even the family life of fifty years ago, was an autocracy, with the man as autocrat. Woman as the weaker vessel was given to man to do with according to his plea- sure. Both types remain, the family autocrat and the wife who affects womanly weakness and dis- parages a strong mind. But modern family hfe, at its best, has reached a higher moral plane than this. It is a sacred contract between two equal individuals, a man and a woman, and all that is voluntary within the family life, mainte- nance, opportunity, parenthood, is the result of free and unpersuaded consent. In such a moral union, parenthood will be exercised only when the conditions permit an expectation of well-born children, and the family circumstances give rea- sonable assurance of their decent maintenance. It is impossible to regulate the morality of fam- ily life from without. The state may insist upon monogamy, may prohibit wife-beating, may decree a decent support for wife and children, may com- pel a certain minimum of formal education, but the subtler part of morality, the finesse upon which the success of family life depends, rests with the man and woman. If there be no children, there is still partnership in a life larger and more com- 288 THE FOUR INSTITUTIONS plicated than either has yet known ; if there be children, the man and woman have become joint rulers in a little kingdom full not only of beauti- ful possibilities, but also of grave and difficult problems. And this situation is not one into which the man was born ; it is one that he has created for himself. Not even the fact that love is blind removes the individual responsibility. If a man cannot meet the complex duties of family life joyously and generously, becoming himself the larger and more moral person in the doing of them, then family hfe is not for him and must be given over with other immoralities. A grave social difficulty arises from the fact that men and women cannot know certainly their ap- titude or inaptitude for married life before the experiment is actually made, and the particular man and the particular woman are equally in the dark as to whether they are sufficiently suited to each other to make the experiment together with reasonable hope of success. The conditions of modern social life are more favorable for the development of a sentimental fancy than for the development of a genuine and abiding pas- sion. For, as a rule, men and women do not work together. They merely play together, and this means that they meet somewhat casually and intermittently. They see each other in the arti- ficial relations of life rather than the essential 389 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE ones. This is true of all classes, and perhaps particularly true of the idle social class. A pre- ference for automohiling over yachting, for dogs over horses, even for Browning over Tennyson, is not a sufficiently serious ground for successful family life. And it is a question whether, in our present industrial world, the absence of sincere living and high thinking on the part of most of our wage-takers does not incapacitate them for entering into anything like an ideal marriage. Considering the conditions under which the ma- jority of marriages are made, it is perhaps credit- able to our human nature that so many of them are even tolerably successful. But morality is not satisfied with the mere absence of open disaster, not even with what might be called a half suc- cess. The grand passion which might have been, the passion that turns a dull world into a para- dise, and men and women into gods ; the beauti- ful children which might have been, the children that bring light and glory into the humblest home ; the high comradeship which might have been, the comradeship that robs Hfe of its one hardly escapable tragedy of loneliness ; the spirit- ual consolation which might have been, the con- solation that gives courage and hope in the face of every disaster, — all this potential good stands as a constant rebuke to the threadbare thing which is. The family is peculiarly the institute of the 290 THE FOUR INSTITUTIONS affections, and in this life-giving atmosphere the best elements in our humanity come to flower and fruit. But when the affections die, family life is like a cold and dusty hearth on which the fire has clean gone out. Ideally speaking, the family has ceased to exist, and we are forced to ask our- selves whether the fact shall be frankly faced, or whether the form of family life shall at all hazards be preserved. This question of divorce is one of the most difficult with which the moralist is called upon to deal, not because there is no distinct right and wrong in the matter, but because there are conflicting duties to be considered and recon- ciled. The primal issue is between the husband and wife. Then there are the children to be con- sidered. So far it is a family affair. But outside the family there are two institutions with distinct points of view and unquestioned powers, — the state and the church. Under the stress and strain of domestic unhappiness, men and women are prone to regard the issue as individual, and to exclude as unwarrantable any interference from either state or church. Such a position would be morally justifiable, if state and church had not been concerned in the establishment of the family. In the majority of cases, both institutions were implicated. In the solemn crises of life — marriage, child- birth, death — the individual turns instinctively 291 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE to an institution whose earth-life transcends his own, and whose mission it is to stand for the eternal as opposed to the transient. He calls upon the church to consecrate his marriage, to christen his child, to bury his dead. These are deliberate acts, and may not be entered upon un reflectively. It is of the utmost importance that the church shall stand true and right on this question of divorce ; but that is not the present issue. The church service is not required by law. It is sought voluntarily. However wise or unwise the church position may be, the man who invokes the of&ces of the church stands morally committed to that position. If in the presence of God and the assembled company a man promises to take his wife for better, for worse, until death shall part, it is difficult to see how he can ever put her away without being himself forsworn. It may have been wrong to take such a far-reach- ing vow. It may have been wrong for the church to have exacted such a vow. Morality questions the propriety of all such spiritual mortgages. But the way out is not to make and break them. It is to avoid them. The church may either change its marriage service, or the indi- vidual may dispense with the service. If he invoke it, he inevitably accepts the position on which the service is founded. In all free coun- tries, a civil ceremony is all-sufficient to estab- 292 THE FOUR INSTITUTIONS lish the legality of a marriage. The relation of the church to family life is not official. Where the church is not called in at the establishment of the family, it very properly claims no authority over any proposed dissolution of the family. The state position is more fundamental. For a family to be recognized, it must have the sanc- tion of the state, and consequently an equally definite state sanction is necessary to dissolve the family. These requirements are held to be neces- sary by nearly all moral persons in order to safe- guard social welfare. A community can suffer hardly a greater human disaster than the capri- cious making and unmaking of family life. While state regulation may seem to interfere at times with individual ideas of good fortune, it is more than probable that the stability in affec- tion and duty which the regulation tends to set up is essential to the development of the high- est type of character, and consequently to the welfare of the individual himself. But state interference rests upon more defensible ground than this. As the institute of rights, the state is bound to look after the welfare of the other party to the family contract, the wife or the hus- band who may not desire such a dissolution of the partnership, and still more is the state bound to look out for the human and the property rights of the children. THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE Extreme individualists of undoubted moral character, as well as sensualists devoid of such character, have made the experiment of estab- lishing family life without state sanction. In such cases, the state assumes the same position that the church does regarding civil marriages. The state does not acknowledge such a union as the basis of family life, neither bestows nor with- holds its sanction, grants no rights to either the woman or her children, and continues quite impartially to deal with the members of such a group as individuals. In thus washing its hands of the whole matter, the state is undoubtedly guilty of a distinct social immorality. The state may well decline to interfere in the personal rela- tions of adult men and women, but the uncon- senting children who are the result of these relations have rights quite as imperative as those of the most respectable legitimate children. It is possible for a man and a woman of high character to live together, to have children, and to create without state sanction a true family which is at once moral and ideal. Circumstances are conceivable under which this would be the most moral thing to- do, as, for example, on a desert island, where there was neither priest to tie the knot nor state to declare it binding. It is not the sanction of any institution that makes a marriage moral or immoral. The progress of 294 THE FOUR INSTITUTIONS individual morality may some time make institu- tional sanction of the family life superfluous. The individuals who enter into marriage are the only ones who can idealize it and make it moral. But however broadly we may interpret these facts, they do not remove the present very grave objections to all irregular family relations. Tak- ing the unsanctioned union at its best, — a pure, high-minded man and woman, charming and beautiful children, — and it remains true that the example of such a family is socially very undesirable. Were all family groups estabHshed upon the same high plane, they would carry their own sanction, and no institutional sanction would be necessary. But the very persons most likely to take advantage of such an example are those for whom legal restrictions are most neces- sary. Few broad-minded persons question the individual purity and morality of George Eliot's life with G. H. Lewes, but most of them are, nevertheless, obliged to regard it as an unfortu- nate example. There is a still more serious objection. Putting this aspect of the question entirely aside, no high-minded man who knows anything of the world and its ways would be willing to subject the woman whom he cherishes above all persons in the world to the insults and humiliations which a society, less moral, if you please, than herself, but more conventional, would 295 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE be only too ready to heap upon her. Nor would he be willing to subject his children to the seri- ous and life-long disadvantages which, justly or unjustly, attach to the illegitimate. The state regulation is very slight, — the slightest consist- ent with social safety, — and does not interfere with the most complete idealization of family life. But were the burden many times as heavy, it would still be less than the price of disobedience. The state regards marriage as a partnership and the family as a contract. In South Carolina no divorce is permissible. The other common- wealths of the republic have provisions of vary- ing wisdom and justice for dissolving a partnership that proves impossible, and safeguarding as far as may be the interests of the children. It must be remembered that the scandals of the divorce court were created mainly before the cases reached that court. The abuses are due for the most part to the varying provisions of the law in our different commonwealths. A movement is now very properly on foot to make the law uniform throughout America. If marriage be a civil rather than a religious ceremony, the state is quite justified in both ratifying and annulling it. But the individual who appeals to the church as well as to the state remains morally bound by the larger vow. Any proposed dissolution of a legal family 296 THE FOUR INSTITUTIONS thus involves the state in all cases, and the church in the majority of cases. But the moral issue remains primarily with the individual man and the individual woman, and is concerned with the effect upon them and upon the children. The most insistent claim is that of the children, since the parents who brought them into the world are bound by the most sacred obHgations to further their material and spiritual welfare. In the majority of cases this is better accom- plished by holding the family together. Chil- dren need both a father's care and a mother's care, and in most cases it is a cruelty to separate them from either parent. Many a husband and wife are held together by such considerations as these. The children represent a positive obli- gation, a deliberately assumed obligation, and must have precedence over all considerations of the self. Where there are no children, the case is much simpler, but the morality of separation or divorce will still depend upon the nature of the marriage contract, and upon the possibilities of service and sympathy that may still exist. Mo- rality can pronounce no hard-and-fast judgments for or against dissolution. It depends wholly upon circumstances. As an organized mode of conduct, any given family will morally persist if it further the objects for which it was estab- lished, the development and happiness of the 297 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE father and mother, the welfare of the children. But the same family will morally dissolve just as soon as it becomes evident that these objects can be better furthered by its dissolution. The family touches so vitally all the events of normal Hfe, and is so thoroughly wrapped up with all that is most precious in that life, that as a personal experience it is happily to most of us a sacred institution, more sacred, indeed, than school or church or state. But it is salutary for all of us to remember that, morally speaking, the family is only a means to the unfolding and per- fecting of the human spirit, and is not in itself an end. It is sacred only as we ourselves, through our wise administration of its possibilities, make it sacred. The sole function of the family is to minister to the personal, human needs of its mem- bers. If it fail to do this, it is an immoral insti- tution. And it is a moral institution only so far as it makes men and women and children larger and better and happier persons. And finally, as lovers of morality, we must always be prepared to welcome any form of super-family which with still higher ef&ciency will promote the cause of human excellence. The school is so much less intimate and fun- damental than the family that it has never been invested with a similar sacredness. As ap insti- 298 THE FOUR INSTITUTIONS tution it covers all forms of orsfanized instruc- tion, from the kindergarten to the graduate department of the university, and has an anti- quity almost as great as that of the human race itself. The most primitive cave man teaching his children to fashion implements of stone was a schoolmaster, and the association a true school. But the form has heen so flexible and varied that we are prone to think of the school as a modern institution. Yet even as such, where it has been well organized, as in the case of the public school, there is discernible a tendency to forget that the school is a means, and to erect it into an end. In America, our worship of the public school is proverbial. In some quarters it would seem almost as if we need feel no concern about public abuses, for given time, and the pubHc school will mend them all ! But such talismanic use of an institution has never been attended with helpful results. No one who has studied the influence of the school would willingly behttle its tremendous utility, but as a mode of moral conduct, the school is merely a tool, a means to an end, a part of the method by which society achieves its purposes. As such, the school must manifest the two dimensions of morality, efficiency in its method and worth in its aim. It is easier to attain efficiency than it is to attain worth. The most penetrating criticism 299 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE of the public school, as it has developed in Amer- ica, is not so much in regard to its efficiency as it is in regard to its aim. The question of method is always pressing, but still more pressing is the question as to what work the school is pro- perly committed to. This involves much more than the barren details of schoolroom machinery with which school, committees commonly deal. It involves a sound philosophy of education, an insight into life. Without this inner clue, few discussions are more time- wasting and soul- wearying than the current discussions in educa- tion. But the problem of education becomes straight and clear as soon as it is handled as a moral issue, and the school is measured as con- duct. Whatever else it may be in addition, edu- cation is essentially an inner process, a change of heart, the revelation of a world larger and more beautiful than any we have yet known. In a word, it is the unfolding and perfecting of the human spirit. If we view education in this large way, it is clear that it is quite the same as that larger world-process which we call evolu- tion. It properly sums up the totality of change wrought in the human spirit by the passing of the days. Education cannot in any absolute sense be neglected. It proceeds in spite of us. For the world is always acting, penetrating through all our senses, and in the human heart 300 THE FOUR INSTITUTIONS and spirit the great reaction goes on forever, the reaction set up by the universe. In spite of bru- talities and retrogressions, the world-process as a whole has meant a good change of heart. As a broad process, evolution is operating to make our human world more human. So the world is the great schoolmaster, and men and women, boys and girls, are being educated ceaselessly and inevitably. Our school-process is but a part of this larger world-process, simply a conscious, human attempt to guide evolution more speedily and surely to its apparent goal. No discussion of education can be helpful or thoroughgoing which does not recognize this double aspect, this uncon- scious, natural process and this conscious, formal process. But the school does not have even a monopoly of the formal side of education. It shares this with the family, the church, the state, with all institutions and persons that consciously attempt to influence mankind. Education has been defined as the art of persuasion. The school may persuade boys and girls, men and women, into the larger life through the medium of language and science and mathematics and the humanities, but it is a part of human con- duct, and to be acceptable and approved must make for the same human wealth — for strength and beauty and accomplishment and goodness — that moral conduct makes for. 301 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE Taking education as a whole, the school-pro- cess is considerably the least important part of it. It is common to talk of the school, and particularly the public school, in exaggerated rhetoric. We never can take too keen an interest in its welfare. But we must always remember that human life is a unit experience. Until fam- ily relations and daily work and adult ambitions have been moralized and idealized, the school can attain no real moral efficiency. The