Because it will pay. It will pay in better boys and girls; better men and women. In having only the best, only what is beautiful, at school, higher ideals of worth and beauty can be developed in the children. These ideals will have their effect on the homes and therefore raise the aesthetic and ethical life of the community. The beautiful school should simply be one of the means used to develop beautiful lives and bring a higher happiness to all the members of the community.

But can we have these things? Are they possible? Yes, if we want them. The money raised by this country for carrying on the Great War would be enough to put an ideal school house in every district in the land and to furnish each in the best of taste. Let us declare war on ignorance and poverty and sin and ugliness, and raise money by the billions for the prosecution of this war, else the other war shall have been won in vain.

Making the world beautiful must be largely the work of women, at least in plan and conception. In our common life together, what men shall do and what women shall do is merely a matter of the division of labor. In the very nature of things, the woman must be the home maker, and therefore the home beautifier. Her

first duty is to beautify it by herself, by giving her life to it, by earnestly taking up its duties and responsibilities, and embracing its opportunities. She should strive to have a home beautiful in every particular. In its material aspects the home should be pretty, the house, the yard, the garden. But more important still is the spiritual side of the home. Circumstances may limit the woman's power to make the home beautiful materially, but they need never limit her possibilities on the spiritual side. To be clean, to be neat, to wear a smile are not expensive. The humblest sort of home materially can be made radiantly beautiful by a woman.

CHAPTER IX.

IDEALS OF MORALS AND RELIGION.

OF all the factors that influence the life of man, bringing him sorrow and joy, by far the most important are his relations with his fellows. Our stronger emotions, love, hate, envy, jealousy, grief, sorrow, joy are excited chiefly by other men. The influence of nature and art and books may be strong but are not to be compared to the influences of our fellows. A human life by itself is incomplete; it demands the lives of others. We can get inspiration from a book, we can get courage from it. The mountains, the rivers, the shady woods in summer, or the snow covered woods in winter, may give us joy, but what is like the touch of a friendly hand? What is like a mother's love? On the other hand, what crushes the human heart as does the unkindness, the scorn, the contempt, the injustice of others? What is so terrible as a mother's pain from the injustice and ingratitude of her child? Our life is through and through a social life. We are all bound together by a thousand ties which we could not break if we would. In this common life together, certain types of action bring pain,

sorrow and sadness; other types of action bring well-being, happiness and contentment. As the ages have gone by, society has put its approval upon these types of action which experience has shown to be for the highest happiness of man; it has put its disapproval on those types which experience has shown to be detrimental to man's highest good. Racial experience has given us our social standards of morality. These standards are an evolution; they have changed somewhat from one age to another. The changes. however, for the last two or three thousand years, have been for the most part, in nonessentials and unimportant details. The fundamental bases of character as held by thinking men have remained much the same, throughout the ages since we have had historic records. The oldest moral teachings in our Bible are largely the same as the best teaching of today. A few changes only have been fundamental. For example, Jesus said, "It hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil."

Man has been here a long time; how long, no one knows. For hundreds of centuries he has been slowly making his upward way, from the brute to the savage, from savage to man. Thousands of years ago he lifted up his hands and

his head. His fight with the elements and the wild animals was a long fight. Man's road has been strewn with blood. Our ancestors, brute and savage, have been travelling this bloody road for perhaps millions of years. Civilization is but a matter of today and yesterday. The heritage we carried out of the woods is akin to the nature of the tiger. It is bred deep in our very nerves and flesh and bones. Most of our failures in the world of morals are due to the fact that we do not take proper account of the age and strength of innate human nature. This nature cannot be transformed over night. It is not changed by a person's learning a few moral and religious maxims. It can be changed only by our building up a new nature based on habit, a building that in the case of each individual requires some twenty years of the hardest kind of work on the part of parents and teachers. And the building must be erected on original human nature. Underneath there always smoulder the fires of the original man who was our father in the woods. Under favorable circumstances, we keep down this smouldering fire, but at any moment it may break forth. Every day somewhere we see its blaze in angry flashing eyes, or in the scorn of an upturned lip, or in a cutting word, or perchance in the blow of a human hand.