Brumbaugh 
 Moral Training of the Young
 
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 LOS ANGELES
 
 
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 ii>m 
 
 i ETHICAL February, 1907 
 
 Iaddresses 
 
 Vol. XIV. No. 6 
 
 AND ETHICAL RECORD 
 
 
 Moral Training of the Young— Peda- 
 gogical Principles and Methods 
 
 Martin G. Brumbaugh 
 
 
 I What an Ethical Culture Society is For 
 
 i Leslie Willis Sprague 
 
 The Moral Instruction Movement Abroad 
 
 |PuBLisHED Monthly: ETHICAL ADDRESSES 
 
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 MORAL TRAINING OF THE YOUNG- 
 PEDAGOGICAL PRINCIPLES AND 
 METHODS.* 
 
 By Martin G. Brumbaugh. 
 
 At the opening- of this course of lectures, it was my 
 privilege to deliver an address on the scope of the prob- 
 lem of moral training; to point out the breadth of the 
 problem, and the factors in the problem. That has been 
 followed by the series of lectures that you have heard on 
 the several Saturday afternoons, all of which were the un- 
 folding of phases of that problem from the historical side. 
 
 If we have established the scope of our problem, it 
 seems to me only right that, as a concluding thought, we 
 should raise the question — What is the process of realiza- 
 tion in the moral training of the individual? How do we 
 bring the boy and the girl through the various steps that 
 lead at last to the realization within himself of the things 
 that we think of as belonging to the moral life ? 
 
 In answering this question, I hope to point out what 
 seems to me to be, not only the steps in the process of 
 moral training, but those steps in the order in which they 
 should be followed in the training of a child to moral con- 
 duct. The problem then is to follow the following prin- 
 ciples in order : 
 
 First, the prerequisite for the moral training of a 
 
 •Closing lecture in a Saturday afternoon course on "The Moral Train- 
 ing of the Young in Ancient and Modern Times," given by different lec- 
 turers under the auspices of the Society for Ethical Culture of Philadel- 
 phia. At the time this lecture was given, March 26, 1904, Dr. Brum- 
 baugh was professor of pedagogy in the University of Pennsylvania. He 
 now holds the position of Superintendent of Public Schools of Philadel- 
 phia. 
 
 167 
 
 8849.S8
 
 l68 MORAL TRAINING OF THE YOUNG. 
 
 child. Before fonnal moral training is begun with a 
 child, he should be trained to the fonnation of right judg- 
 ments. Before we can ask him to determine what is the 
 right or the wrong in a specific thing, he ought to have 
 his instrument of judgment trained, so that when he 
 comes to apply it to the solution of moral problems it will 
 be an efifective agency in disposing of his difficulties. 
 That means that the whole intellectual discipline of the 
 mind, when rightly carried out, is the best basis for the 
 moral training of the child. "When rightly carried out" 
 means when the whole discipline of his intellect centers 
 in the purpose of training him to the formation of right 
 judgments; to be able to take facts from any field of 
 thought, and, holding them in mind, establish their rela- 
 tions, and announce these relations as they really are. 
 
 In order to, accomplish that, one must give the child 
 multiplied interests upon which to exercise judgment; for 
 he reaches the power of forming right judgments only 
 by forming judgments, by having definite things laid be- 
 fore him, and reasoning with these things, until he knows 
 how to use the materials of thought, and draw from them 
 their legitimate conclusions. Our whole public educa- 
 tional system is weak or strong in proportion to its effi- 
 ciency in establishing this power in the mind of a child. 
 It stands opposed, therefore, to some of the things all too 
 common in our educational policy ; and to the extent that 
 these things prevail, they weaken the possibility of the 
 ultimate moral training of the child by impairing imme- 
 diately his ability to form right judgments. 
 
 The first of these things in our educational practice to 
 which this law stands opposed is the prolonged presenta- 
 tion of concrete materials to the child. There is such a 
 thing as overdoing the shoe-peg, the tooth-pick and the 
 green-pea experiment in education ; and there comes a
 
 MORAL TRAINING OF THE YOUNG. 169 
 
 time in the life of the child when it should be taken 
 away — utterly away — from all finger contact with things, 
 and be compelled to think in symbols ; and he will never 
 arrive at the point in his culture where he can establish 
 right judgments until he has lifted himself above the 
 plane of thinking in things. 
 
 I do not mean that all concrete teaching is bad ; in- 
 deed, I think teaching that is not concrete in the elemen- 
 tary grades is not good ; but the attempt to carry the 
 concrete materials of the elementary school and the kin- 
 dergarten high into the grades of our public schools keeps 
 the child always below his better power, and, in the end, 
 interferes very materially with his ability to establish 
 right judgments. For his judgments, at the last, are the 
 relations of ideas expressed in symbols, and not the rela- 
 tions of things expressed in extension or space. 
 
 The late Dr. Higbee, who was, for many years, the dis- 
 tinguished Superintendent of Education in this Common- 
 wealth, was wont to express this phase of our problem in 
 these words : "There speedily comes a time, in the life of 
 a child, when we should un-sense him, bring him away 
 from immediate contact with things, and throw him back 
 upon himself, to find truth in the symbols of his own 
 soul." 
 