present trend in American life is to place the emphasis upon things, not persons. So long as this is true, the school-process will be mechanical and material, and will not make for human integrity. An adult world given over to the pursuit of unworthy ends cannot possibly frame a w^orthy school-process, for it lacks the necessary insight. But even if it could, the process would be inef- fectual. With the school teaching one set of ideals, and social life another set, there grows up quite inevitably a confusion and insincerity barren of good fruit. In America we have developed three types of lower school, — the state school, the church school, and the private, non-sectarian school. They are in a way competing institutions, but it is only fair to say that the terms of the com- petition are hardly equal. The state school is supported by taxation, but the church and the 302 THE FOUR INSTITUTIONS private school are supported by individuals who have already contributed their share towards the support of the state school. It is only fair to re- member this condition in trying to estimate the moral worth of the different types of school. It may account in part for the fact that in America the state schools taken as a whole are probably superior to the church schools and private schools taken as a whole. Yet the three types have their contributions to make towards the general wel- fare, and to our body of educational knowledge. The moral argument for a state school rests upon the very proper consideration that society owes at least an elementary education to all its children, owes them the freedom of opportunity which this equipment supplies. And it rests upon the ground that only through education can a society achieve material prosperity and artistic distinction. But the question as to whether these admittedly excellent purposes can best be accom- plished by a free state school is of course open to debate. It depends upon our conception of the function of the state. Whatever the final decision, it is wholesome to remember that the state school is good only as we make it good. As a practical result, a state school, like a state church, does tend to become mechanical, and to lose some of the vitality and adaptability inher- ent in less completely organized bodies. That a 303 ,,^ OF THE OF THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE state school is under all circumstances an un- qualified blessing is, I think, too unreflectively taken for granted, and prevents our making the institution the useful social agent which it is capable of becoming. The church schools have been established for two reasons, — a narrow reason and a broad rea- son. To hold and win children for the given denomination is the narrow reason, and has little in common with the universality of morality. To teach by approved pedagogical methods the righteousness and morality apparently left out of the curriculum of the state school is the broad reason, and has much to commend it. In point of seriousness, the moral equipment of a nation is far more important than its technical and formal training. If it were a choice between righteousness and the limited educational advan- tages offered by the state schools, no earnest man would hesitate to choose righteousness. In the opinion of many competent persons, America is more in need of righteousness just now than of anything else. It may well be that, by its insist- ence upon this need, the church school will deepen the emphasis already coming to be laid upon moral instruction in the state school, and so make itself unnecessary. The private school probably offers the ex- tremes in American secondary education, the 304 THE FOUR INSTITUTIONS very best that we have and the very worst. This comes about from the freedom of the conditions. Any one, whatever his equipment, may set up a private school. The financial rewards are too small to ^attract mere adventurers, but it is the financial question that commonly brings ship- wreck. The majority of school proprietors may not be wise, but they are, as a class, singularly high-minded. There is commonly no failure in good motive. Some of our poorest schools un- doubtedly started out with essentially ideal objects in view. The failure to realize them is due in part to inefficiency on the part of the head-master or his assistants, a lack of practical executive power, but it is due in even larger part to an economic reason, and this is particularly true of the day school. Such a school has fixed geographical limitations. It can draw its scholars only from a somewhat narrow territory. The more enthusias- tic and devoted the head-master, the more prone is he to spend everything he has on equipment, even to go into debt. To keep the enterprise afloat, he is obliged to have a fair, even a large number of scholars, and quite before he knows it, he is in the position of a man bidding for scholars. This means that he ceases to be a pro- fessional leader, and is soon offering the sort of education demanded by a non-professional body, the parents. The parental idea is a somewhat 305 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE curious mixture, compounded of memories of an old-time school supposed to be good because it produced their own excellent selves, and the latest educational rumor picked up from the newspaper or at the club. This home pressure is so great that, as we all know, in many struggling private schools, and even in some highly prosperous ones, it is the parents, or even the children them- selves, who decide the curriculum, and not the master. The moral schoolmaster must be some- what autocratic. He has no business to teach unless he know more about such matters than either parent or child. He must take the same position that a self-respecting physician takes, and consent to act only where his prescriptions are followed. If such confidence does not exist, no moral cooperation between master and parent is possible. The boarding-school has two marked advan- tages over the day school ; first, there are no geo- graphical limitations, since boys can come from all over the country, even all over the world, and secondly, the boys are resident, but their parents are not. This makes it possible for a skillful mas- ter to offer an ideal scheme of education, and to feel reasonably certain that over such a wide ter- ritory he will find a sufficient number of appre- ciative parents to make his school self-supporting, without those immoral compromises which are 306 THE FOUR INSTITUTIONS unavoidably involved when he feels himself forced to bid for boys. There is also less opportunity for home interference. But parents are not the only obstructionists. Trustees of acute conscientiousness and no peda- gogical training are even more fatal to good work. I am disposed to think that an ideal school requires, in addition to great ability on the part of the master, three very practical con- ditions, — no trustees, complete ownership by the master, an establishment so simple that it can be run financially without any scholars. These were the conditions under which Buddha and Plato and Jesus taught. The best private school is necessarily better than the best state school. The latter cannot rise much above the average level of the com- munity, but the former has almost unbounded freedom, and if untainted by profit hunger can be a veritable light in dark places. It is indeed the high opportunity of the private school to point the way for other schools, and to carry out those valuable experiments in education which are less possible for church and state institutions. As an institution, the church has had a his- tory so rich and voluminous that any attempt to deal with its morality within the limits of^a few pages must seem not only inadequate, but afeo 307 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE presumptuous. It is older than any family, how- ever historic ; it has outlived every state. The church comes to us venerable in years; laden with traditions ; speaking of a life which tran- scends the present ; guardian of sacred rites and mysteries. It is impossible to be insensible to the claims of so august an institution, august in spite of the crimes which have been committed in its name. As the historic institute of duty, the church has entered the inner recesses of the spirit, and has spoken the words of action and renunciation, of forgiveness and condemnation, of life and of death. More intimately than the family or the school or the state, the church has addressed itself to the individual conscience, and so has gained a dominion over the machinery of action not won by any exterior force. In inciting men to acts of high devotion and self- sacrifice, as well as to deeds of perjury and cruelty, the power of the church has been terri- ble. In all countries and all ages this power has been and is exerted, both for good and for evil. It has been a singular history of mingled light and darkness. To a multitude of devout persons, the church is not this frail and human institution, but is immaculate, infallible, sacred. The crimes which have attended its history have been the mis- takes of its individual ministers, and as repug- 308 THE FOUR INSTITUTIONS nant to it as to us. That is to say, the real church is an ideal institution, of which we see but a faint reflection in the human institution known to us. Morality has no quarrel with this position. The ideal church, Hke the ideal family and the ideal school, is a sacred institution, whose existence, even in the shadow realm of the spirit, has made possible such light and glory as has been the portion of the actual church on earth. But morality, as a helpful criticism of human conduct, must concern itself wholly with the thing that is, and must take account of the actual weakness as well as the actual strength. So judged, the church of to-day is part moral and part immoral. It is moral as it holds up to the individual the vision of a higher, attainable life than he has yet known ; as it speaks to him of the sacred compulsion of duty, and instructs him truly in what duty is ; as it touches his heart through its services, its beauty, its music, to a greater reverence and a deeper love ; as it min- isters to the poor and the sick and the unfortu- nate ; as it gives everything and asks nothing. To look upon the church in this way is to regard it in its true moral character as a means and not as an end, and its morality will depend upon its efficiency in furthering the social purpose, the production of a more excellent humanity. And the church is immoral as it sets itself up as an 309 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE end, asking, where it ought to be giving ; as it offers an ideal of life at once unattainable and inconsistent with the best earth-life of humanity ; as it creates artificial and childish duties, and obscures vital and fundamental ones ; as it de- velops a ceremonial so elaborate as to be the substitute for good deeds ; as it fails to minister to the needy and to put them practically in the way of a better and a happier life. The most far-reaching criticism of the church that morality has to offer is just this charge of inversion, that the church has come to look upon itself as an end, with requirements, privileges, revenues, servants, when in reality it has no excuse for being, save in its own power to serve, when in reality the feeblest child playing on its doorstep, the meanest sinner kneeling at its altar, is more mighty than it, is the genuine end for which this elaborate machinery exists. But this is the fatal weakness in all institutions. The family, school, church, and state all tend to take themselves more seriously than they tend to take their proper functions. If, in the course of social evolution, these institutions should ever disap- pear, one may venture the prediction that it will not be because their high functions have ceased to be valued, but rather because the institutions themselves have ceased to perform their func- tions, have ceased to serve. And whether we 310 THE FOUR INSTITUTIONS will or not, these institutions are all on trial, are being judged by their fruits, are being found wanting or not wanting. It remains for those who beheve them essential to the enginery of the good life to justify their belief. Viewing the church in this fashion, as servant instead of master, it is clear that the church has no moral claim upon the individual. There can be no valid duty of church-going. Whether we go to church, or whether we refrain from going to church, is indeed a moral act, but its morality does not depend upon any claim of the church as an institution. It depends solely, as in the case of all other human conduct, upon the results. If going to church betters me personally, it is an advantage which I may not morally forego. To remain at home — other things being equal — would be to be guilty of the immorality of the second-best. If, on the whole, the ministrations of the church better the community, it is a privi- lege to support it which I may not morally omit. But the question may not be decided in any off- hand, hard-and-fast way. The question is indi- vidual and special. It depends upon a hundred things, upon the particular church at hand, upon the temperament, the day's mood and needs, the occupations of the week, the home duties and advantages, the alternatives of every sort. In a word, the church is an optional rather than a 311 . * THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE necessary institution. A man may morally elect it or decline it, just as he elects or declines that more immediate family life which follows upon marriage and parenthood. Neither decision is in itself moral or immoral. The morahty of the action depends upon whether or not it brings the greater good fortune. Personally, I am very glad to have been brought up in that church which ' has ever been the conserver of reverence and good taste.' And I should wish my chil- dren, if I have any, to come under the same poetic and inspiring influences. But I find my neighbor no less moral because he declines this symbolism, and prefers to remain at home, a member of that invisible church which knows neither time nor space, and is made up of all faithful and open souls. A church stands commonly for both faith and works, and both faith and works are open to moral judgment. The first requisite of any faith is that it shall be sincere. If it fail to be this, it is as detestable as any other form of lying ; more detestable in fact, since it implies a rotten- ness at the very heart of things. A live faith is dynamic. It cannot stand still. It is bound to pass from lower levels to higher levels. The objection to a too rigid creed is that it makes insufficient provision for this growth in grace. It forces a man out of the church, or it brings 312 THE FOUR INSTITUTIONS upon him the far graver disaster of forcing him into hypocrisy. By its very nature, faith can- not be prescribed. It is not what a man would beheve, but what he must, as the result of his own individual, spiritual experience. Happily, no institution can prescribe a man's experience. If it could, the world would be a much duller place than it is. Failing to do this, no institution can logically prescribe a man's faith. Such a posi- tion is not causational, and therefore not moral. At its inception, any special church, not pro- mulgated by force, tends to be sincere, moral, and vital. It attracts to itself a body of persons who believe practically the same thing. This community of belief is the very occasion of their coming together. It is natural to formulate this belief into a creed. If the terms be general and flexible enough, the church may remain sincere and vital over many generations. But sooner or later, some limitation is reached. Higher con- ceptions have supplanted lower conceptions. It is no longer possible for the best souls to sub- scribe to the outgrown creed. Under our present administration of the special church, this best blood of the church passes out from its midst, and there are left those poorer souls troubled neither with spiritual doubts nor spiritual life. There are two ways of regarding such a situa- tion. Individually, the disaster to the man who 313 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE comes out may not be very great. If the church have brought the individual to such a point that he can stand by himself, face to face with the eternities, and pass on to higher levels, the church may for him have performed its function, and be no longer needed. But there will always remain a well-founded doubt as to whether the church, had it been truly catholic, might not have helped the individual to still greater heights. And then there is the other point, the social con- sideration. A moral church must be efficient, and it must hold up the highest attainable ideal of earthly life. It can do this only through indi- viduals. It is bound to fail in efficiency and in the progressive worth of its ideals, if it so con- stantly and remorselessly squeeze out of its own body the very persons best qualified to realize its purposes. The situation comes down to this, that a fixed creed means either a sincere, brilliant church that is transient ; or a hypocritical, dull church that is permanent. Neither alternative is mor- ally tolerable, if the church is to be that insti- tution of high human service which our ideal of the church warrants us in believing that it may be. The way out, from a moral point of view, is the furtherance of a church, devoid of a fixed creed, allowing the utmost freedom of belief to its members, standing above all things 314 THE FOUR INSTITUTIONS for efficient human service, preaching the best spiritual ideals of the time, but always pointing resolutely beyond them to the more glorious vision of to-morrow. Beliefs as modes of conduct are open to inde- pendent moral judgment. They are good or bad as they make for or against human excellence. A large belief in the matter of the eternities tends to make a larger person, just as a cramped faith makes for littleness. But this is no argu- ment for illusion. The moral man wants to see things as they are, even though what he sees has in it the elements of tragedy. No belief is good simply because its immediate effect is comfort- ing; for life being a unit, a single stream of con- sciousness, any lack of verity contaminates the whole. But the effort to see things as they are is necessarily limited to the knowable. If within this wide domain could be found adequate ex- planation of human life, of the world, of nature, the human spirit might rest content with such a realism. But failing any explanation, the alert spirit turns to things as they may be, and in this transcendental world endeavors to create that body of probable or possible truth needed to com- plete and rationalize the actual experience of the present. It would seem that there must always be this fundamental mystery in all finite life. To hold the spirit back from these voyages of 315 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE discovery would be to limit quite inexcusably the field of the spiritual life. To dwell too persist- ently upon the transcendental may easily mean the withdrawal of interest from the wholesome problems of daily life, and the neglect of its most obvious duties. But to ignore the transcendental side, and count the story of actual experience in the three-dimensional world a complete story of life, is to go over to a materiaHsm which is neither satisfying nor fruitful. By holding before us in a large and flexible way the genuine mystery of life, and avoiding all ' man-made mystifications,' the church may render noble service to society by enlarging the boundaries of the individual spiritual life. As we have seen, the family is a creation of the state, and without state sanction has no ofii- cial existence. It is sometimes the joint creation of the state and the church. The school