and slowly we are gaining insight into the truth that whatever is wrong for her is wrong for him. As it is our duty to protect children because they are weak and helpless, it is our duty to protect all who are weak and helpless. The young are by nature incapable of caring for themselves; and, therefore, the home, the church, and the state accept the responsibility of providing them with nourishment and nurture. The adult man and woman should not be weak or ignorant or vicious; and we feel that it is not their own fault chiefly, but the fault of the home, the church, and the state, if they are so. We would therefore make helplessness, ignorance, and vice impossible. Religion inspires love, confidence, and courage; and science lights up the way of life with the torch of knowledge. As disease is largely preventable, we believe that vice, pauperism, and crime are also preventable. The law of causation is universal; and, the cause being known, the finding of a remedy ought to lie within the reach of intelligence and love. Our progress consists largely in the discovery of remedies for ignorance and impotence. Quinine, drainage, and sanitation have made vast regions habitable where hitherto healthful life had been impossible. The discovery of the causes of many of the worst diseases has shown us how they may readily be prevented or cured. The knowledge of the causes of evil, whether physical or moral, necessarily leads to the inquiry how they may be suppressed or controlled. The cosmical and geographical conditions which interfere with the normal development of human endowments we can hardly hope greatly to modify. In the tropics the race is and probably will always be indolent, ignorant, weak, and sensual. Heredity, too, plays a great part in the destiny of each one. We are in mind as in body largely what we have assimilated or what heredity, which is the outcome of endless assimilations, makes us. They who are born with a taint in the blood, with perverted instincts and enfeebled wills, not only fall into vice more easily than others, but they are also more difficult to reclaim. If man shall ever learn to do for his own kind what breeding and training enable him to do for various strains of domestic animals, he will have discovered an effective means for preventing crime and misery. But what he calls his rights, which often are but his prejudices and passions, will probably continue to keep him from treating his own species with the wisdom with which he manages inferior creatures. Reckless and senseless marriages are an inexhaustible source of evil. Many of our people

enter into wedlock as thoughtlessly as they take a stroll or fall asleep; and the result is quarrels, contentions, divorces, and children reared in an atmosphere which blights their tender lives. Hence crime. among the young is increasing far more rapidly than the population grows. So long as this poison fountain remains open, so long will vice and pauperism continue to breed degradation and wretchedness. Homes which are hells thwart the wisest efforts to reform abuses. They hinder the school, weaken the church, and undermine the social fabric. Our chaotic and lax marriage laws encourage and facilitate imprudent marriages, but the source of the evil lies deeper. Institutions, it has been said, are in the control of men, public opinion in that of women. Women decide how we shall build and furnish our houses, what we shall eat and wear, what we shall find beautiful and entertaining, where we shall live, what we shall read, whom we shall consider friend or foe, what beliefs or prejudices we shall hold, what religion we shall have. From them we learn our mother tongue, from them our notions of right and wrong, of propriety and justice. If they were more large-minded, more intelligent, more unselfish, more serious, more loving, three-fourths of the depravity and sin which make life a curse would disappear. The fountain-head of social good or evil, of vice and crime, or of honor and virtue, is in the home; and the wife and the mother make or unmake the home. Whatever view we may take as to whether man or woman was the most guilty primal offender, woman bears the greater responsibility for the wrongs and miseries which afflict and oppress the modern world, since the force of public opinion, which is in her keeping, is mightier than riches and armies and laws. More than any age since the beginning of time we have given opportunity to woman, have placed her in the seat of influence and power; and shall she prove false or frail or ungrateful, traitorous to the vast confidence which all that is noblest and most chivalrous in man has led him to repose in her? Doubtless her increasing dominion has helped to arouse in our public life greater sympathy and tenderness, a more complete revulsion from cruelty, whether to man or beast. But more than pity we need justice, which is the first and greatest charity. The most grievous injustice which oppresses us, of which the weak and the poor, the laborers and their wives and children, are the chief victims, has its source in the political corruption which taints our whole public life, and more especially the conduct of our municipal affairs. It

not only stamps upon our name a brand of infamy in the eyes of foreign nations: it disheartens the best among us, and makes reform seem impossible. It not only impoverishes, but it disheartens and dechristianizes the laboring populations of our cities. It is the foe