 It stands opposed, in the second place, to excessive 
 memory efiforts, to that long series of efiforts in home 
 and school that think they accomplish much when the 
 child, by reason of them, is able, in his memory, to carry 
 large orders of facts about which he knows absolutely 
 nothing, beyond the fact that he knows how to repeat 
 them in the order in which the}- were taught to him. The 
 memorizing of long and senseless categories of raw ma- 
 terials — it may be — ^but which never get beyond the mere 
 memorv stage of the child's mind, stands sadlv in the way
 
 I/O MORAL TRAINING OF THE YOUNG. 
 
 of the serious cultivation of the power of correct judg- 
 ment in his mind. The function of the memor\' is not to 
 carry these things, it is to carry the products of the judg- 
 ment when once they have been analyzed and expressed ; 
 and the vitahty of the individual's memor}' is to be meas- 
 ured by its ability to put back into judgment that which, 
 before it reached the memory, was refined in the judg- 
 ment. Things understood are the legitimate products to 
 be placed in the memory. 
 
 In the third place, it stands opposed to the hasty gener- 
 alization which leads the mind of the child, and of the 
 childish adult, to infer a law upon too meagre premises, 
 to think that a great truth has been discovered when only 
 a few facts have been apprehended. 
 
 This reminds me of the story of the French doctor who 
 had a patient sick with typhoid fever, and after all 
 the remedies that he knew had been tried without avail, 
 he finally, in distress, gave the patient chicken broth, and 
 the man got well. Then the French doctor was delighted, 
 and he announced through the medical journals that 
 chicken broth would cure typhoid fever. The next pa- 
 tient that he had was an Englishman, and he applied 
 the remedy, but the Englishman died. Then he revised 
 his generalization, and said that whereas chicken broth 
 would cure a Frenchman who was ill with typhoid fever, 
 it was fatal to an Englishman ! 
 
 Children are making that sort of generalizations all the 
 while, and they lead to conclusions that are not war- 
 ranted by the facts at hand, and that impair the power of 
 forming correct judginents, which are only the legitimate 
 expression of exactly what the facts that are in the mind 
 convey. 
 
 It stands opposed, in the fourth place, to reasoning by 
 analogy, or inference,lhat most subtle and pernicious field
 
 MORAL TRAINING OF THE YOUNG. I/I 
 
 of thought which, basing itself upon some figure of 
 speech, places over into one order of truth what it sees in 
 another, on the basis of remote or fanciful resemblance. 
 To be sure, before we have philosophy, we have my- 
 thology ; before we have science, we have the myth — and 
 all through the history of the race reasoning by analogy 
 has set the standard for primitive minds, and not at all 
 the standard for mature minds and civilized experiences. 
 Now, the child, as he comes to the school, is very prone 
 to make inferences that are not warranted by the facts; 
 and, if he is to be trained ultimately into right judg- 
 ments, he must be cautioned against forming any such 
 analogous relations as these. Here, then, is the general 
 process of intellectual culture, which results in establish- 
 ing in the mind of the pupil the power to judge facts cor- 
 rectly. 
 
 The second thing to which I wish to invite your atten- 
 tion, in the preparation of a child for specific moral guid- 
 ance, is this law, that his conduct is to be regulated in ac- 
 cordance with moral ideas and the sentiment of duty. 
 The child, at the beginning of his life, is not moral, nor 
 yet immoral — he is unmoral ; he has not yet established a 
 will that determines conduct, and therefore he has not yet 
 taken upon himself the taint of the immoral nor the virtue 
 of the moral quality. He stands before all activity with- 
 out the power to enter upon it ; and, in that early stage 
 of his life, by the presence of the teacher and the parent, 
 there must be formally set in the life of the child con- 
 duct in harmony with right ideals, and with the sen- 
 timent of duty. Long before the child knows why, he 
 must do things. The child must do things long before 
 he can give a reason for the thing that he does. He must 
 do the things because somebody else knows that is wise; 
 and so the child acquires the habit of moral action, and es-
 
 1/2 ^[ORAL TRAINING OF THE YOUNG. 
 
 tablishes a formal code of moral deeds before his own 
 mind has reached the point of growth whereby he can 
 either approve or deny the validity of these things. 
 
 The child comes to school every morning at nine 
 o'clock, not because he has reasoned out within himself 
 the virtue of being there at nine o'clock, but because the 
 moral order in the school and in the home has estab- 
 lished conduct in confonnity therewith. The child must 
 sit in school quiet and erect and respectful and obedi- 
 ent long before he knows the value of these things. He 
 does it in obedience to a law imposed upon him by the 
 school and home for his good ; so that his conduct estab- 
 lishes through habit a conformity to a code of moral deeds 
 before he has reasoned out for himself what moral deeds 
 are. And there are some people much older than children 
 who still act under the guidance of a formal morality 
 imposed upon them from without, and wdio have not yet 
 reached the stage in their development in which a real 
 moral soul from within guides their conduct. 
 
 I think most of us are just a little different from what 
 we w'ould be because of the formal quality of the life 
 about us, and our desire to confomi to it; and yet, if we 
 were to vote in our souls we would vote against confor- 
 mation to those principles. One of the reasons why we 
 like to go off during the summer season into the woods, 
 is, as we say, to be natural once again ; that is, to throw 
 off these formal restraints, and be our own guide — yacht, 
 fish, if we want to ; take the collar from our necks and 
 throw it to the winds, if we want to; and do other things 
 which in the social order are not considered good form, 
 the individual who practices them being ostracized by 
 society. So much for the formal and intellectual prere- 
 quisites of this process. 
 
 Let us now take up the constructive side of the prob-
 
 MORAL TRAINING OF THE YOUNG. 173 
 
 lem. Under that, first of all, it seems to me, we should 
 instruct the mind of the child in moral ideas and their 
 spiritual significance ; that is to say, we should tell what 
 these ideas are, and what they stand for on the spiritual 
 side. I prefer to put the interpretation of the idea on the 
 spiritual side, rather than upon any other side, because I 
 want the child that acquires a moral idea to see the value 
 of that on its best side, in its relation to religious truth, 
 and the higher development of his soul, rather than to see 
 these relations to his services to mankind in the market 
 and in the counting-house. 
 