is cap- able of independent life, but in most civilized countries it is largely in the hands of the state, somewhat in the hands of the church. In Amer- ica, church and state are not only independent, but we are even jealous of anything more than the most transient cooperation. In Europe and Asia we have the phenomenon of the established church, in some cases church and state working together as one institution. In many ways the argument for a state church is quite as strong 316 THE FOUR INSTITUTIONS as the argument for a state school. Yet the trend of liberal opinion is undoubtedly towards a state school and away from a state church. Where the state church stands for specific beliefs, for a fixed creed, as nearly all historic churches do, it seems manifestly unjust to exact financial support, still more unjust to exact spiritual obedience, from those who do not accept such a creed. On the ground of social welfare, there is much to be said for a national church, without fixed creed, committed solely to social service and the reality of the spiritual life. The cardinal virtue of society is freedom. To achieve this is the full measure of the law. As the institute of rights, the supreme function of the state is to assure each man, woman, and child within its borders of the largest possible measure of freedom. It is the more permissible to select a cardinal virtue for society, if the chosen virtue be not only fundamental in itself, but also capable of a progressive interpretation that will enable it to keep pace with our enlarging con- ception of morality. Freedom is precisely such a virtue. It not only sums up what a man be- lieves to be his fundamental social right, but it is susceptible of a progressive interpretation which allows the state to be a dynamic and therefore a moral institution. The morality of any state 317 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE may be accurately gauged by the amount of freedom which it has secured for its people. It would be a difficult, but perfectly possible task to arrange the contemporary states of the world in a descending scale of moralities. And the curious feature of such an arrangement would be that the essential morality of the state would not rest wholly upon the political form of its gov- ernment. All the republics would not be found among the sheep as a matter of necessity, nor all the monarchies among the goats. It is a matter of history, the number of crimes which have been committed in the name of this sacred thing, human freedom. Social welfare depends upon the freedom of the individual to work out his own good fortune. It is the condition of morality, and therefore the fundamental virtue of the moral state. But free- dom, as we have seen, has a double aspect, the freedom of non-interference, and the freedom of opportunity. The one is negative, the police function. The other is positive, the social func- tion. It is not necessary to say which is the more important, since both are essential to suc- cess. Neither function is very fruitful of human welfare, if the other function be omitted. A state which did nothing but cry ' Hands off ! ' would offer, at best, a very barren sort of free- dom ; just as a state which devoted itself to the 318 THE FOUR INSTITUTIONS socialistic activities of opportunity, while it al- lowed the individual to be badgered and coerced, would be a very miserable moral failure. Inter- preted broadly enough, either function really includes the other. Non-interference means, in a large way, not only the non-interference of per- sons and institutions, but also the non-interfer- ence of events, — of time and space, hunger and cold and nakedness, disease and poverty, fire and water, — in a word, that essential non-inter- ference of what we have called the tyranny of things. Since more persons, infinitely more, have perished from disease and famine and natural calamities than from the total violence of a not- too-gentle world, it is not fanciful to urge that the police function might properly be exercised against these combined foes with as much en- thusiasm and efficiency as against more visible and corporal assailants. In the same way it is proper to urge that the freedom of opportunity is a very idle phrase in- deed, unless it include, as the very first oppor- tunity of all, the opportunity of free choice and volition. The vision of a social state which omitted the primal morality of individual free- dom could not be saved by any amount of or- ganization and benevolence from being in reality the vision of a well- developed tyranny. This is sometimes, ag we have seen, the defect in that 319 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE smaller group, the family, and in that larger group, the church. It is the essential defect in those socialistic dreams in which a supposed social welfare is allowed to ride rough-shod over such little matters as individual preferences and desires. It is curious that the myth of Procrustes, so grotesque in itself, should have a world-wide and time- wide application. Publicists, moralists, religionists, alike seem subject to the malady of wanting to make us all fit the same bed. As a matter of fact, the negative function of the state, the police function, is badly carried out the world over, and not least badly in America. Life and property and spiritual integrity are far too subject to attack. There are few local- ities where it is perfectly safe to venture abroad late at night. There are still fewer localities where it is safe to leave one's house unlocked, or one's wife and daughters unguarded. There are few communities in which the frank avowal of an opinion greatly at variance with current public opinion is not attended by unpleasant per- sonal results. In those smaller matters of dispute which must be taken to law for their settlement, there is no great assurance of justice. The pre- sence of paid advocates in our courts too often makes the issue depend upon a battle of the wits. It is not necessary to multiply details. The fact remains that as an experience, the freedom of 320 THE FOUR INSTITUTIONS non-interference, even in a country which prides itself on its freedom, is still a very Hmited and imperfect morality. As this is the primary and essential element in all state morahty, there is at least color for the contention that a state which has not attained this elementary achieve- ment cannot profitably turn its attention to those more complicated moralities which present themselves under the head of opportunity. It is much like indulging in charity before one has paid one's just debts. ^ Hands off ! ' taken alone, is doubtless a very Hmited programme, but as a first and necessary step in state morality, it is a tremendous achievement, and an achievement which may not be omitted for the sake of more brilliant pyrotechnics. Granting a state this large achievement, the attainment of non-interference in the more ob- vious affairs of life, the more profound morality of opportunity opens so unending a vista that one might well desire for such a state an immor- tality not yet achieved by any historic state. The large benefits which accrue from organized and united effort are now too well recognized to need further argument in their behalf. The state is such an effort on the largest possible scale, a corporation which includes every individual on terms of approximate equality. The possibilities in such an organization are practically unlimited. 321 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE A morality which insists upon the first-best as the only permissible ideal enjoins a ceaseless activity in the exploitation and conquest of new possibilities. The morality of opportunity, al- ready touched upon in the chapter on Social Wel- fare, means the annihilation of all that hinders the human spirit, and the multiphcation of all that helps it. What we are after is not a toler- able life, but the very best that the best of us can see and grasp ; something magnificent in its sweep and power. We shall the more readily realize this vision as the state becomes for us an instrument of the splendor of life, and not merely a large policeman. But morality regards not only these splendid ends of social activity, but also the processes. Those who have high hope of the social function of the state must scrutinize with equal care the morality of its methods. It is not the greatest good of the greatest number, regardless of the claims of the minority. That is an out-and-out immoral- ity, the too abundant immorality of all majority rule. The. opportunities must be offered, not forced ; must be paid for by those who use them, not by those who decline them. For every oppor- tunity offered by the state has been achieved at the cost of human effort, and must be paid for by some one. In speaking of state activities and state duties, it is easy to forget this practical side 322 THE FOUR INSTITUTIONS of the matter, and to speak as if the state, were it sufficiently socialized, could feed and clothe and shelter and educate and amuse and redeem its people out of its own good-will and creative fertility. But the fact is, thai while the state can accomplish things quite beyond the reach of the individual, and at a cost less than others, the cost is nevertheless there, and must be met. The moral problem is to get the utmost social advan- tage at the least cost, and to apportion the cost quite justly among the actual beneficiaries. There is, of course, a large way of looking at this social function of the state which makes the advantage of any considerable body of persons the advantage of the whole community, by rea- son of the general heightening of the national life which is thus brought about. It is easy on such grounds for Great Britain to justify the state support of the Anglican Church. Any given Englishman may fail to admire its services or to attend them, may indeed be supporting a non-conformist chapel round the corner, but he nevertheless gets an ample return for his church rates, says the state, in the general decency and morality and prosperity which follow upon the ministrations of the establishment, and make his own good fortune much more expansive and agreeable than could be the case without this national safeguard. It is easy on the same 323 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE grounds to justify our own large expenditures for the public school. I may have no children of my own, or if I have, may prefer to send them to a private school, but nevertheless, says the state, I get full return for all the school tax I may pay, in the general increase in social welfare and social morality which results from the dif- fusion of education. On quite the same ground, the general good, the state defends all its multi- tudinous expenditures for highways, lighting, water- works, boards of health, charities, river and harbor improvements, lighthouses, scientific bureaux, geological surveys, and the like. It may happen that very few of these activities touch me directly, but I share the general wel- fare to which they are contributing causes, and may properly be called upon to pay my propor- tion of their support. This argument of social welfare is a very po- tent one. It appeals particularly to persons who have lived in a highly socialized community like Switzerland or Massachusetts, and have after- wards experienced the less socialized life of the frontier. No socially-minded person would have the state withdraw from these most important functions of opportunity. On the contrary, one would wish the utmost expansion of these liber- ating functions. ' We are all socialists now.' The social ideal is a community freed from the 324 THE FOUR INSTITUTIONS tyranny of things, and at liberty to lead the Hfe of the spirit. The extreme programme of social- ism is in exact accord with morality, so far as this programme proposes, at the least possible expenditure, to feed and clothe and shelter man- kind, to annihilate time and space by means of approved methods of transportation and commu- nication, to avert preventible disasters, to open wide the doors of opportunity into all wholesome material and spiritual activities. But the moral criticism of social methods remains inexorable. Morality is always harking back to that fun- damental position of the Prologue, that it is the human heart which is to be satisfied and instructed and uplifted, that the moral goal is individual good fortune, that a supposed social welfare gained at the expense of this good for- tune is in reality social disaster. Morahty permits the state to use force only in carrying out its police function. The social function, to be moral, must mean the freedom of opportunity. Oppor- tunity, to be opportunity, must be self-chosen, must engage the spirit ; otherwise it is misnamed. Morally speaking, the state is always on very delicate ground when it comes to fulfill its most important function, that of opportunity. And this is particularly true when it touches essentially spiritual interests in church and school and family. Many of the state functions of opportunity are 325 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE 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 un- necessary to avow its incompleteness. The estab- lished 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 insti- tution which constitutes one of the largest ele- ments 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 326 THE FOUR INSTITUTIONS 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 break- ers 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 insti- tutions 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. 327 XIII OCCUPATIONS THE young people of America receive a cer- 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 par- ticular 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 for- tunate or unfortunate in their school and home opportunities, there comes a time when all at- tempt 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 afPord, — and two ques- tions of large moral import at once suggest themselves : first. How can this industrial coming out be delayed ? and secondly. How can the in- dustrial life be made educative ? 328 OCCUPATIONS 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 child- labor. The utilization of children in mine and factory, office and department-store, coal-breaker and passenger elevator, as bootblack, messenger- boy, newsboy, farm-hand, is prompted by our view of prosperity as dependent upon things. The grow- ing 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 sub- stantial as good times. And the objection is con- sistent 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 oeautif ul women and beau- tiful children, persons of strength and accom- plishment 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 ab- solutely fatal to human happiness and welfare. Somewhat older children, taught by a false phi- 329 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE losophy of life to regard wages as the greatest good, voluntarily sell themselves into what is vii'tually an industrial slavery. Young men and women, by premature marriage, confirm this slavery, and breed more immaturity and incom- petence, another generation of those who are not free. There are several methods by which this mis- use of childhood can be done away with. The most ideal method is through the force of a con- trary idea. In the matter of child-labor, public opinion wavers. If the case be that of an imme- diate 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 ne- cessity 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 shel- tered, 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 chil- dren on the part of those who mean neither to 330 OCCUPATIONS nourish nor educate them. What is a very plain duty — the giving to childhood of its proper heritage of happiness and opportunity — gets tangled up with other duties equally plain, — the furtherance of individual, parental responsi- bility, and a prudent guarding of the social purse- strings. Among cultivated persons, public opinion is already on the side of child freedom. But the great breeders of children are not cultivated per- sons. They are the very persons least likely to be restrained by public opinion, or even to have knowledge of an informed public opinion. In some instances, in factory towns, it has been shown beyond peradventure that children, instead of representing parental responsibilities, repre- sent, as a matter of fact, possibilities in the way of labor and income too eagerly seized upon by lazy parents. And the same situation holds on many a back-country farm. We have thus the inverted spectacle of parents supported by chil- dren, infants almost, instead of children sup- ported and properly brought up by parents. It is evident that mere public opinion is not yet qualified to deal with this question of our indus- trial coming of age. It is a grave offense to imperil a child's life, to rob him of freedom, to take away his chance of happiness. In many respects it is worse than 331 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE the crime of negro slavery, for it is a crime against helplessness, and against our own race and blood. And the effects are even more appalling, — a hopeless, immoral, degenerate proletariat, a stunted, pinched, pale-faced race, who may well ask of us, their masters, if the Constitution be a lie and God's love a jest. These children did not ask to come. They were not consulted. They never promised, for the gift of life, to give all that makes life worth having. They came in an- swer to a human appetite, made brutally keener by the starvation of all the other normal appe- tites. And now they are here, and others are coming, a great multitude of them. And what shall we do about it, we people of leisure and heart and intelligence, we people who feel a genuine concern for morality? Shall we close our eyes and let the iniquity go on, this giving of physical life of doubtful quality, and this withholding of the genuine content of life, — freedom and opportunity ? The old patriarchal idea of the family makes us hesitate to come between parent and child. The feeling is deep-seated that the natural guar- dians of children are their parents. Happily, the human heart is so constituted that in thousands of well-ordered homes this guardianship is sa- credly carried out. The most of us are blessed in knowing what it means, a mother's love, a 332 OCCUPATIONS father's love. We know the sacrifice, the devo- tion, the splendid, unfaltering faith. But there are thousands of homes which are not happy, where this sacred guardianship is not fulfilled. They are the shabby homes where child-labor lays its tired head to sleep. Yet there seems no individual redress against so great an immorality. What can you say to fathers and mothers, perhaps a crippled father, perhaps a widowed mother, who from the depths of misfortune and poverty yield up their children to the service of the money-getters, yield them up perhaps with tears? What can you say to fathers and mothers shamelessly giving birth to child after child whom they know that they can neither feed nor equip ? As individual to indi- vidual, you can say little, and you can say still less to industrial greed, — to the shareholders, directors, managers, who welcome child-labor be- cause it is cheap. The shareholders and directors are humane ; they love their own children. They know nothing officially about child-labor, but they want their dividends, — life and freedom and opportunity in one pan of the balance, and profit in the other. And none of us are guiltless. We all like cheap goods, and we like our hard-coal fires. We do not ask questions, and in truth we dare not. Do you know what I see, when of a dark 333 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE night I look into my own coal-bin? I wish it were only the blackness of the coal and of the night. But I see something else. I see the pale, pinched, half-starved faces of little children work- ing in mine and hoisting-house. I see the bruised, scarred, pitiful little hands that have picked my coal half free from slate. I am not calling upon my imagination. I have seen these ghosts of childhood in the coal regions of Pennsylvania. I have seen other caricatures of childhood, the off- spring of overworked men and women, in the mills of New England. Whether we find it con- venient or not, child-labor and parent-fatigue form one and the same problem in their baneful effects upon the vitality and excellence of the race. There is no individual redress ; modern indus- try is too anonymous for that. I may personally burn wood and affect homespun without lifting an effective hand to save the children. It is use- less to appeal to the employer of child-labor. He may himself be a compassionate man, but his ready answer is that what his business rivals do, he must do likewise, — a brutal philosophy, but quite unanswerable. In a number of states, in the South as well as in the North, an attempt has been made to secure adequate legislation against child-labor. The dis- position is to take whatever can be got, and to be grateful for the smallest protection. When one . 