of civilization, of religion, of morality, of God and of man. It thrives in the mephitic air of saloons and brothels and gambling hells. It makes the rich its accomplices, and compels the respectable to connive at its iniquities and infamies. It perverts the public conscience, it destroys the sense of responsibility, it renders efforts at reform abortive. In the presence of this moral plague even the wisest and the bravest are bewildered and discouraged. No subject is more worthy of the attention of those who are interested in the improvement of social life and conditions. Legislation can accomplish little unless it is supported by a more humane, a more enlightened, a more Christian public opinion. Here, again, therefore, we need the assistance of noble-minded and educated women. If in the home, in the school, and in the church, where woman's influence is potent, if not paramount, the sentiment that corrupt politicians are more criminal than convicts be awakened and fostered, good will have been done. Were it possible that the daily press should take a sincere and serious interest in whatever concerns the public morals, what a beneficent power it might exert ! But this cannot be hoped for while the newspaper continues to be chiefly a commercial enterprise; for, when the primary consideration is pecuniary profit, it will be deemed proper to publish whatever may excite curiosity, even though it pander to morbid cravings and prurient propensities. In the actual conditions the machinery and institutions created to deal with the violators of the laws are, in a large measure, the agencies whereby vice and crime are produced and diffused. The delinquents who are incarcerated are chiefly the poor, who, had they money to pay the fines, would escape imprisonment. The heaviest punishment is inflicted on the most helpless, and frequently on the least guilty; and thus the morally weak, the victims of unfortunate environments, are degraded, hardened, and made habitual offenders. Nearly one-half of the several millions annually arrested become chronic criminals. In the face of the theory that punishment should be reformatory and preventive, the fact remains that in our hands it is still largely a cause of corruption and of the spread of vice. Our city prisons and station-houses are often nurseries of crime, and

this may be affirmed also of many of our county jails and poorhouses. A recognized authority on this subject has said that, if there is an iniquity in the land to-day, it is the county jail system; that there is no greater iniquity in the world than the jail system of the United States. But the discussion of this and analogous questions would carry us beyond the limits assigned to an address like the present. It is enough to have called attention to the fact that it is the part of wisdom to refuse to yield unreservedly to our American spirit of optimism. All past ages, when compared with our own, were, in a sense, ages of ignorance; and there may be reasons for thinking that the man of the future will place our century in the same category. A dark age certainly it shall be called when considered from the point of view of conduct, when character is held to be the only sufficient test of enlightenment. The immature and the degenerate prefer pleasure to virtue and power, and they who prefer money to truth and love are also immature or degenerate. Greed not less than sensuality marks epochs in which all things are verging toward ruin. We are at present under the tyrannous sway of the spirit of commercialism and expansion, and our very thought is made subservient to the ideal of vulgar success; but they who have best insight, have a fine scorn of current opinion. They are able to do without its approval and they end by receiving it.

Emerson says that America is God's great charity to the race; but true religion, working with the added power which science gives, is greater than America, and will purify, ennoble, and transform our life into some likeness to the divine ideals which as yet we but simply discern. We have already learned that a man's chief value does not lie in his ability to conquer with sword and shell, and we are coming to understand that it lies just as little in his ability to manipulate machinery or to get money.

Comte thinks that Christianity is the consecration of egoism; and it is a fact that it regards primarily the individual, and asserts the supreme worth of personality. But it also insists that the individual can rightly develop and find himself only in devoting his thought and life to the love and service of God and his fellow-man. It would found on earth a kingdom of heaven in which obedience to the will of the eternal Father, which is good will to man, shall be an allcontrolling constitutional principle and law, and beneficence the universal means of personal and social advancement. We must

be benefactors, that we may become able to love our fellows; for, if we incline to hate those whom we wrong, more surely are we drawn to love those to whom we do good. They who live with whatsoever things are true, just, gracious, pure, and amiable, continue to grow in mental and moral power; and the good of life lies in the mental and moral dispositions which a spiritual faith and disinterested conduct create and foster within us. As matter is but life's setting, not its substance, so, if we would go to the succor of those who fail in right living, we must give them our interest, sympathy, confidence, and affection more than our money. The special vice of the thriftless and delinquent is heedlessness and recklessness. We must train them to forethought, attention, and consideration; and personal influence, not almsgiving, is the proper means whereby this may be accomplished. If we would save them, we must save them from themselves. The purest charity consists in doing the spiritual rather than in doing the corporal works of mercy, since the essential good is the good of the soul. Let us have confidence in whatever increases the power of the soul; confidence, therefore, in the virtues of religion, which are faith, hope, and love; confidence in knowledge, science, freedom, and labor, persuaded that riches are good only when they are the possessions of the wise and good. It is easier to be generous than to be just. The generous win approval, while the just are often misunderstood and suspected of lack of heart, The poor love the poor because they give their thought and time to one another. They do not love the rich because the rich give them only money. Mere advice has little efficacy, for what we all need in nearly all situations is not so much a clearer view of right as a more fervent desire, a more determined will, to do right; and this advice cannot supply. No system of dogma or morals, however much it be preached, can regenerate the world. If men are to be converted and transformed, they must be brought close to Christ himself, must learn to know and love him, as Saint John and Saint Luke, Saint Francis and Saint Vincent de Paul, knew and loved him. They must be brought to believe and feel that, as he is one with the Father, so are we all verily God's children. If reason alone controlled us, the world would be a waste. If the universe of metaphysics and of science were not an abstraction, it would be a hell, where faith, hope, and love would become impossible; for they are nourished and kept alive, not by specu