 So the first thing here is to teach the child clearly what 
 a moral idea is — what we mean by truthfulness ; what we 
 mean by kindness ; what we mean by honor ; what we 
 mean by trustworthiness ; what we mean by conscientious- 
 ness, or by any other of the dozen or more things which 
 enter into the complex thing that we call the moral self. 
 
 After we have taught what that thing is, the next step 
 is to show to the child its value, that is to say, its signifi- 
 cance, so that there comes to him, in the appreciation of 
 the idea itself, the reinforcement of its great value to 
 him in his life. When we teach a boy mathematics, and 
 come to some such problem as percentage in the study of 
 arithmetic, we always first define the temi, and then 
 tell him how important it is that he should understand 
 percentage because of the great value of its applications to 
 him in his subsequent business career. We tell him how 
 he will be able to compute the interest on money ; how he 
 will be able to compute discount ; how he will be able to 
 form a compound or complex partnership, and, putting 
 in various sums from different sources, at the end make 
 an equitable and just distribution of the profits or right 
 adjustment of the losses, and so we point out the specific 
 value of that study to him ; and he takes all the more in-
 
 1/4 MORAL TRAINING OF THE YOUNG. 
 
 terest in the study of percentage now that he knows that 
 it has a large value to him in life. 
 
 I think we have not always, with the same degree of 
 skill and patience, told our pupils in the schools and our 
 children in the home the real significance of these moral 
 ideas in their lives. 
 
 Then, in the third place, when we have once established 
 the idea, and impressed its value upon the mind of the 
 child, the problem is to secure from the child the applica- 
 tion of these principles to specific acts — a creed-conduct 
 — and this is the most difficult thing in the whole process. 
 Most of our children know, in general, what are the right 
 and what are the wrong thiiigs ; but when we ask them to 
 put the test of these laws to the interpretation of a spe- 
 cific act, at once there is the greatest diversity of opinion, 
 and the greatest failure. Let me illustrate that very 
 briefly to you. 
 
 A boy one morning was called by his mother. He got 
 up promptly, dressed himself, and came down to the 
 breakfast table on time. ( How do you score that for the 
 boy? For him, or against him, so far?) At the break- 
 fast table this boy refused to eat the food that was prepared 
 for the other members of the family, and, instead of that, 
 he ate five shredded-wheat biscuits. (How do you put 
 that down for your boy — for him or against him? Now 
 you are not all unanimous on that problem; you cannot 
 apply your moral code to a question of five shredded- 
 wheat biscuits.) And while the boy is at the breakfast 
 table, maybe while the boy is eating his meal, his mother 
 says to him, "When you are through with the breakfast, 
 I want you to go on an errand before you go to school." 
 He understands her all right, and, when the meal is over, 
 puts on his cap, and goes out and plays until nine o'clock. 
 At exactly nine o'clock he is at school, lined up with the
 
 MORAL TRAINING OF THE YOUNG. I75 
 
 Other saints ready to go into the school and take up its 
 duties. During all the morning session, until noon, he be- 
 haves in school as a boy should behave, and performs 
 every task required of him by the teacher. When school 
 is over he goes home for his luncheon. His mother says 
 to him, "Why did you not go on that errand for me this 
 morning?" and the boy says, "I forgot;" and after 
 luncheon he returns to school. That afternoon, as a group 
 of children were passing the seat upon which he sat, in 
 some manner his foot slipped out and tripped another 
 boy, and the boy fell in the aisle. The teacher saw it, and 
 said, "Come here !" and he came. She said, "Why did you 
 do that?" and he said, "It was an accident." She said, 
 "Sit over there, and I will see you after school." When 
 the other scholars had gone home, the teacher and this 
 boy had an interview, which lasted fifteen minutes. It 
 does not matter what was said or done — it is over, and the 
 boy goes straight home. His mother says, "You are late 
 this evening." "Yes," he says, "I was talking with a 
 friend," What is your opinion of that boy? 
 
 Take each act which has happened that day, and set 
 your moral law upon it, and tell me whether I do not 
 speak the truth when I say that one of the very hardest 
 problems with which we have to deal, in the process of 
 the moral training of a child, is to teach him rightly to 
 apply the law that he knows to the specific acts that come 
 under his daily observation. 
 
 We have not nearly enough training in our schools just 
 on that point ; we seem to be content when we have taught 
 the law, and received the answer back, when we ought 
 not at all to be content until the child can interpret the 
 law adequately in terms of conduct. And if there be any 
 part of the whole moral process in the school that has 
 great significance, it is that part of it which gives the
 
 1/6 MORAL TRAINING OF THE YOUNG. 
 
 child, through exercise upon specific cases hke that, the 
 power at the last to weigh the complex acts of a day's life 
 or an hour's career, and form a proper judgment upon 
 them. 
 
 The discipline of the home and the school is a disci- 
 pline of caprice, and the child is punished to-day for that 
 which is let go by unnoticed the day before, and much of 
 the severity or the leniency of the punishment at any 
 given time is determined by the condition of the stomach 
 and the liver of the teacher or the parent at a given mo- 
 ment. It is the law dishonored, and caprice exalted into 
 a code. 
 