334 OCCUPATIONS remembers that this slow process has brought much that is very precious in modern civilization, one is inclined to be patient, and to be satisfied for the moment with this opportunism. But when one thinks of the children, when one re- calls the health and strength which they are fail- ing to get, the beauty and accomplishments which they will never know, the happiness and freedom which, once taken out of the life of children, can never be made up to them, one is forced to believe that so urgent an emergency needs more radical measures. Society must al- ways take the long view in all social questions, and must regard self-preservation as the very foundation of its morality. If we were quite will- ing to sacrifice all the children now prematurely employed in our various industries, and could do it with a perfectly clear conscience as far as the children themselves were concerned, we should still be guilty of a grave social immorality, for we should be sacrificing that larger view of good fortune which we call social welfare. From chil- dren stunted and crippled by premature toil, society cannot get vigorous men and women, worthy fathers and mothers, informed and excel- lent citizens. We are poisoning the very source of social welfare, for we are robbing the on- coming generation of all possibility of excellence. Life is a question of alternatives. If one do 335 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE this, one cannot do that. Educators well know that in the plasticity of childhood is wrapped up the possibility of a more excellent race. But children at w^ork for nine, ten, twelve hours a day cannot realize this possibility, or come into this glorious human heritage. All they can do is to grow prematurely old, and beget children less strong, even, and less vital than themselves. During adolescence the danger in this premature labor is particularly great. There are periods in the lives of even well-to-do boys and girls when parents and teachers must be very patient, when they dare not exact more than the lightest school tasks, for the life-energy of the children is needed almost to the last drop to support the now sud- den growth and development. Think of the social crime of diverting this life-energy from its proper work of the upbuilding and perfecting of young manhood and womanhood, and doing it for profit! The society that does this, that taps its life- blood, in enfeebling its children, is committing moral suicide. It is producing anaemic, half- human men and women, poor fragments of hu- manity, quite devoid of anything so gracious as himian wealth. It is producing the parents of degenerate children. It is producing fertile soil for the growth of the defective and criminal classes. In a word, it is sowing the wind. Morality is very deeply concerned with the 336 OCCUPATIONS remedy for this condition of affairs. It is clear that the remedy does not lie in separate state le- gislation. The evil is one that demands national treatment. Not only are the issues too grave to wait for this slow solution, the separate action of over forty commonwealths, but from its very nature, the situation cannot be dealt with in one state while it is ignored in another. It is a ques- tion of interstate industry. The modern organ- ization of industry has made its staple products cosmopolitan. The conditions of the industry are the conditions of the world market. We cannot possibly go back and treat these indus- tries as if they were local. Neither can we with any hope of success apply local remedies to the evils of the industry. One cannot imagine for a moment that it would have been possible in 1860 for any single Southern state to abolish negro slavery while the neighboring states re- tained it. In the long run, such a state might have achieved distinction and prosperity. But hunger and thirst, cold and nakedness, are mat- ters of very short run. It was not a question of sentiment. It was a question of bread and but- ter. The prices of Southern products were fixed by the conditions of slave labor. It would have been economically impossible for one state to abolish slavery and compete with other states retaining it. 337 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE At the present time, we might reasonably ask Pennsylvania to abolish child-labor in and about the anthracite coal mines, for anthracite is prac- tically limited to that one state. But we cannot reasonably ask Georgia to abolish child-labor in her cotton mills while Alabama and the Caro- linas retain it. We need no prophet to tell us what would happen. The industry would seek the cheaper labor market, and the Georgia legis- lators would be cursed for their pains. The evil of child-labor, like the evil of negro slavery, is one of national complicity. There are to-day in this free America of ours between one- quarter and one-half a million child-laborers, some of them less than ten years of age, some of them receiving as little wage as nine cents a day. The problem is large enough and grave enough to claim the attention of the general gov- ernment. The abuses can be cured with thor- oughness and dispatch only by the same sort of national action as is now being brought to bear on railroads, trusts, and other enterprises of an interstate character. The same argument for the liberation of these little brothers and sisters, whose helplessness and weakness ought to be an irresistible appeal to everything in us that is chivalrous and fine, holds true in the case of all the industrially unfit, the sick, the disabled, the old. We shall never 338 OCCUPATIONS be a civilized or a moral people until we show compassion and practical consideration for the weak of all classes, and are willing only to lay upon those who can bear them the burden and heat of the industrial day. If a community once come to regard child- labor and invalid-labor and old-ag^e-labor as im- moral, the problem of avoiding them is as good as solved. And every community given to reflec- tion must sooner or later come so to regard them. We can no longer urge poverty as an excuse. On a sinking boat all must turn to and help bale. On the frontier all must work, each ac- cording to his strength. But we are not on a sinking boat ; ours is no longer a frontier coun- try. On the contrary, we are, as our politicians are so fond of telling us, one of the richest countries in the world, and the very most pros- perous. We can afford to do what we like. In America there is less occasion than anywhere else, and in these early years of the twentieth century least occasion of all, for the industrial exploitation of the unfit. This freedom from industrial demands does not necessitate idleness on the part of either children or old people. Nor does it mean the absence of helpful human service, one for an- other. That would make good fortune quite impossible. There is always plenty of wholesome 339 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE occupation for children, not only school and play, but also the minor offices of home courtesy and helpfulness. If these occupations be well directed, they are all educative. Nor need old age sit with folded hands, stupidly waiting the coming of the death angel. In every active, well-spent life, unsolved problems accumulate, problems of great interest and importance. Industrial leisure need not mean inactivity. The very most val- uable things of life have been accomplished in these times of industrial leisure. In addition to this, old age is highly sensitive to the human relations of life, and eager to render all possible service within its strength. The remedy for child-labor in America, as we have been trying to point out, is to be found in national prohibition, a new emancipation procla- mation giving freedom to the children of the North and the South, the East and the West. The problem of food and clothing and shelter remains, and must be solved by the state through the agency of the parent. To place the problem wholly in the hands of the state would be to deprive right-minded parents of a welcome and helpful duty, and to encourage on the part of the irresponsible the most reckless giving birth to children. But these considerations do not justify the state in leaving its children to chance. The state is morally bound to exercise a super- 340 OCCUPATIONS vision over them ; and to see that they have freedom, and the food, clothing, shelter, and education that will make such freedom individ- ually and socially fruitful. In the case of children whose parents are either dead or incapacitated, it is the plain duty of the state to turn wise foster-parent, and this not alone for the good of the child, but quite as much for the ultimate good of society. Humanly it is the desirable thing, and economically it is the cheaper thing. Each child rescued from ignorance and vice means so much less for the criminal budget. It means, too, increased health and security and prosperity for the community at large. In point of fact, our present method of dealing with unguarded childhood is quite the most expensive that could be devised. It is build- ing an elaborate social structure out of defective material. The remedy for old-age-labor is plainly some scheme of state pension. Such a plan has been vigorously opposed as an impossible drain upon the public purse. But the idea is gaining ground, and is found to be a practical programme and not a mere humanitarian dream. And in truth, the scheme is only a moral, effective way of doing what is now being done grudgingly and most in- effectively. The old-age pension is not a charity, alms given by the still strong to the no longer 341 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE strong. It is a self-respecting plan of support, founded upon the acknowledgment that the old have done their share of work, and that the young are now to take their turn. The support of the old is inevitable, and all that the pension scheme does is to recognize the propriety of the burden, to apportion it equally, and so to carry out the plan as to further the happiness and welfare of the aged. It was the past generation that gave us birth, that nourished us and educated us ; above all, that handed down to us unimpaired the helpful traditions of the past, the fruits of civili- zation. Without this spiritual gift, we should be almost as the savage, forced to begin life anew and content ourselves with our own small per- sonal gains. In a word, it is to the past genera- tion that we owe everything which now gives worth to our present youth and strength, and enables us to carry on the vital part of our own work. As soon as a man ceases to work, he begins necessarily to live upon the labor of others. If he be what is called rich, this support takes the form of rent, interest, or profit, not sustainers of life in themselves, not created by his own contemporary labor, but mere social devices by which the industrially idle live at the expense of the industrially active. If a man be poor, he becomes dependent upon the labor of some hard- 342 OCCUPATIONS working son or daughter, the hateful pittance of some more fortunate relative. If he be a pauper, the almshouse, the old-people's home, the parish charity fund, yield a living so bitterly unwelcome that one may fittingly pray to be delivered from it. The primal fact is, that old people are neces- sarily dependent. The pension scheme recognizes this necessity, but robs it of all ungraciousness in recognizing the propriety and sacredness of this dependence. It holds that the honorable leisure of old age has as valid title to the current happi- ness and welfare as has the honorable industry of the legitimate workers. One might urge the exclusion of the aged from industrial labor not only on their own account, but also on ours. We younger men and women of America can hardly be said to have entered even the lower foothills of morality, so long as we allow the aged to suf- fer, allow old men and old women to work be- yond their feeble strength, allow them to be in actual need of decent food and clothing, shelter and human service. To do this is to wrong them, and it is also to brutalize ourselves. In even so new a country as America, the prob- lem of the unemployed is a serious one. At this particular moment, the period is expansive. One does not stumble upon the unemployed in street parade, or encamped upon the water front at Chicago, but one can still see them in smaller 343 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE companies in the public squares, at employment offices, in cheap lodging-houses, at police sta- tions, in hungry-looking tenements. The effect of machinery has been to displace the human work- ers, and were this not the case, machinery could hardly be regarded as beneficent. Civilization means the curtailment of industrial labor, and an extension of the reasonable work and play of an industrial leisure. Carried far enough, and civili- zation would give us a true golden age, in which industry had become so effective and so pleasura- ble that it would be counted as part of the fun of life. But there is a tremendous difference between this achieved leisure and the enforced idleness of the unemployed. The true office of machinery is not to displace the workman to his hurt, but to his good. This beneficence can be manifested in several ways : by excluding from industrial oc- cupation the unfit, children, w^omen, old people, invalids ; by prolonging the freedom of child- hood and youth, the period of growth and prepa- ration ; by shortening the industrial life and giv- ing a self-respecting leisure in old age ; finally, by cutting down the length of the industrial day to eight hours, six hours, four hours, when we may. It is a fatal policy to have our machines one whit less effective than they need be, or our industrial day one minute longer than need be. The employment of the unfit — the too young, 344 OCCUPATIONS the too weak, the too old — is no more necessary economically than it is defensible morally. It is impossible to state dogmatically just what should be the limits of the industrial life ; that is, just when the young man should begin his in- dustrial labor, just when the older man should cease. The most practical method of approach- ing the question, and therefore the most moral method, is to consider the ideal conditions quite regardless of ways and means, and then to in- quire how ways and means may be brought into conformity with the ideal. The social ideal is a generation of young persons possessed of the human wealth of strong and beautiful bodies, well-trained hands and eyes and ears and voices, informed morals, warm hearts, and reverent spirits, — in a word, young persons prepared for the most serious of life's purposes, the work and play, thought and emotion, repeti- tion and original creation. If this social prepa- ration could be gained in childhood, and a rich after-life assured, there might be no objection to entering boys and girls in the industrial world while they were still boys and girls. But we all know that such a preparation is not even a pos- sibihty before young manhood and womanhood are reached. The plastic years up to the age of adolescence are needed for the upbuilding of the body, the training of the senses, the development 345 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE of the moral and aesthetic instincts, the necessary practice in spoken language and observational science. It would not be too much to devote the first fourteen or even the first sixteen years of life to this most important of all preparatory work. The stiff er intellectual work now crowded into these earliier years, and the consequent omission of the proper organic work, has a tendency to dwarf the final man and woman, and to make them smaller persons than they need have been. The only argument for this prematureness is an industrial one, -^ the necessity or the desire to be out and making a living. The ideal requirement demands that these earlier years be better spent, spent in the upbuilding of a larger and more effective personality. From sixteen to twenty may well be given to the more formal require- ments of culture, to language, mathematics, sys- tematic science, and the humanities. Nor should this higher course be elective. It should be broadly human, but prescribed, intended to form the tastes along liberal lines, rather than to ac- centuate premature preferences and prejudices. It is highly desirable that the doors of life be kept open, and the thought flexible. One serious defect of the new education is its tendency to encourage premature specialization. This criti- cism particularly applies to those manual train- ing schools which handle the mechanic arts as 346 OCCUPATIONS ends in themselves rather than as educational means. At the end of this formal course, the condi- tions being favorable, our youth might well have a year of travel and non-academic occupation, a special period for making up his mind upon the important question of what to do. If the course of higher study followed a well-spent childhood, it might reasonably cover the greater part of our present early college work, and the three or four years succeeding the Wanderjahr be devoted to special university training. This would bring our youth to the mature age of twenty-five, and this, it seems to me, is quite early enough for the industrial life to begin. From a large point of view, it is not so much how long a man works as what he does. Both individually and socially, it is infinitely more important to have our young people well trained for playing a large part in life than it is to have them started early on a small part. The propriety of contentment with a poor, poverty-stricken destiny, some trivial scheme of life, is preached on all sides, preached with par- ticular unction by those of larger destiny, and by those who beHeve themselves and the persons of their class better served by men who have not made the most of themselves. But morality has no sympathy with such a view, morality with its 347 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE august insistence upon efficiency of method and worth of ends. From a moral point of view, industrial work may not displace purely educational work until, through the ministry of the latter, our young people have come into a mature manhood and womanhood, properly equipped to carry out in- dustrial work to the greatest advantage, and pro- perly prepared to make it a means of further education and discipline. If this preparation require twenty-five or even thirty years, then social welfare, that is, morality, demands imper- atively that the years be given. At present, in the more strenuous industrial callings, men and women are not