 Had I time, I should like to give you further stories, 
 that I think might possibly puzzle you, large as you are, 
 and experienced as you are, in applying your moral law to 
 concrete problems properly. 
 
 Now that we have once accomplished this quality in the 
 moral process, the next thing is the directing of the per- 
 sonal experience of the individual in acting out his moral 
 ideas, in doing them, for it is only when he does them that 
 he learns the virtue there is in them. 
 
 There was once a selfish boy in a group of thirteen, 
 who, when fruit was served to the group, always reached 
 out, and took the largest apple or the largest banana, — 
 and selfishness is always immoral. And a wise teacher 
 said to herself, I must break that habit, and establish un- 
 selfishness in the heart of that child. So she said to the 
 child, "When you pass the fruit around to the other chil- 
 dren, help yourself last." And he said he would. And, 
 behold, when he had passed around the dish to the twelve 
 children, the last of the twelve took the last of the pieces 
 of fruit, and the selfish child had an empty dish from 
 which to help himself. He cried the first time, but the 
 second time he saw the force of the teacher's wisdom, and
 
 MORAL TRAINING OF THE YOUNG. 1/7 
 
 the actual truth is that there came a time speedily when 
 that boy delighted in passing the fruit, and seeing others 
 happy, even when he himself did not receive fruit — and 
 that is a high moral state for a man or a boy to achieve 
 in this world. 
 
 In some way we must give the child the opportunity to 
 do the things that bring to him the sense in his con- 
 science of approval for the act that is right, and when we 
 have done that, we can reinforce the value of this per- 
 sonal experience by presenting to him concrete cases of 
 worthy action performed by others — preferably by others 
 of his own age — so that he knows that this thing is within 
 the range of his own attainment, and is the actual achieve- 
 ment of one no better able to achieve than himself. 
 
 In Holland, in the public schools, the histor}- books 
 for the children are all so written that a child of the grade 
 in which the book is used tells to the children in the pub- 
 lic schools the story of Holland's glory. There is no ma- 
 ture mind interpreting great civic processes, but a little 
 child in the book stands out and tells the children, in the 
 language of the book, the story of Holland's glory. And 
 because it is the language of a child to the hearts of 
 children, it stimulates them as perhaps a more mature ex- 
 perience could not stimulate them. 
 
 In other words, next to the actual doing of the moral 
 thing is the story in which moral deeds are described. 
 The value of the story is next in value to the personal 
 experience. For that reason biography is of tremendous 
 value in the training of the moral self. If I wish to teach 
 a child that has no opportunity to understand in his own 
 experience a certain moral quality, let me select for him, 
 not a law relating to that moral quality, but a very real, 
 full story, in which that quality is acted out by another 
 person of his own age and maturity. A story that will 
 illustrate this may lead you to see my point, and believe it.
 
 1/8 MORAL TRAINING OF THE YOUNG. 
 
 Some years ago, in the city of Edinburgh in Scotland, 
 there was a Christmas present given out to the poor chil- 
 dren of the city by the Christian charity of the city ; and 
 on Christmas Eve the little children lined up in a row to 
 receive their presents. Many of them were poor, and 
 half-clothed, some bare-footed and bare-legged. They 
 stood in a line in the twilight on the icy pavements of the 
 city. In the line was a little bare-footed girl, whose feet, 
 as they pressed the icy pavement, were almost frozen. 
 She would raise one foot under her meagre skirts and 
 wann it a bit, standing on the other foot meanwhile. 
 Then she would change positions, and in that way she 
 tried to protect herself from the freezing cold. Next to 
 her in the line was a boy, bare-footed like herself, but 
 wearing on his head a woolen cap. When he saw the 
 suffering of the little girl, he took his cap from his head, 
 laid it down on the city street, and said to her, "You may 
 stand on that." 
 
 Next to taking one's cap, and putting it under the foot 
 of a suffering child, it seems to me that the story would 
 teach the moral and enforce the quality for those that 
 hear it. 
 
 When a story is presented, its value is to be measured 
 by its concrete quality, which is the quality in the story 
 that appeals to the emotional life, that nourishes the feel- 
 ings of the child. And so, after the story, the next step 
 is to reinforce the feeling quality of the story by the 
 poem, which is itself full of concrete materials, but 
 which strengthens the quality of the story because of its 
 rhythm — the rhythm adding to the emotional phase of the 
 story — and then, as a last expression of that, to put the 
 rhythmic emotional material into a song, and sing it. The 
 order is — tell it, read it, sing it. When you have done 
 that with it, you have pretty well defined it in the moral 
 atmosphere of the child's mind.
 
 MORAL TRAINING OF THE YOUNG. 1 79 
 
 When all of this has been done, beginning with the 
 purely intellectual training that leads to correct judg- 
 ments, and the establishment of formal morality by the 
 exercise of force and guidance from without; when we 
 have informed the mind of the child as to what moral 
 truth is, and have taught him how^ to interpret that — in 
 a law first of all, and in the concrete cases in the second 
 place — when we have put the premium of emotional ap- 
 peal upon the child to do that thing, there remains one 
 additional thing, the summing up of all this round of 
 disciplines into the law, or the maxim or the proverb, 
 which stands in the mind of the child as a sign of all that 
 through which the mind has passed, and which is ade- 
 quately and fairly represented by the maxim or the law. 
 
 You see, therefore, that in this process, that with which 
 we usually begin, the moral training of the child, is that 
 which comes the last. Here again is the law, 'The first 
 shall be last, and the last shall be first." What has been 
 perhaps, more than any other thing, the cause of so im- 
 perfect results in the moral training of our children, is 
 that we have laid the law before them at the outset, and 
 put no premium or inducement into the life of the child 
 to realize the law. So he committed it to memory, and 
 repeated it when he was asked to do so, and violated it all 
 the time, because he never learned what it meant in 
 terms of conduct or in terms of feeling. 
 