only well initiated, but often well spent by the time they are thirty. The proper duration of industrial life will depend upon the quality of it. Under favorable conditions, it might continue for half a century, from the time a man is twenty-five until he is seventy-five. But with our present wealth, and the high efficiency of our machinery, so long a term of service hardly seems necessary. Twenty- five years, one third of a reasonable lifetime, could be made ample. From twenty-five to fifty, — it is enough time to give to mere bread-and- butter. It is far too much time to give unless, during the same period, there has been sufficient industrial leisure to enable a man to keep alive 348 OCCUPATIONS those larger, more impersonal, more cosmic inter- ests which make life as a whole worth while, and render old age gracious and acceptable. Nor would it be wise to make the industrial day of uniform length. In youth, there is a splendid superabundance of energy. In age, there is a deficiency. It would be reasonable to apportion the day's work accordingly. It might be well to start with an industrial day of eight hours, in ten years to reduce it to six, in ten more, to four. One cannot say, apart from experience, what arrangement would be necessary or possible in practice, but one can say that increased efficiency in industrial methods and increased justice in the distribution of products must conspire to shorten the present excessive amount of time given by the average worker for the satisfaction of mere bodily wants. The cardinal social virtue being freedom, moral progress must mean in- creased freedom for the actual workers as well as complete freedom for the industrially unfit. In attempting to measure the morality of occupations, the nature of the work is an even more important element than the time of service. Many of our present occupations are morally im- possible. While opinion naturally differs as to the precise content of such a black list, there are certain underlying principles which do decide, in a broad way, the things that a man may do and 349 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE the things that he may not do. The moral stand- ard furnishes an all-sufficient and easily applied test. A man's occupation is not only a part of his conduct, but a very large part of it, since at present it takes the very cream of both his time and energy. An occupation, to be moral, must satisfy the same requirements that all other con- duct satisfies, efficiency and worth. It must be productive of happiness in the worker, must ap- peal to him as desirable, must satisfy his individual instinct by being an activity in harmony with his nature and powers, and quite as rigidly must it satisfy the objective ideal of social welfare. Where the usual scramble is for money, and where there is not enough money to go all round, the current idea of desirability in all occupations is their money-producing power. That such a spending of the days is highly immoral, however, is plainly evident as soon as one applies the moral yardstick. Money-making schemes, as such, lack efficiency and worth. From the nature of the case, the money-hunger, if universally appeased, would come to nothing. The uniform distribution of money would mean the complete loss of its power. In reality, the power of money resides solely in its power to command other persons. It is only because my neighbor has none that he becomes for the time my slave and servant. If we were all millionaires, it would be extremely difficult 350 OCCUPATIONS to get our dinners cooked, our linen washed, our houses swept. The essential power of money lies in its unequal distribution. If I pursue money, therefore, I pursue an end which, from its very nature, is not and cannot be social. Granting, for the sake of argument, that money does bring individual happiness, its pursuit would still be im- moral because the happiness could be gained only through the subjection of those without money, and such happiness cannot pass the objective moral test of social welfare. But the supply of money is limited. It has a tendency to collect in a few hands. Over ninety per cent of our tradi- tional fortune-hunters suffer defeat. The quest of money has therefore the further moral objec- tion which attaches to all forms of gambling. These are essential objections to money-making as an occupation. As conduct, it has a very low efficiency, less than ten per cent, and lacks the worth of social welfare. In point of fact, it even lacks the worth of individual good fortune, for we all know that the possession of money, beyond the very limited amounts needed as a medium of exchange, leads to as much personal unhappiness as any other form of intemperance, is indeed a fruitful source of all other forms. We are forced to believe, then, that all occu- pations in ivhich profit is the sole, or even the major end, are immoral. 351 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE This consideration, which seems to me sound and indisputable, cuts down the list of possi- ble occupations by almost one half, for it cuts out all occupations that are unnecessary. Every one can decide, after even a little reflection, which occupations are necessary and which are not, and can cut out those which have no more serious end than profit. Industrial occupations yield a marketable product, or offer a market- able service. The William Morris test may be applied to both. Are these products and ser- vices useful ? Are they beautiful ? If we know them to be the one, or believe them to be the other, the occupations of which they are the fruits are socially and morally acceptable. But if we know these fruits to be neither useful nor beautiful, the occupations themselves are barren and immoral, a misspending of the days, a waste of that very precious thing, human life. Every young man, standing on the threshold of his industrial life, can materially further the cause of morality if he resolutely decline all mere profit- making adventures, and resolutely demand of his occupation that it shall be worth while in and for itself. That a given occupation regards itself as ne- cessary does not count for anything. All occu- pations tend to regard themselves as necessary. It is one of the humors of life — some look 352 OCCUPATIONS upon it as a compensation — that a trivial, wholly unimportant task is taken so seriously by the little person who does it that he comes quite honestly to believe that the social wheel would cease to revolve if the task were once omitted. And this remark appHes not only to barbers and tailors, with their mock gravity as to how the hair and the coat ought to be cut, but also to other persons not so obviously serio-comic. Even the prostitute, as Tolstoy points out in the tragic novel already quoted, comes to regard herself as a necessary part of the social tissue. In any serious attempt to measure the morality of occu- pations, one may not be content to accept all occupations that are vouched for by their vota- ries, whether it be in the name of industry or commerce, religion or education, pleasure or duty, legislation or progress. Occupations are not im- personal. They are more or less organized forms of conduct, and as such are right or wrong, and for precisely the same unescapable reasons that make all conduct right or wrong. But while every person, not too dishonest or muddle-headed, can decide against the obviously unnecessary occupations, the advertising, stock- broking, financial exploiting, the speculating, patent-medicine vending, multiple shopkeeping, and the like, the difficulty becomes genuine when his scrutiny reaches those occupations which have 353 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE been capable in the past, or are capable in the present, of rendering a social service of high utility, but which are now commonly or occa- sionally prostituted to baser ends. The lawyer who obstructs justice and works only for a ver- dict in his own favor ; the fashionable physician who ministers, not to the needs of society, but to its whims and follies ; the surgeon who holds up his victim for a sum larger than the service is worth ; the worldly clergyman who deals in smooth sayings and a fat Hving ; the school- master who fails to educate ; the shopkeeper who distributes poor wares; the manufacturer who turns out useless novelties and rubbish, are all of them socially unnecessary and socially mis- chievous persons. But it still remains true that law and medicine, rehgion and education, distri- bution and production, as genuine articles, are socially and morally worth while. It may take courage to apply the test, but it remains forever true that occupations must satisfy the same moral test that human conduct must satisfy. A man puts his b^st years and his best strength into his daily work. If -this work fail to be worth while, fail to be educative, fail to make him a better man, he has lost his best chance, and his life must truly be counted a failure. It would be a very vain quest to try to moralize the frag- mentary residue of his life without moralizing his 354 OCCUPATIONS daily work. No conduct is moral, however brilliant and effective it may be, which does not on its emo- tional side heighten the sense of personal well- being, and on its intellectual side make for social progress. MoraHty in conduct is not the specific doing or the specific leaving undone of particular hard-and-fast projects. It is rather a tendency in conduct which makes the doer happier and the social tissue sounder. And the moral person is the one who shows this tendency in all his con- duct, in his occupation quite as much as in his home life. We have here a practical and adequate crite- rion of occupation. Those occupations are moral which conserve and heighten human wealth. Those occupations are immoral which make against human wealth, which lessen, stifle, or dis- sipate it. As a universal end, the quest of human wealth involves primarily the human wealth of the agent himself. Those who believe that the world is essentially selfish in the meaner sense of the word, and that human nature, with its prim- itive instincts of self-preservation and race-pre- servation, may be trusted to look out always for the interests of the self, are prone to recommend an unbridled, intemperate altruism. But such a course defeats its own end. A community made up of individuals all bent on sublime self-sacrifice would ultimately present a very depressing col- 355 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE lection of broken reeds. The human wealth that all were seeking for others would have quite evaporated, and the final result would be extreme poverty rather than extreme wealth. There are many who frankly admit this all-too- obvious criticism, but who yet hold that as only a small percentage of mankind will at any time embrace this extreme altruism, their sacrifice will act as a corrective for the general selfishness and tend to restore a wholesome balance. But there are two fatal objections to such reasoning. The one is that it makes the end justify the means, — a maxim which at all times and in all places is essentially immoral, — and the other is that these broken reeds are not in a condition to reno- vate society. If they possessed the very secret of good fortune, their own unloveliness would discredit their doctrine, and turn healthy-minded men and women in an opposite direction. By their fruits ye shall know them. Persons who have not won human wealth for themselves are not in a position to teach others in what human wealth consists, or how to win it. Altruism in its unadulterated form has no light to shed upon the right spending of the days. And egoism is as little successful. There are few thoroughgoing egoists. Nearly all men and women are egoists in spots, but egoism is a frame of mind which it is difficult to keep up consecu- 356 OCCUPATIONS tively. Granting the illusion of an out-and-out egoist, however, and a very little reflection will show how utterly incapacitated he is for achiev- ing any destiny that we should like to imitate. As a mere matter of prudence, the egoism would soon have to be bridled. In a community where every man's hand is against his neighbor, where might makes right, even the strong man can gain only momentary supremacy. Sooner or later the giant would be caught sleeping ; sooner or later old age would come, and then it would be all up with him. Our egoist, to keep in the fight at all, would soon have to temper his egoism with a pretty large admixture of at least expediency altruism. But suppose for the moment that we grant each community the luxury of one thorough- going egoist, while all the rest are fairly altruis- tic saints, it takes even less reflection to see that in spite of the exceptional circumstances, our egoist could not achieve good fortune. Human wealth is not an affair of the body and senses alone. It involves their health and development quite fundamentally, but it involves much more than this. In even larger measure, human wealth is an affair of the intellect and the spirit. The out-and-out egoist would be devoid of sympathy, devoid of affection, devoid of desires that had to do with anything larger than his own very lim- ited self. In the midst of the prevailing altruism, 357 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE such a nature could not attract to itself any genuine love and care. It would command pity and the service that follows upon pity, but that would be all. This last case is not wholly hypothetical. One sees it after a fashion in many institutions where an egoist stands at the top and his assistants are at least pseudo-altruists. The institution may be a factory or a store, even a school or a church. The head egoist may possess all the outer sem- blance of good fortune, — an embarrassment of material riches, an apparent absence of personal and lowly duties, a superfluity of servile atten- tion, — but deep down in his heart he knows, and you and I know, how hollow the whole thing is. You can see it in his eye, however well- groomed his person, and however reticent his speech. In a word, egoism pure and simple has no commanding message in regard to the proper spending of the days. These considerations are commonplace enough, and must be quite obvious to all thoughtful men and women who have passed halfway over the traditional threescore years and ten ; but when carried to the logical conclusion and applied to the question of occupations, the result is revolu- tionary. Half of our current occupations have been thrown out as morally impossible on the ground that they were unnecessary, that they 358 OCCUPATIONS failed to minister to use and beauty, and were therefore unworthy of the human spirit. Of the occupations that remain, the moral requirement of human wealth makes necessary a selective scrutiny. Granting that a self-respecting man may not spend his days in writing advertisements or in other paltry occupation, it remains to ask just what he may do. One may not be too sure that the occupations called necessary are really necessary, or really minister to use and beauty. It is commonly thought that coal and iron and copper are neces- sary ; that railways, bridges, and steamships are necessary ; that apartment houses and office build- ings and other giant structures are necessary. But there have been civilizations quite as inter- esting as ours which got on without the majority of these things, and were satisfied with small store of the few that they did use. It is more accurate to call these later devices convenient. The things that a man must have, the real neces- sities of life, are few in number. They are food and clothing and shelter. These belong to the primitive morality of self-preservation. We have already tried to show that these primary neces- sities are capable of a large moral refinement. But beyond these, the word ' necessity ' can hardly be used. In our modern complex world many products of nature and the arts have high utility 359 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE in liberating man from the tyranny of things and opening the freedom of a larger opportu- nity. Yet in spite of th^ir value and importance, the processes which yield these products are not morally permissible if they be carried out at a human cost. If coal cannot be mined, iron and copper smelted, railways and other structures built, without marring and brutalizing the human beings who do all these things, then the processes of mining and smelting and construction are im- moral processes, and must be placed on the moral Index Expur gator ius. It would doubtless be found that all these operations could be so car- ried out as to involve no human loss, and to yield only human benefit ; but until they are reorgan- ized along these human lines, they may not be accounted moral occupations. No amount of convenience or reputed useful- ness can justify the sacrifice of men and women and children. Prosperity does not reside in things, but in persons. Both the individual and society demand human wealth. And so the moral person, scrutinizing the occupations which our modern industrial life offers, must not only decline those which seem frivolous and unimportant, but also those which impair health and integrity. No matter what the bribe of wage and cajolery, the surrender of human excellence is an unpardonable sacrilege. And this applies all along the line of 360 OCCUPATIONS occupation, from the most exalted poet to the lowliest hod-carrier. It is useless to say that these things are neces- sary, that these stupendous achievements of our so-called civilization must be carried on, whatever the human cost. It is mere foohshness to call these operations beneficent, on the plea that they give work to the otherwise destitute. The chil- dren of the established order have always sung such chants. They have always declared per- manent the things that are really transitory. One must not be too much impressed by their state- ment. One must not regard as permanent any phase of civilization which is not morally accept- able. Every phase rests upon an underlying idea. It is permanent only so long as this idea holds. It vanishes the instant the idea is withdrawn. But both the work and the idea belong to individuals. Each man who declines immoral occupation for himself, to that extent reforms all industry, help- ing to save society as he saves himself. And still the moral problem of occupations is not settled. A man may decline frivolous work ; he may decline humanly harmful work. This is negative, a mere clearing of the ground. The positive problem of what he shall do remains. These moral prohibitions have reduced the list of conventional occupations to perhaps one fourth, and from this smaller list the individual must 361 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE make his own choice. Since the day's work re- presents such a large part of conduct, it is badly chosen indeed unless it represent the worker's deepest preference, and bear a vital relation to his nature and powers. Good fortune is individ- ual, and in America at least, youth has no pos- sible excuse if it fail to find such occupation as the heart genuinely desires. But such a choice is not made once and for all, and the problem ended. In reality, the choice of occupation is made every day. By simply continuing in the old work we virtually decide against all other work. It is a choice, and all other alternatives have been made as impossible as if formally scru- tinized and declined. Now morality is dynamic, a progress from smaller good to larger good. And conduct, to be moral, must show the same advance. Treating occupation as conduct, it is clear that occupation, to be moral, must serve some higher end than mere maintenance. This providing of food and clothing and shelter, vital as it is, is merely a secondary function of occupa- tion. The primary function of occupation is the same as the function of evolution and education ; it is the unfolding and perfecting of the human spirit, the development of the larger and more complete self. It is altogether possible to handle occupation in this ideal way, and to make it minister both 362 OCCUPATIONS to the body and to the spirit. It is not the easiest way, the line of least resistance. On the contrary, there is an appalling amount of inertia about all of us. It is fatally easy to go on doing what we happen to be doing. But this means the impoverishment of the whole adult life. In education the tasks are made increasingly diffi- cult. In the spiritual life new and varied reac- tions are deliberately sought. The stimuli are altered. The days are valued not for the repeti- tion of old and twice-told tales, but for the new knowledge, the fresh inspiration, the larger in- sight that they may be brought to bear. If this were not the case, we should agree that the student had wasted his time, and should seri- ously doubt whether he were worthy of a con- tinuance of opportunity. But in life the majority of persons are guilty of just such a wasting of the days. They follow the same grind, day after day, month after month, year after year, under the mistaken impression that they are moral and industrious persons, who deserve to be patted on the back here, and credited with something pretty considerable hereafter. It is gravely doubtful whether these dull prac- titioners of routine accomplish even their own special, monotonous tasks as well as the more alert and versatile experimentalist would have done them. As the work grows automatic, less 363 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE and less attention is required, until finally the worker becomes a machine, a curiously useless machine except for one unvarying piece of work. But even were it otherwise, the very reverse even, the moral argument would still be overwhelm- ingly in favor of diversified toil, for the moral end of the activity is the character which it has helped to fashion, and only incidentally the marketable product. So few persons see this. In school, the master directs the work, endeavors to develop the personality, and so to vary the occupations that they shall afford the largest human reactions. In industry, the masters have their thought fixed on the output. That is magnified, and the effect on the worker is ignored. Nor can one blame the worker, tired and spent with the day's work, if he too get the question inverted, and come to measure success in terms of things, his own success in terms of dollars. The easiest approach to such success is through wages. And so the majority of our countrymen have sold them- selves, sold the major part of their day, the major part of their power, into another's keep- ing, and have trafficked away what may not be trafficked away, even the inalienable heritage of self-possession. And this voluntary slavery is a second form of sacrilege in the name of industry. It is conceivable that industry might be so organ- ized that the workers would be the major con- 364 OCCUPATIONS cern, and that a succession of occupations would offer the peeded variety and discipline. But at present it is not so organized, and the man who permanently consents to wages consents in most cases to an immoral scheme of life, and has shut the door to the larger good. To make work educative, that is the worker's main business ; to see to it that it furthers indi- vidual good fortune, that it is a source of hap- piness and delight, as well as of mere physical maintenance. And this can be done only when the worker is his own employer, his own master, an independent spirit accepting the high oppor- tunities that a human life offers. If he be less than this, he is not a man, and his morality is the dumb acquiescence of a slave. It is idle to prate about democracy, if our people have not even the fundamental virtue of self-possession. Whether this question of occupations be looked at from a social or from an individual point of view, the result is the same. While social welfare is just the sum total of individual good fortune, and any failure in the fortune means a defect in welfare, it is also true that special forms of social wrong-doing are made possible only by the willingness of individuals to sell themselves into industrial slavery. The seemingly impersonal evil done by combinations and trusts is in reality done by persons, and is THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE practicable only because men of brains, as well as day-laborers, sell their time and strength and honor for a wage. What is needed is a more tonic view of life generally, more courage. We can afford to run some little risk of hunger and cold and naked- ness, if by so doing we may save our souls alive. But really there is very little danger of starving. Your strong, merry, reverent soul has a better chance than the craven, for after all, the world loves a man better than a slave. It is cowardice, not necessity, that robs men of independence and self-possession. Practically the wage-taker says : ' It is really too much of a responsibility, this getting of food and clothing and shelter. I am not equal to it. Assure me of these, — I shall not be over-particular about the quality, — and you may have the cream of my time and strength ; you may have the major part of my manhood, and you may make what you can out of it ! ' He is afraid to paddle his own canoe, and so pulls an oar in the galleys. It is a national mis- fortune that this is the situation of the great majority of our people to-day. And it is a still greater misfortune that when they do organize, the object is not a manly independence, but a larger wage, an increased class consciousness ! They are workmen first, wage-earners, slaves for eight to twelve hours each working day, and 366 OCCUPATIONS only incidentally men. It is true that the masses are ignorant, but they will remain ignorant so long as they are patted on the back and made to believe that this state of things is wholesome, this abdication of true manhood, this denial of the moral life. For morality says that occupations must be significant, not frivolous ; must be health-giving, not health-taking ; must be self-chosen, not im- posed ; must be educative, not deadening ; must be sources of happiness and delight, not of mor- tal weariness and despair. If a man's occupation fail to be this, no matter what the wage or so- called profit, it is not a moral occupation, and the man himself is not a moral person. XIV IMMEDIACY MORALITY is commonly supposed to be the enemy of impulse, the friend of reflection. Such a view is a logical result of the doctrine of total depravity, original sin, and the shadow-view of life generally. Impulse shows the real man, just as he is, and the real man being evil, all im- pulsive action must be doubtful, if not absolutely immoral. With reflective action, it is different, they say. Moral conduct, being the opposite of what we naturally want to do, a conflict indeed with our genuine desires, can be forthcoming only when reflection discredits impulse and points out the better way. It has been our purpose to present a concep- tion of morality far saner and sweeter than this morality of the chained beast. Impulse is often wrong, sometimes sadly wrong ; but the genuine remedy lies not in flouting it, but in chastening and purifying it, enlisting impulse on the side of the right, and then following it. This method is presented both as a more rational method and as the only thoroughgoing method of making a man essentially moral. It is the method of so 368 IMMEDIACY great a moral teacher as Jesus, the method o£ purifying the heart's desires and so entering into the kingdom. He that hateth his brother is the murderer; he that lusteth is the fornicator. Morality holds a man accountable for the outer act more than the inner state, if any discrepancy be possible ; but the man himself, to be a moral person, must concern himself most vitally and primarily with the heart's desires, for out of these the act emerges. Salvation is a process of in- forming the heart, of teaching it to turn to the sources of genuine and lasting happiness. The saviours of the race have made this appeal and rendered this service. Commonly, they have turned the attention inward, have made good fortune consist in human, spiritual possessions rather than in things. Yet so subjective a teacher as Jesus did not hesitate to declare that, the king- dom once found, all else would follow. But the primal good fortune was the inner state symbolized by the kingdom. To be saved, from this point of view, is not to want to do the wrong thing, sometimes the very wrong thing, and to desire it fiercely, and yet by God's grace to go haltingly and half-heartedly and do the right thing, but rather by God's grace not to want to do the wrong thing, to want indeed to do the right thing, and to want it in fuller and fuller mea- sure. This seems to me the only sincere and THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE well-bred sort of goodness, and all else a miserable hypocrisy. To save myself, — and therefore to save that part of society for which I am directly responsi- ble, — I must do three things. I must blot out all impulses and desires that are evil. It is negative work, rather a dull sort of weeding in the garden of the heart, and not calculated to arouse any great enthusiasm, but it is very necessary. And it must be a root-and-branch tearing out, not any mere pruning and half measures. It is a sort of gardening that never quite ends. Higher and lower are relative terms. Desires that are good at one time may cease to be good as one advances to higher levels. One must so live as to see this and be sensitive to the outgrown chapters of one's life. Then I must cultivate the impulses and desires that are good, make habits of them, for the gar- den devoid of wheat is hardly better than a gar- den full of tares. Morality cannot be built out of mere negations, of omitted evil. It must be built out of positive good. At bottom, it is this thought that makes the sturdier mpraHsts among us so impatient of the goody-goody people, the people who count as good simply because they have not energy and life enough to be bad. But morality, as we have seen, has no word of appro- bation for this human colorlessness. It requires 370 IMMEDIACY efficiency in action and worth in ends, is the pro- duct of the two, and requires that each dimension shall be sizable. Finally, I must work, not merely for good for- tune, for happiness, but for high good fortune, for great happiness. I want not only to be saved from evil and to attain good, but I want the largest good, the most welfare. It is a quest in which the goal recedes as we approach, in which ambition knows no bounds. It is permissible so near the end of a book on morality to assume that the earlier milestones on the moral path have been reached and passed, and that, for the moment, we are in the hill country. The purpose of the present chapter is this third item in the programme of salvation, — the heightening of the sense of good fortune. As good fortune is a matter of consciousness, it depends for its mag- nitude upon the vividness and intensity of con- sciousness. Whatever heightens consciousness increases our capacity for emotion, for emotion, indeed, of both a painful and a pleasurable sort. The vital people of the world have this intense consciousness, with all its capacity for suffering and joy. This is life, this intense participation in all that goes to make up existence. It is a greedy drinking of the cup of life, and has about it a large element of courage. Great good for- tune is not for timid souls, for the apathetic and 371 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE lazy, any more than success in business is for the slothful. One must be willing to pay the price. The greatest good fortune is an out-and-out gift of the gods, for it is associated with the full, rich temperament which a man is born with or not born with. Why one man should have this supreme gift and another not have it, is one of the moral enigmas which apparently give no promise of solution. To connect it with other incarnations, with previous existences, is to put the problem at a distance, but not to solve it. The point of interest for us practical seekers after good fortune is to know how a meagre tem- perament can be made rich, and a rich tempera- ment be made richer, if indeed so great a miracle can be wrought. If we imagine a man to have compassed the minor moralities, to have no bad habits, to have some distinctly good habits, to be on good terms with his neighbor and friends, with himself, — and there are men already in this hill country, — what can he do to better this good fortune and taste a still deeper and more genuine happiness ? These problems of higher morality are not unimportant, even though the majority have not yet come in sight of them. The same objection might be urged against all graduate study. The problems of higher morality are quite as impor- tant to morality in general as are the problems of 372 IMMEDIACY higher mathematics to mathematics in general, and for precisely the same reason. They throw a flood of light upon all our elementary work, giving us a much more fruitful conception of the fundamentals, and still more, by opening an infinite vista, they make the lower work increas- ingly worth while. When one has reached the practical limits of one's natural capacity for good fortune, it is highly pertinent to inquire whether the capacity may not be enlarged. We believe, indeed, that it may, and that the problem is one of the expansion of conscious- ness. The thing that differentiates our vital, full-blooded, fortunate people from the anaemic brother seems to be the greater reality in their particular world. This reality shows itself in the greater wealth of thought, the more intense inter- est, the keener participation, the more emphatic impression that life is eminently worth while. It would seem that reality is a thing to be cultivated, and on the whole a far more desirable thing than much that we do so assiduously cultivate. The sources of reality in a man's life are varied. They are not necessarily or even for the most part material. The overwhelming majority of these sources are mental. Indeed, one might properly say that they are all mental, since the reality of our material possessions depends not upon the possessions themselves, but wholly upon 373 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE our own feelings about them. We have made good fortune consist in just these apparently trivial things. The feelings and the validity of the analysis may be tested by any one willing to question his own fortunes and investigate their fluctuating character. Psychologists have pointed out that the first effect of confession, even the confession of serious crimes, is one of relief, even happiness, for the pressure of apprehension, the apprehension of discovery, outweighed even the grave results of discov- ery. And bankrupts, once over the brink and in the hands of the sheriff, grow buoyant and light-hearted. The thought is freed from the appalling picture of impending ruin, and once more turns to more hopeful and constructive measures. So the value we place upon our pos- sessions depends wholly upon our state of mind at the time. An unexpected windfall gets spent several times over, when a much larger fee com- ing in the course of the day's work, and possibly a trifle smaller than we anticipated, creates a curious tightening of the purse-strings. A word of disparagement fills the artist with despair, and robs his canvases of all value. In such a mood many really noble works of art have been destroyed, the fragments to be afterwards pre- served as precious relics. A little appreciation turns a chest of manuscripts into a treasure 374 IMMEDIACY house, while censure makes them so much waste paper. The house on which we have spent so much time and thought, and more money, per- haps, than we could quite afford, in the end is at the mercy of our friends. Their comment makes it seem quite worth while, or else a sad, humiliat- ing blunder. In the reminiscences and autobiographies of successful men, it is very noticeable, the tremen- dous gratitude they treasure up for the men and women who, in the struggle days before recogni- tion came, encouraged them to believe in them- selves and to go on trying." This gratitude is deeper, not for money favors, but for the rarer wealth of human sympathy. Generations of fair women have had the worship of enamored men, and will have until the end of time, but it is a small tribute compared to that greater fund, the offerings of a son to his mother, the woman who made high achievement seem a possibility, and the ideal world an attainable reality. It is these mothers, plain or beautiful, hard-working or luxurious, who have truly held destiny in their hand, for in giving a mother's faith and sympa- thy they gave success. ' But Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart.' It may seem that I am taking trivial instances, that good fortune is made of sterner stuff than mere emotion, that it is a tangible possession, to 375 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE be mentioned in one's last will and testament, and subject to the inheritance tax. Those who have such experience of good fortune must, of course, hold to their belief, and there is no discussion. But were the whole experience known, it is more than probable that either the good fortune is not genuine, a mere symbol of welfare in place of true happiness, or else that it happens to go hand in hand with that inner satisfaction which is the veritable good fortune. Where possessions heighten reality, and they have this undoubted power, they become to that extent sources of good fortune, but never the good fortune itself. To balance the account with precision, and determine just where things cease to be a help and become a hindrance, is a major problem of the moral life, and a singularly indi- vidual problem. St. Francis found all possessions a hindrance, and espoused poverty with an ardor seldom imitated. St. Paul declared in favor of the golden mean, neither poverty nor riches. The typical American prefers riches. Even Mr. Lowell is reported to have said that if he had his life to live over again, he would go in for money, since money is power. We have here three very different types of belief, and it is not my purpose to pass judgment upon any one of them. It is a matter of temperament. The possessions that would have bothered Francis might have been 376 IMMEDIACY used to excellent advantage by Paul. The riches not desired by Paul might, in Mr. Lowell's hands, have heightened his own undeniable good for- tune. But for the people who are not Francis or Paul or Mr. Lowell there must be some deter- minable point up to which possessions minister, and beyond which they swamp. I once knew a lady whose very excellent maxim in regard to expenditure was to save only what she could not spend to advantage. This bit of practical wisdom seems to offer the touchstone that we need. Pos- sessions minister just so far as they add to the reality of life, heighten the consciousness, inten- sify the interest, increase the happiness, and they have negative value when they pass beyond this point, when they begin to confuse and distract. To the majority of people, the poverty of St. Francis would be a distinct disadvantage, a dis- tinct absence of good fortune, for it would mean the lack of adequate instruments to carry out the wholesome activities of Hfe, the work and play, the hospitalities and benefactions, the art and research. In normal persons there is a self- activity to be satisfied which requires means as well as ends. To the majority of people, the great wealth which Mr. Lowell might have turned into power, but which might conceivably have stifled The Vision of Sir Launfal, would be a distinct loss