 If we want to do the right thing with all the material 
 that we have gathered here from week to week in this 
 course of lectures, it seems to me that we can reduce it 
 to the order I have indicated this afternoon, and at the 
 very last, as the crown of the whole moral activity, set 
 the law, and not at the beginning. 
 
 Just one thing more, which I think should be said at 
 this stage of the matter. All moral training, just as all
 
 l8o MORAL TRAINING OF THE YOUJSTG. 
 
 intellectual training, has its right to be, not because of 
 any results that are achieved in the mind of the individual 
 that pursues intellectual studies or moral studies, but be- 
 cause of the service which that knowledge compels the in- 
 dividual to render to his fellowmen. 
 
 To know one's duty, and not to do it, is not only im- 
 moral within itself, but it is a radical hindrance to the 
 working out of the well-being of our fellow-men. I have 
 no business to know moral law unless I honor my knowl- 
 edge of that law by service to those about me ; and the very 
 virtue of a moral soul is to be measured in terms of his 
 service to those about him, and the depth of that service, 
 and the breadth of that service, and the quality of that 
 service. All is to be interpreted by the character of the 
 service that we render, not by the quality of the theory 
 that we hold. 
 
 There are some people who think they do many good 
 things. They do them because they wish better things to 
 come back to themselves. Their service is not unselfish, 
 and it is not moral. It is when we do a thing because we 
 dare not, from our own self, refuse to do it, and do it 
 without a thought of the morrow and the moral, that our 
 service begins to take on the high quality of moral 
 heroism.
 
 WHAT AN ETHICAL CULTURE 
 SOCIETY IS FOR.- 
 
 By Leslie Willis Sprague. 
 
 In trying to answer the question, what an Ethical So- 
 ciety is for, you will perhaps pardon me a personal word 
 by way of preface, since this is my first address upon an 
 Ethical Culture platform, after formally associating my- 
 self with the movement. Since I have been old enough 
 to look seriously upon the problems of personal and so- 
 cial life, I have been greatly impressed with the Ethical 
 Culture Movement; and as my contact and experience 
 have broadened, I have come more and more to feel the 
 imperative need in modern civilization of such a move- 
 ment. And this, first of all, because of the platform 
 which is secured by an Ethical Society, a platform upon 
 which all classes of people, whatever their affiliations 
 may have been or are, may meet — that broad platform 
 of human brotherhood, where people of diverse thoughts, 
 ideas and impulses, may meet to help each other in the 
 endeavor to understand the meaning of life, and to dis- 
 cover the right attitude towards their fellows, and to- 
 wards the problems of modem civilization. I have all 
 along been specially impressed by the fact that Ethical 
 Culture brings ethics to the forefront, putting the neces- 
 sities of the ethical life as the pre-eminent necessities 
 and placing ethics before and above all other considera- 
 tions. Not simply morality, but ethics. Morality be- 
 
 *An address delivered before the Philadelphia Ethical Society, 
 Sunday, October 23, 1904. 
 
 i8i
 
 lS2 WHAT AN- ETHICAL CULTURE SOCIETY IS FOR. 
 
 longs to the outward conventional relationships of men 
 and women. Morals means an outward conformity to the 
 ways of good living that have been developed in the past ; 
 whereas ethics, as the derivation of the word implies, con- 
 notes rather the inner attitude of man towards the prob- 
 lem of his being, the right adjustment in the inner life as 
 well as in the outer conduct of life, the discovery of prin- 
 ciples upon which the moral life itself is to be construct- 
 ed. I take it to be important that ethics should be brought 
 increasingly to the forefront, in the midst of a world- 
 change that is going on in the thinking of man. Sweep- 
 ing changes are taking place in the religious and philo- 
 sophical thought of the world, and it is imperative that 
 ethical interests should be separated from either theolo- 
 gical or philosophical theorizing, in order that the ethical 
 life may not go down, as is all too common in the mod- 
 ern world, with the disintegration of the philosophical or 
 theological bases upon which the good life has hereto- 
 fore rested. This I think to be one of the most impor- 
 tant interests of the Ethical Society and of the modem 
 world ; the more so considering the fact that the ten- 
 dency towards material science, economic and social em- 
 phasis, and the larger and larger human contact are all 
 tending increasingly to break up the old sanctions, the 
 older philosophical and theological bases upon which eth- 
 ics has heretofore rested, and to leave the conscience of 
 men unanchored. Evidence we find on all hands of the 
 breaking up of the sanctions of the moral life, not onlv 
 in the individual but in the community, and of the rapid 
 spread, through the last half century, of thought that 
 expresses itself in free love, frequent divorces, the break- 
 ing up of the older constraints, the lessening bonds of 
 duty between employer and employe, the piling up of for- 
 tunes by political manipulation, and the cynical smile
 
 WHAT AN ETHICAL CULTURE SOCIETY IS FOR. 183 
 
 which poHtical corruption brings to the faces of those who 
 hear it mentioned, — the indifiference of modern society 
 towards those fundamental ethical impulses which the 
 past recognized, but which to-day seem to be further 
 and further from having their due command over our 
 life. 
 