of good fortune, for it would mean the undue 377 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE expenditure of time and thought in its care, and a mixture of excess and caprice in its spending, to say nothing of the almost unavoidable barrier that it would set up between one's self and the neighbor, perhaps the very man or woman in whose keeping there rested the infinitely greater good fortune of love and comradeship. These considerations and many more equally or even more telling make the pursuit of good fortune seem strangely difficult. Any general solution is indeed impossible. Each soul must determine the personal limit, and if the amount of material possessions adjudged desirable can- not, after wholesome efPort, be attained, it always remains possible to readjust one's ideas, and to compel good fortune with such available goods as one has. There are, indeed, two distinct methods of growing rich. One is to acquire vast possessions. The other is to cultivate a capacity for happi- ness. The one is the method of millionaires, and, as we have seen, is not a universal method, since vast possessions do not necessarily create happi- ness, and are not attainable by the majority. Indeed, if they were attainable, they would lose their power. Were we all millionaires, we should, as I have been pointing out, have considera- ble difficulty in getting our breakfasts cooked, our palaces swept, our linen washed, our stables 378 IMMEDIACY cleaned. The man who elects to grow rich in things elects a form of wealth whose potency depends upon the poverty of his neighbor. But to increase one's capacity for happiness is open to every one. This capacity for happiness depends upon the state of the body, of the mind, of the spirit, and its increase has the tremendous recom- mendation that it brings about, of necessity, a heightening of good fortune for all neighboring souls. This is the method of the philosopher, and no turn of the wheel can destroy the good for- tune. Even time cannot annihilate it. Old age and death come to all, but their manner of coming depends not upon them, but upon us. The capa- city for enjoyment diminishes with age in all affairs of the body and mind. Strength gives place to weakness. The faculties grow dim. The appetites lose their zest. Exercise becomes less pos- sible, and a source of greater pain than pleasure. Even positive ills appear, and life may come to be a round of daily suffering. So, too, the memory weakens, the immediate personal interests grow- slack. These evil fortunes are the portion of all old people, of rich and poor alike, but they press less heavily upon the man of simple, sturdy life, upon the possessor of human wealth ; and they press more heavily upon those whose joys have been associated with things and all excesses. But old age would be a pitiful thing, in truth, and life 379 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE an essential tragedy, if this were the whole story. Happily, it is not. The spirit does not suffer this eclipse. It is the product of experience, of days and months and years that have slipped into the past, that have been themselves effaced, but have left this permanent record. The capacity for happiness in the spirit may increase with every year of life up to the very moment when the soul passes into the undiscovered country and the world-hfe is at an end. This increase in spiritual happiness may be so great that it not only bal- ances the losses elsewhere, but even overshadows them, and makes old age the happiest time of all. We have all seen these serene spirits who have acquired the habit of goodness, of happiness, and who expand in all true living up to the very end. Happy the community which produces such spirits, and possesses such examples for a younger generation ! If the tomb mean eternal silence, all is still well, for the cup of happiness and welfare was filled to the brim and ever full. But if, as some of us believe, the spirit lives eternally, then the happiness of the spirit possesses an added dignity, a timeless, indestructible worth. These considerations do not in healthy-minded persons produce any contempt for the body or the intelligence, any disregard of the present moment. Such an attitude would defeat itself. The body, the intelligence, the present moment, 380 IMMEDIACY are the sources of experience, the materials out of which the spirit builds. One must be alive in every pore, radiant with health and wisdom, possessor of the present moment. The failure to live is commonly due to pro- crastination. Every man expects to be good some time, expects to be happy some time. This con- stant putting off robs life of all reality. Where all achievement, 'all first-hand experience, all happiness, are put into the future, there can be no genuine heart-throb, no vitality, no reality, for one essential attribute of reality is immediacy. The philosophers all agree to this, but the mor- alists too much ignore it. It is to-morrow rather than to-day. Education is tainted with the same remoteness, a process which has most of its re- wards in the future. Life itself becomes curiously attenuated and unreal when goal and effort are so widely separated. In all serious schemes of salvation, the accept- able time is now. Consciousness is never so keen when contemplating either past or present as when engaged with the immediate, experienced present. To heighten consciousness, to deepen reality, to take good fortune at the flood, is to return to the present moment, to make the days good in and for themselves as well as means to future good. The path to a larger and more genu- ine good fortune is to introduce immediacy into 381 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE the affairs of daily life, to make the goal and the effort both contemporaneous, to have concern for the wealth of the present, living, eternal moment, the wealth of human health and happiness, and to have done once for all with that excessively prudential foresight which makes the present a desert in the vain hope of making the future a paradise. The effect of this absent-mindedness, this banishment of immediacy, is to create a curiously artificial and unreal world, to make us seriously doubt as to whether the game is worth the candle, and to induce a very natural and almost justifiable pessimism. If everything good really is in the future, and present virtue is repression, a grim endurance faintly illumined by a remote anticipation, then truly is it a bad world upon which we are fallen, and wisdom counsels all detachment of desire. The one hope in the whole tragedy is the chance of ultimate escape. Our own attitude towards this prisoner-view of life is a most important matter morally. It is not disposed of by saying that it is temperamental. This is perfectly true, but morality does not teach that all temperaments are desirable and lead to happiness. On the contrary, morality says that the natural inclinations are not to be retained in the heart and thwarted in their fruits, but that the natural inclinations a^'e to be instructed and disciplined, essentially eradicated and supplanted IMMEDIACY if need be, until their natural fruits are desirable and happiness-producing. It is very noteworthy that many contempo- rary writers of more thoughtful turn, men like Tolstoy, Maeterlinck, and Paulsen, men much impressed with the evil of life, with its ennui, with its essential nothingness, have all hit upon the life of the simple laboring man as our one example of present light and holiness. Tolstoy has tried very bravely to taste the simple life which he praises. Others have tried to follow his example. Individually, and in communities, we find some few successes and many noble fail- ures. The ultimate result of all separatist move- ments is the same, an inevitable barrenness. But one can understand the ground of this praise of the lowly life. It lies in the immediacy and consequent reality of the laboring man's life. Literature has idealized it, and speaks rather of the dream than of the daily toil and routine. But nevertheless it has seized upon a vital fact in pointing out that it is a life in the present moment, a hfe of genuineness, of participation, a life of wholesome objective tasks begun and finished. The lesson of such lives is not to go and do likewise, not to imitate the poverty and primi- tiveness, not to ignore the fruits of progress, and return to a Nature untouched by human achieve- ment and social experience, but rather in that THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE more complex world in which it is our privilege to live, to keep ourselves simple, our hands on the machinery, our lives in the present. Those who fail to attain this reality of the present mo- ment, who are unhappy, baffled, discontented, not because the world is essentially ^vil and dull, but solely because they are always out of their time- setting, eternally reminiscent, eternally anticipa- tory, never eternally contemporary, are prone to regard the happy, healthy-minded person with high disdain, a poor, unperceiving creature who laughs, not because there is anything to be merry over, but because he does not know any better. This high-mindedness on the part of life's trage- dians has created the impression that happiness is hardly respectable. It has given a cynical touch to our humor. It is robbing us of mirth. There is a curious belief current that those who are happy have not plumbed the depths of being, that they are under an illusion and do not know life. In certain quarters, to be guilty of optimism is to proclaim one's self incapable of handling the deeper problems of life, incapable, indeed, of even knowing that there are such problems. So obnoxious does the optimist become that just to have met him is a traditional reason for pes- simism. In spite of serious charges to the contrary, it remains true that the essential element in all 384 IMMEDIACY great world movements, in all reforms, revivals, rebirths, consists in this simple turning to the immediate moment, and is to that extent mysti- cal. The new prophet, teacher, singer, artist, law- giver, is the man who turns away from tradition outgrown and meaningless to the wealth of the present moment. The literature that endures has in it this element of timeless truth, is always con- temporary, never obsolete. The Hebrew Bible is full of these solemn returns to the vital present. In its many books, grave and pessimistic as many of them are, there is nothing more impressive than that simple name by which, according to the Mosaic tradition, God preferred to be known, — / Am, — the God who had done so much in the past, who promised so much for the future. The Christian Bible is the similar record of a return to immediacy. Hebrew ceremonial was no longer life-giving, Roman civilization no longer sound. Jesus came with a simple message. He taught the life that is, the God within, the present act. All moral and religious teachers have done the same. They have proclaimed life real by pro- claiming it immediate. In our own day, all that is vital in religion and education and art has drawn its inspiration from the same fountain. The individual life, to be moral, must be real, and to be real must be im- mediate. Efficiency and worth are dynamic quali- 385 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE ties. They have to do with what is. This instinct for the immediate has great hold among children and young people. It shows itself in their play, and in so much of their study as comes to any- thing. It is likewise the hall-mark of genius. Interest gives to life this present-moment vitality, and is at the bottom of all good and great things. It is an instinct that is entirely wholesome^ this desire to bring effort and goal together, this per- sistent feeling that all our activities ought not only to lead somewhere, but should be an end and gratification in themselves. It is a legitimate revolt against such eternal preparation, against the constant putting into the future of the things that make up heaven. It is a legitimate demand, that for self-realization. This praise of immediacy does not imply any return to a primitive life of impulse, any relin- quishment of all those precious fruits of reflec- tion and foresightedness which the labor and travail of the centuries have so painfully pro- duced. One is under no such necessity. In the best of immediate action, impulse is tempered by thought. In the moral life, the desires of the heart are chastened and informed, but they ex- press themselves with sincerity and directness. And furthermore, if the present moment be wisely spent, the gods themselves will not complain, for the future is assured. Immediacy as a moral 386 IMMEDIACY quality necessarily includes that '* ultimacy ' which is often opposed to it and proclaimed the greater good. There is in reality no conflict. We can have no desirable ultimacy which does not grow out of a well-spent present, and we can have no moral immediacy which does not lead to an ad- mirable future. The high good fortune and large happiness, if enjoyed at all, must be immediate. We may accept either things or expectations as so many promises of good. We may linger over pleasant memories of the past. But good fortune and happiness are experiences, and as such they be- long to the present. XV THE MORAL OUTLOOK WE have here a very human sort of moraHty. But it has this advantage over more aca- demic and remote systems, that it is both sound and usable. So intimate a scheme of morals could hardly escape the soundness which inheres in all genuine human experience. However partial and imper- fect an empirical morality may appear to be when contrasted with the formal completeness of an outwardly imposed code, it has the inner wit- ness of the spirit, the validity of an experienced fact. Such a morality may be incomplete, but so far as it goes, it is convincingly genuine. Its very incompleteness is a part of its soundness, for the story of human life is so far from being told that one has a feeling of having hardly en- tered upon the preface. There are intimations of what human life may be in the future, but the most valuable intimation of all is just, that blind intimation which suggests that human life will be something more glorious and more beautiful than we have yet had the insight to conceive. So our present morality is but a prelude to that larger 388 THE MORAL OUTLOOK morality into which the race is slowly growing. In the presence of this ideal and absolute moral- ity, whose veiled figure occupies the future, none can be more conscious than we that we have here but touched the hem of her beautiful gar- ment. The most that we can hope for is, that by even so slight a touch enough virtue is en- tered into us to inaugurate the one possible form of spiritual redemption, the redemption achieved through self-activity. This human morality is eminently usable. It is not the morality of the chained beast, keeping alive in the heart the beast of unlawful desire, and depending for safety upon the doubtful strength of a conventional morality. It is a thorough- going redemption, a redemption to be carried out, not in spite of the heart's desire, but through the heart's desire. The thing to be redeemed is human nature, and the thing to redeem it is just this same human nature. An inner result can be gained only by an inner process. Human nature being what it is, the heart's desire is essentially for the things which the heart be- lieves to be desirable. All men want good for- tune. They have wanted it in the past ; they do want it in the present ; they will want it in the future. It is the psychological necessity of saints and sinners alike. If they ceased to want good fortune, they would cease to be men, cease indeed THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE to be conscious, sentient beings. Even the animals want good fortune, and through a rudimentary morality of experience, achieve it after a fashion. But all men who realize that good fortune is also the essential goal of morality are by neces- sity more eager to know and practice morality than the most austere moralist can be to press its precepts upon them. So the process of moralizing and redeeming the human heart is the process of education, of enlightenment. It is an inner process, a change of heart, the revelation of a world larger and more beautiful than any world the heart has yet known. To be genuine, it must be voluntary, a purification of the heart's desires through know- ledge, and not the compressing of desire into external and alien moulds. Men cannot be saved en masse by state or church or school, by any outer compulsion. They may not be thrust into the kingdom of heaven as cattle into fat pastures. If that were a good way, the great God would have done it long ago. But one by one, men enter the kingdom of the perfect life through the compulsion of their own desires. It is not a place, but a condition. It is never distant, never closed, never over-crowded. In its serene commo- diousness there is always welcome. This genuine morality is not the command of any institution or oracle. It is something for 390 THE MORAL OUTLOOK a man to discover through the process of daily life, and to discover continuously throughout the whole of life. It is wrapped up in the very nature of things, and quite as unescapable as the force of gravitation. It is a part of the great sanity of the universe, the principle of causa- tion operating in the spirit. And the universe is the most excellent of schoolmasters. It offers us freedom and opportunity, — freedom to know things as they are, in an increasing measure of perception, and opportunity to harmonize the daily life with the perceived reality of things. To see, to feel, to think, — that is, to live, to hve eagerly, even greedily, — this is the condition of enlightenment. The dead soul may not participate in this vital morality. It is to such a soul a sealed book, an unknown tongue. And this is the grave moral objection to all that is deadening in our modern social life, to family aridness, to school routine, to church creed, to industrial grind, to state exac- tion, for it kills the life of the spirit, and makes impossible that superb morality which springs from throbbing human life and from enlighten- ment. To those who go on the quest of good for- tune, it is a supreme duty to be alert, to wonder, to be curious, to see things as they are, to be ahve with all the intensity and earnestness of a moral passion. It is an old cry, this cry for more light, 391 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE but it has been regarded by the Western world, not as a cry of the whole human spirit, but as having to do solely with the intellectual life. Even in America, light is too much conceived as a luxury, something to be indulged in by those who care to give up the more solid business of the hour, not as something which constitutes the one fundamental duty of mankind. We hear the dispraise of culture, of the higher education. They are said quite solemnly to interfere with business success, and therefore to be undesirable. As a result, the majority of our men are essen- tially uncultivated, and this in spite of the fact that their native ability has easily made them fac- tors to be reckoned with in the world of affairs. And our women, in spite of their graciousness, possess for the most part only a pseudo-culture. All disparagement of the morality of insight really springs from a profound and paralyzing skepticism. Men do not believe that at heart the universe is good, that the moral law is fun- damentally a natural law, that morality consists in seeing things as they are, in enlightenment. Neither does the state believe it, nor the church. Even the school, in spite of Socrates and Emer- son, believes it only in part. Men believe practi- cally that the world is at heart evil, that morality has to do with things as they ought to be, rather than with things as they