 I have been interested in the Ethical Society, not only 
 on account of the basis it offers, but the common meeting 
 ground which it gives to those of different beliefs, not 
 only because it brings ethics thus to the front, but because 
 the Ethical Society as an association represents the ear- 
 nest endeavor on the part of individuals to combine on 
 behalf of the interests that are most precious and impera- 
 tive. And I take it that these interests which have been 
 at work in the organization and that have drawn me per- 
 sonally to a closer association with the Ethical move- 
 ment, are those which have animated the efforts of your 
 leaders, here and elsewhere. An Ethical Society is not 
 primarily a protest against other religious organizations. 
 It is not born of any failure to appreciate the enormous 
 service rendered to the world by every institution that in 
 any way seeks to conserve the ethical interests of hu- 
 manity. There are few associated with the Ethical move- 
 ment, I take it, who do not realize the debt of the world 
 to every phase of organized religion, every great system 
 which has given its great ethical enunciations and exer- 
 cised an influence towards a larger and nobler relation- 
 ship of men and men. The Ethical Culture movement 
 represents an endeavor to gather together the best in- 
 fluences and teachings, the highest reaches of thought 
 and imagination which the world has anywhere and every- 
 where expressed, in order that they may be brought to a 
 focus upon the conditions of our own time and the prob- 
 lems of our personal lives. And it is significant that there
 
 184 WHAT AX ETHICAL CULTURE SOCIETY IS FOR. 
 
 should at last be in the world one platform upon which the 
 various ethical interests of all religious teachings may be 
 represented and all placed together in that larger synthe- 
 sis for which the world is waiting. 
 
 But the Ethical Society is something more than a mere 
 platform for the free expression of opinion concerning 
 life, ethics and religion. Because it is an ethical society 
 it is necessarily an association of people — an organiza- 
 tion — in behalf of high and world-wide ends. You may 
 think that all these various interests might be realized 
 in the individual life, separate and alone; that ethics is 
 the supreme effort of every individual when he comes to 
 his right awakening, however separate and aloof he may 
 be from his fellows. But ethics is not merely a question 
 of individual life. It requires an association of people 
 who are united for this great common aim. And this 
 thought of organization brings us to one of the most im- 
 posing characteristics of the modern world. We see about 
 us everywhere a tendency towards closer, vaster organi- 
 zation; a tendency which in the inner life is met by a 
 resistance of organized endeavor. There is a tendency 
 towards larger and larger combination of peoples. We 
 have evidence in this country of the passing away of State 
 rights and the larger emphasis upon the rights of the 
 Federal Government. Federal interests are more and 
 more absorbed in the larger interests of international re- 
 lationship, so that the political issues of the day are not 
 the issues of internal administration but of foreign af- 
 fairs. We have seen the tendency of our time towards 
 extending the international ideals. Such meetings as 
 those of the Peace Conference are indicative of a grow- 
 ing disposition to combine, on the important questions of 
 international ethics, into one great world organization; 
 and the power of the international arbitration bureaus
 
 WHAT AN ETHICAL CULTURE SOCIETY IS FOR. 185 
 
 and international treaties, increasingly inclusive of even 
 minor affairs, is a further indication of this tendency 
 towards world organization. We see the same tendency 
 towards organization in business life : the combinations 
 of capital in trusts, of manufacturers, of labor unions 
 and the federation of labor interests. The same tendency 
 is going on even in the educational life of the country, 
 and the larger institutions are taking the smaller ones un- 
 der their control. Our city schools are dominated by the 
 policy of the universities. The secondary schools are 
 made to be preparatory for the higher educational insti- 
 tutions. All through the external world this tendency to- 
 wards organization and closer association is robbing man 
 of much of his independence, so that he cannot work 
 alone, can scarcely think alone, and cannot fully live ex- 
 cept in harmonious relation with society. 
 
 With this surrender in the external affairs of life, men 
 have been driven to assert the claims of individual life in 
 matters of ethical experience. We have heard a good 
 deal lately concerning why men do not go to church. 
 This discussion has filled the pulpit and press and maga- 
 zine. One reason, and perhaps the pre-eminent reason, 
 why men do not go to church, is that men wish to reserve 
 one little province of life in which they shall be free and 
 independent. Many of the people who do go to 
 church and attend faithfully upon the ministrations of 
 religion will not associate themselves with the organiza- 
 tions of religion, because they cannot surrender this last 
 province of individual liberty, the liberty of the individual 
 life in matters of faith and ideals. And yet, if you will 
 look closely at the matter, you will discover that there is 
 no province in which association is so imperative as in the 
 innermost experience of the individual. We can much 
 more readilv work alone, even amidst combinations of
 
 l86 WHAT AN ETHICAL CULTURE SOCIETY IS FOR. 
 
 capital and labor, than we can carry on the principal work 
 of our personal lives without the influence and sugges- 
 tion of others. Without association for moral and re- 
 ligious end, the highest ideal which is developed out of 
 race experience, which belongs not only to the present 
 but to the past, which gathers into itself all the finest and 
 the best of all that man has ever loved and thought and 
 been — must perish. 
 
 But the great end of the ethical life is not simply the 
 emphasis of the ethical interests, but an associated en- 
 deavor in behalf of those interests, in order that we may 
 come to a higher appreciation than we can reach separ- 
 ately and alone. The Ethical Society therefore stands for 
 association, and if we do not realize this necessity, it is 
 because we are still under the influence of the old mon- 
 astic, or of the philosophical individualistic interpreta- 
 tion of human existence which through long centuries 
 has been emphasized. These have been the dominating 
 influences on the attitude of mind towards the meaning 
 of life in the past. If you would know the truth, go 
 alone and think; go into the closet or into the desert, if 
 you wish to reach the ultimate, go apart, as the philoso- 
 phers did, and dwell alone in the contemplation of your 
 own inspirations. And yet, if we stop a moment to think 
 upon the weakness of this individualistic ideal we shall 
 see how it has been corrected by all the higher influences 
 of our own time. Carlyle's thought of the hero as one 
 who stood alone, who had no contact with his fellows ex- 
 cept to open his ideal to them. We are coming to realize 
 that there is no hero who does not gather into himself the 
 spirit of his time, and become the expression of the high- 
 est and best forces of society. No thinker can, out of the 
 intimacy of his own study, bring forth some new philoso- 
 phy of life. The great thinker is the man who gathers
 
 WHAT AN ETHICAL CULTURE SOCIETY IS FOR. 187 
 
 into himself the utmost of human intelHgence, and who 
 therefore becomes the interpreter of the silent endeavor, 
 the expression of the intellectual activity of the great ma- 
 jority of men. The higher life is always the life of clos§ 
 and intimate human association. The artist is no artist 
 who does not gather into himself the ideals and aspira- 
 tions of the age, and then give voice to that which other- 
 wise were silent. And so the moral life is conditioned 
 upon association in behalf of moral ends. 
 
 The Ethical Society then stands for association, and for 
 association in the spirit of an ethical challenge. We have 
 our ideals which we do not live up to. If any one of us 
 could live up to the best impulses, thoughts and purposes 
 which he has gained from the nurture of his childhood, 
 even for one day, the world would be a very different 
 place in which to live. But we do not live up to these 
 ideals. These ideals with which we began our early man- 
 hood are dissipated in the midst of a world of conflict. 
 The higher ethical impulses of our spirits are destroyed 
 or made ineffective by the angry jar and friction of the 
 world about us. The noblest aspirations fail, and every 
 man who goes out to meet the problem of life is met with 
 the question whether it is worth while to seek to live up to 
 his aspirations, or whether to conform to the standards 
 of the world in which he is placed. And so we come to the 
 Ethical Society meeting, as people go to their places of 
 worship, to renew our allegiance to these ideals which 
 have commended themselves to us in the past, to measure 
 our life by the standard which we seriously hold, and to 
 give ourselves anew to the ethical interpretation and ful- 
 filment in practice of the higher inspirations which each 
 and every individual life must at some time feel. The 
 association therefore is for ethical challenge, but not for 
 this alone.
 
 Ii5b WHAT AN ETHICAL CULTURE SOCIETY IS FOR. 
 
 The Ethical Society is an association for ethical illu- 
 mination, for moral guidance. We know not what to do 
 in the midst of the perplexing problems of modern life. 
 The conscience of the race is to-day perplexed in the 
 midst of conditions which are largely new. Each hu- 
 man life is to-day more difficult than in the ages past. We 
 come together in the Ethical Society for the study of the 
 questions of the ethical life, as well as for self-devotion 
 to ideals. You come here, where, according to your plan, 
 speaker follows speaker, each with some special study and 
 experience, for guidance, and to gain for yourselves that 
 interpretation or vision which the speaker has of the 
 meaning of human association. We unite in the Ethical 
 Society in the interest of a deeper apprehension of the 
 spiritual imperative, and of the way in which ethical 
 commandments should carry us in our business, in our 
 homes, and in our relation to the civic life. The Ethical 
 Society is not only a meeting place for challenge, not 
 only a place to which we shall come for illumination and 
 instruction, but it is an organization of people in behalf 
 of ethical work. And one of the things which our day 
 ought to realize is that association is imperative, that ex- 
 pression is imperative, if any effectual work is to be done 
 in the world that is so complex, so vast that every indi- 
 vidual effort is lost in the great organized social life. If 
 you would do anything effective in business, you usually 
 ally yourself with other interests along your line of ac- 
 tivity. If you would be effective in the educational world, 
 you must associate yourself with the greatest movement 
 in which you can find a, place, with the greatest co-ordi- 
 nated activity. And so, in the ethical interests of the com- 
 munity we must realize the limitation of our own indi- 
 vidual capacity, and the necessity for close co-operation in 
 order to secure the best effect.
 
 WHAT AN ETHICAL CULTURE SOCIETY IS FOR. 189 
 
 And that for which an Ethical Culture Society must 
 exist — for which all of the churches really exist — is to be 
 found in the inspiration g-iven to the individual life. The 
 way in which you and I live in the community, the way in 
 which we fulfil our duties as parents, husbands and wives, 
 neighbors, citizens and workers in the world, the way in 
 which we fulfil our responsibilities will determine the 
 world's interpretation of the meaning- and importance of 
 the ethical life and of the Society for Ethical Culture. 
 
 But over and beyond the influence of the Ethical So- 
 ciety upon the individual life, there are great undertak- 
 ings which cannot be served by individualism, however 
 high its expression, things which we must do together. 
 If you would realize the importance of such co-opera- 
 tion, you only need to look at your own Society, or that 
 of New York, to see how one and another thing is accom- 
 plished through association, which could not be wisely 
 undertaken alone. Any such work as that undertaken 
 by your Society last winter, in providing a course of Sat- 
 urday afternoon lectures on the Moral Education of the 
 Young, in which you gave the community the best utter- 
 ances that could be gathered concerning moral education 
 in our public institutions — such an effort could not be 
 fruitful if attempted by an individual alone, nor could it 
 be so well and effectively performed by any other organi- 
 zation in this city. Look at the splendid Ethical Culture 
 School at New York, which Professor Adler and his as- 
 sociates have developed, which is an object lesson, not 
 only to the city of New York, but to the best educa- 
 tional interests of all the world. People come from over 
 the seas to study its workings, to see the results in the 
 awakening of the ethical life, and the attainment of an 
 all round culture on the part of those who are fortunately 
 privileged to pass the years of their life-preparation there.
 