eternally are. 392 THE MORAL OUTLOOK This belief that morality is concerned with a hypothetical world alien to actual life has made our popular morality highly speculative and arti- ficial. It is conventional morality, rather than necessary morality. But in point of fact, conven- tional morality is an indeterminate expression. It may be a general morality, or an out-and-out immorality, — a wise summing-up of human ex- perience, or an unchastened out-reach into spec- ulation. Conventional morality is a large compo- nent of what we call conscience. It makes the uninstructed conscience an unsafe guide to genu- ine good conduct. The man who follows his con- science is often an immoral man, for he follows a body of prejudice and convention, not commonly in harmony with that natural sanity which is the very heart of the moral law. In truth, the one method of morality is edu- cation, the passionate process of righteousness. And by education is meant not alone the process of childhood and youth, the teaching by which we try to bring to others the large realities of life, but still more that conscious, self-imposed process, as unending as existence itself, by which a man in earnest tries to see and to know. The moral life is a divine discipline, an escape from ignorance, a coming into knowledge. For moral- ity grows out of the insight born of experience, is the child of wisdom. From this point of view, 393 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE self -education is a moral duty of fundamental order ; and no mode of life is permissible which does not come to us richly freighted with wisdom- giving experience. To see, — that is the supreme duty, — to see things as they are, and yet to see. To see in any full measure is, of necessity, to do. But to put this moral insight into practice is to pass from theoretical morality to its gracious applica- tion, religion. For religion is essentially a man's attitude towards life, towards the universe. No man is without a religion. Salvation is not a pro- cess of getting religion, as the popular phrase has it. It is a process of changing one's religion, building up a larger and more wholesome atti- tude towards life in place of a smaller and meaner one. So religion, morality in movement, must be progressive, sweeping the spirit onward, out of the smaller into the larger life, out of the dark- ness into the light. And just as morality has in education its approved method, so religion has in habit its approved method, in habit, that automatic goodness on which so much stress has already been laid, which renders the incompara- ble service of wrapping up in the very organ- ism itself the fruits of every moral insight, and leaving the spirit free for fresh conquests and new births. Through self -education, we recognize morality ; 394 THE MORAL OUTLOOK through rendering its insights habitual in con- duet, we put on rehgion. Such a conception of religion makes it some- thing greater than the historic activity of any church, however august, and plainly differentiates it from theology, the body of church doctrine. To many devout persons there is a fundamental distinction between religion and morality, reli- gion being the far higher reality, and morality its very humble handmaiden. This separateness even disparages morality, — mere morality, it is called, — and too often goes to the extreme of divorcing morality from religion. So it becomes possible to be religious without being moral. The secular and church history of the Middle Ages abounds in illustrations of this essential contradiction, faithful sons of the church living lives of open scandal. One sees the same evil at the present moment, and sees it in the newer, reformed com- munions as well as in the more historic churches. The unavoidable effect of emphasizing doctrine as a means of salvation is to produce a lament- able carelessness of life. Those sects which lay the greatest stress upon free grace and other forms of metaphysical redemption present, as a rule, the poorest showing in the way of genuine morality. Doctrinal apologists have of course explained the situation by saying that all the while rehgion herself is unde filed, and that the 395 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE immorality must be charged to the weakness of human nature. It seems that the man asleep is religiouSj and awake, immoral. The historical objection to such an explanation lies in the fact that many of the most atrocious immoralities, such as the cruelties of the Inqui- sition on the Continent, and the persecution of the sectarians in Great Britain, were committed in the name of religion. Perhaps the more se- rious objection is psychological. Men may be good and bad in spots, local aberrations due to the universal human inconsistency, but on the whole, human consciousness is a unit. The char- acter which a man creates for himself, and which becomes the significant part of him, is all of a piece. Jesus taught that to break the law in one particular is to break it in all particulars. Mo- rality, as we have seen, does not depend upon the exercise of any chosen set of virtues, cardi- nal or minor, but upon the general attitude of the man, upon the tendency in daily conduct, which stamps him as good or bad. Religion, if it is to be a vital reality, must possess a similar all-inclusiveness, must be a man's spiritual state, taken as a whole, and the gracious acts which flow out of that state. Pure religion and unde- filed was long ago defined in just such terms as these, and the definition has been stated anew by all the great religious teachers of mankind. 396 THE MORAL OUTLOOK In point of fact, religion and morality are. es- sentially one and the same thing, a general atti- tude towards life which makes for the hisrhest good fortune of the individual and the deepest welfare of the community. It is a barren attempt, this attempt to distinguish between religion and morality. If we are to draw any line whatever, we may more profitably consider morality to be the science of right conduct, our body of empiri- cal spiritual truth, and make religion the more personal term of duty, of effort, of the will bent on putting morality into action. The only dissatisfaction which the spirit suffers from this identification of religion with morality comes, I think, from the feeling that the whole story of the inner life has not thus been told; that while any true religion must include the whole of morality, religion herself is larger than any interest of the earth-life, is indeed a tran- scendent out-reach into the unseen. This would be a true criticism, if morality were a mere con- ventional matter, and were limited to its strict etymological meaning. The spirit would be quite right in demanding something more juicy and life-giving than these doubtful social conventions. But that larger morality which we have here been trying to present has to do with human conduct in all its aspects, with inner states as well as with outer acts, and human conduct in- 397 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE eludes virtually the whole of life. So any belief in the eternities, in God, in immortality, in the unseen world, in a higher order of beings, in man's relation to the universe, is a part of human conduct, and as such is a part of the subject- matter of morals. If this belief be vital, a reality of the heart rather than of the lips, it must per- ceptibly touch one's whole attitude, and so mani- fest itself in conduct of a larger and more cosmic order. The thing which religion and morality alike are to redeem is life as a whole. A belief which is not incorporated into life, into conduct, is either insincere, or else it lacks significance, a mere cobweb, a will-o'-the-wisp, a speculation without dignity or worth. Of very small value is my belief in God, unless I draw upon his power ; in immortality, unless I manifest serenity and leisure ; in the unseen world, unless I am sobered by its mystery ; in gods and angels, unless they are to me inspiration and example ; in the high destiny of mankind, unless I try honestly and sturdily to achieve it. Beliefs have to do with the unseen, with the genuine mystery of life, and cannot be forced. I beheve what I must, not what J would. Yet, as elements in human conduct, all beliefs are open to moral judgment. One is quite as bound to purify one's beliefs as to purify one's outer acts. Any faith which lowers human excellence 398 THE MORAL OUTLOOK is on the face of it discredited. Any belief which produces essentially good fruit has at least a strong presumption in its favor. One may adopt, in a tentative way, any set of beliefs which seem to complete and rationaUze the partial ex- perience of the present. Such beliefs are impli- cations from actual experience, and while they may perhaps claim no greater authority than a high degree of probabihty, they may reasonably be accepted in the same spirit that one accepts a fruitful hypothesis in science. It is eminently worth while for a man who is without any active beliefs as sources of conduct to ask himself whether their omission is not a form of laziness, a mere drifting, a lack of imagination and of enterprise ; and whether this omission is not condemning him to a less successful daily life than he might have known had he taken the trouble to scrutinize human experience and in- quire into some of its mtore helpful implications. No wholesome structure can be built out of negations. For reHgion is not fixed. There are not ten great religions. There are as many religions as there are human hearts beating ; and of these religions, all are great that manifest sincerity and progress. Religion is as varied as that quest of good fortune out of which all morality and religion have grown. It is an individual thing, 399 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE and being identical with life, it sums up at any moment the achievement of the striving human heart. The East understands this matter better than does the West. In the East they do not try to import religion into life. The phrase would be meaningless. To them, — to the best of them, — religion and life are one and the same thing. The identification is complete. This is the secret of the power which Eastern religions have over all eager and hungry souls. It is the secret of the power of those Christian sects which turn upon works rather than upon free grace. It is the secret of the growing power of those mod- ern cults of optimism which, in spite of their several vagaries, have undoubtedly set morality in motion, and made religion and life identical. It is the secret of the beauty in the lives of those eminent men of science who have put their cau- sational beliefs into practice. It is the very heart of that experimental lif^ which declines to count material enterprises as other than passing means, and stands out resolutely for that larger end, the welfare of the spirit. The present moral outlook is full of promise. It is assuredly a victorious moral world in which the wrong ideals of good fortune, the wrong methods of daily life, proclaim themselves by their very failure. It is also a happily constituted moral world in which the good fortune sought 400 THE MORAL OUTLOOK and gained is not uniform and deadly dull, but marvelously varied, full of surprise and beauty. And it is a blessed moral world surely, in which I am neither obliged to submit my own ideal of good fortune to the vote of my less informed neighbors, nor, less informed thail they, to pre- scribe their ideals. The conditions could hardly be more favorable for the development of human character. Our present world is not only good, but, morally speaking, it seems to me the best possible type of world, for it is essentially a sane world. The great principle of cause and effect operates in the affairs of the spirit, as well as in those of the body. I create my own earth and my own heaven ; through enlightenment, I adorn them; through habit, I take possession of them. I awake each morning to a heightened wealth, to the possibiU- ties of a larger day. I go to bed each night undiscouraged and content. What if my gains are infinitesimal, if I still seem to my neighbor a very poor man ? One need not on that account whimper and cry out. The soul believes in itself ; it has infinite time. The vision of a larger life is open to every man. It is truly catholic, is universal, since in some measure it touches every human heart. From such examples of the larger life as I have found in life and in literature, from such small 401 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE experiments as I have been able myself to make, I am convinced of the reality of such a life, of its compelling beauty, of its essential religion. This conception of religion can be compressed into no specific creed. It may be stated only in the broad- est and most general terms. For this path from nothingness to God, from ignorance to enlight- enment, is not a broad highway on which men travel in noisy companies. It is rather an infi- nite spiral, up which a man climbs in the awful solitude of his own spirit. The most that can be said of any man's reli- gion, by way of classification, is that it belongs to a certain type. In its full statement it is indi- vidual. How essentially immoral is the attempt of person or institution to check this free play of the spirit and chain it to one of the milestones on the road ! Each man has his own religion, his own attitude, his own ideals, created by his own nature, and responding to what he believes to be its needs. It is not for another to judge or to despise. For out of this soil, however humble, the better self must grow. More sacred than any property right, yet less cared for by law and public opinion, is this precious possession, person- ality. I must respect it in others ; I must guard it in myself. What I am, — that is my religion. What I may be, — that is my possible destiny. What 402 THE MORAL OUTLOOK I ought to be, — that is my highest good fortune. But these are not separate and unrelated facts. On the contrary, what I am determines what I may be, and what I may be determines what I ought to be. The way of life is not a series of leaps over separating, bottomless chasms from one spiritual island to another. The way of life is rather a gentle passing from conduct of low efficiency and limited worth to conduct of high efficiency and cosmic worth. Like all the pro- cesses of evolution, it is continuous, the daily unfolding and perfecting of the human spirit through harmonizing one's habits with one's insight. In the practical affairs of life, this willingness to look straight, to identify religion with life, would remove, I venture to think, at least the major part of all the many difficulties that beset mankind. The moral life consists in this vital awakening, — seeing things as they are, once, twice, always ; seeing more and more things, seeing them more and more as they are. The glory and the wonder of life are very near, but one must open one's eyes. One may not try to believe one thing and do another thing. To have a good reason, and back of it a real reason, is to tangle up life into a multitude of perfectly use- less knots. To be direct, to be simple, — this is almost the complete formula of success. 403 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE Doubtless, human nature will some time be a much fairer thing than it now is, but just as it is, human nature is quite the most precious thing that the world has yet produced. It is the one element of importance in the whole drama of life, the one element of abiding interest and supreme moment. The moral outlook is full of promise because human nature is what it is, — a blunderer, a follower of false lights, a f orgetter of high destinies, it is true, but nevertheless always seeking, always striving, always hungry for good fortune, always in touch with a godlike possibiHty. The individual ideal of good fortune may be small and limited. But a man wants what he must want. In the very act of gaining his ideal, he discovers its quality, its limitations, its defects. Then he aspires again ; he sets his heart on something better. This may happen many times, nay, must so happen. But so long as a man is faithful, so long as he is sincere, each quest will be a nearer approximation to what is genuinely good. Each adventure of the spirit yields a deeper satisfaction. And some time, sooner or later, the spirit in all sincerity will want a fortune better than even its own chastened self can discern, a fortune that the gods them- selves would call good. And when this happens, life has become moralized, and the spirit is mov- ing towards freedom. But the quest is not over ; 404 THE MORAL OUTLOOK it has just fairly begun ; the quest itself is a part of the good fortune. Fate deals with a man, not with men. To make religion this pressing personal problem for every man and woman, and boy and girl, is to identify it with life, and so make it individual and human. Disaster comes when a man dele- gates to others what he has no right to alienate from himself, but the disaster is a victory for the moral order. The way of life is never the way from another's point of view. We may discuss life and its possibilities together, the several aspects of duty, the range of opportunity, and so chasten and correct that partial view of life which alone is open to the single individual, but the supreme decision, what a man ought to be and do, rests with him. It is in the awful soli- tude of the spirit, in the closet-chapel of per- sonality, that these issues of life and death must be worked out, and all larger decisions reached. When a man takes firm hold of his own life, and handles it with even the limited skill which he brings to the concerns of the petty, worka- day world, the gods themselves cannot deny him heaven. We are all children of the same quest, seekers of a good fortune such as we see. For each it properly wears a different face. And each is bound by the necessity of his own heart's desire 405 THE CHILDREN OF GOOD FORTUNE to follow the image which his spirit makes. But when enlightenment is come^ and the sweet rea- sonableness of a larger knowledge abides in the heart, this image of good fortune, with its gentle but unescapable compulsion, reveals itself as the serene and beautiful face of morality. Electrotyped and printed by H.O. Houghton df Co. Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A. JOHN PERCYFIELD By C HANFORD HENDERSON "John Percy field is twisted of a double thread — delightful, wise, sunshiny talks on the lines laid down by the Autocrat, and an autobiographical love story. It is full of wisdom and of beauty, of delicate delineation, and of inspiring sentiment." New York Times, " Its merits will rank it among the few sterling books of the day." Boston Transcript. "A book of rare charm and unusual character . . . fresh and sweet in tone and admirably written throughout." The Outlook, New York. Crown 8vo, gilt top, #1.50. HOUGHTON, /v2b^ BOSTON MHTXIN /^$W ^'^^^ & COMPANY reara NEW YORK EDUCATION AND THE LARGER LIFE By C HANFORD HENDERSON **In this volume Mr. Henderson has set down many stimulating thoughts. He makes inquiry as to how education can be so applied in America as best to further the progress of civilization. . . . Fine pene- tration and distinct charm of style make it both in- structive and fascinating." Chicago Record-Herald. " A broad minded view of the relation of education to life." Springfield Republican. " It is a book to come back to again and again for hope and inspiration." Life^ New York. Crown 8vo, ^1.30, net Postpaid, $1.43. HOUGHTON, /^^ BOSTON & COMPANY teVVa^ NEW YORK THIS BOOK IS DUE ON THE LAST DATE STAMPED BELOW AN INITIAL FINE OF 25 CENTS WILL BE ASSESSED FOR FAILURE TO RETURN THIS BOOK ON THE DATE DUE. THE PENALTY WILL INCREASE TO 50 CENTS ON THE FOURTH DAY AND TO $1.00 ON THE SEVENTH DAY OVERDUE. 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