 190 WHAT AN ETHICAL CULTURE SOCIETY IS FOR. 
 
 Then there are the philanthropic interests of the many, 
 different divisions of the New York Society, bringing 
 life and healing to people of every class and of every 
 race. This, then, is the object of an Ethical Society — to 
 gather the people whose little means and whose inade- 
 quate time could not personally effect any great object, 
 any important leadership towards ethical ends, but who 
 by combining the little means and time of many people 
 in a neighborhood, attempt great undertakings, and attain 
 a vast accomplishment. 
 
 The Ethical Society is, therefore, an association on 
 behalf of ethical work, not merely for bringing out ideals 
 of life by personal inspiration and contact, but on behalf 
 of ethical service to the community. For the ends of 
 ethical culture such a Society must necessarily be a close 
 human association, and one of the points I wish this 
 morning to emphasize more than any other is the impera- 
 tive necessity for a closely combined association among 
 the people who constitute an Ethical Society. The Ethic- 
 al Society is for this very human relationship of men and 
 women in the interests of the ethical life. In one or anoth- 
 er way through a number of years past, it has been my con- 
 stant feeling that there has been too little contact of this 
 sort. Our great universities, increasing in their activity 
 and in their numbers, are gradually limiting the contact 
 between professor and pupil, and decreasing that be- 
 tween pupil and pupil. In the great cities we live lonely 
 and isolated lives. In the midst of the city we can be 
 more lonely than out upon the dreary desert plains. There 
 are thousands of people about us in whom we have no in- 
 terest, with whom we have no association for moral help. 
 The individual is lost in the great aggregations of mod- 
 ern cities and of industrial activities. An Ethical So- 
 ciety ought to form one place in the great desert of lone-
 
 WHAT AN ETHICAL CULTURE SOCIETY IS FOR. I9I 
 
 liness in which we can come into vital and human relation 
 with mankind, in which we shall come into such contact 
 as shall be helpful to each and all. This is the whole 
 secret of the Ethical movement, the right relation of life 
 with life, the interest of mutual helpfulness. 
 
 We need a new interpretation of marriage relation- 
 ships and of domestic life. The older significance of mar- 
 riage — the old formula — was to cleave to each other 
 for better or worse as chance might be. The ethical 
 idea is not for better or worse, but that husband and wife 
 take each other to make the worse good, to make the 
 good better, and to make the better best. The true mar- 
 riage is an ethical co-operation, each seeking to bring out 
 the highest and best in the life of the one he or she most 
 loves. This is the true meaning of marital responsibility, 
 which modern conditions are causing to be interpreted in 
 terms of material economy. The responsibility of the 
 parent as to the child, as commonly viewed, is that it 
 shall be well taught, clothed, fed and started in life. But 
 the ethical responsibility is not only to clothe, feed, edu- 
 cate, but to bring out the latent possibility not only of in- 
 tellectual and physical well being, but of moral and spir- 
 itual life, to develop in the child all that is latent in its 
 spirit. So in friendship: true friends are not those who 
 merely enjoy each other's society from year to year, who 
 come into relationship with each other in pleasant so- 
 cial intercourse, but is realized where each strives to bring 
 out the best that is in the other's spirit, so far as one life 
 may influence and affect the other. And this is the true 
 meaning of an Ethical Society, — an association of peo- 
 ple banded together for mutual moral help in character- 
 building — in which the members come into personal hu- 
 man relationship. If we could only devise methods by 
 which, instead of constant instruction, which often falls
 
 192 WHAT AN ETHICAL CULTURE SOCIETY IS FOR. 
 
 upon dull and deaf ears, we niig-ht incite and stimulate 
 each other to bring out. each for the other's good, the 
 best and highest ! But this whole thought rests back upon 
 a new apprehension of the meaning of human life. 
 
 The American impulse, so strong all over our great 
 land, is to get out of the class in which we have been 
 placed by the fortune of birth, and to get into some 
 higher class, that of those better favored than we are. 
 This eager desire to get on in life, which is so charac- 
 teristic and so fatal in our civilization, rests upon a false 
 perspective, upon an unethical interpretation of human 
 relationships ; for every human life, because it is a human 
 life, whatever its degree of education and its position in 
 the w^orld, whatever its capacity and power, has its con- 
 tribution to make to every other human life. The one thing 
 which the social settlement work has most clearly re- 
 vealed is the fact that those who go to work among the 
 unfavored classes get far more than they give. Men in 
 the midst of suffering and distress, surrounded by unfa- 
 vorable conditions, who have learned what it is to endure 
 hardness, to resist temptation, to stand upright with the 
 dreadful fact of to-morrow's needs pressing heavily 
 upon them in to-day's activity, because they have come 
 thus into contact with an essential experience of human 
 life, are able to speak words which the most favored needs 
 to hear. So the Ethical Society, if true to its foundation 
 principle of gathering together people, regardless of edu- 
 cation and station, into one fraternity, is in a position to 
 help on the enrichment and enlargement of human char- 
 acter through moral fraternity, as no other organization 
 can possibly do. 
 
 The ethical association, then, is in behalf of co-operative 
 character-building, close human personal relationship be- 
 tween member and member, not simply for the pleasant
 
 WHAT AN ETHICAL CULTURE SOCIETY IS FOR. 1 93 
 
 enjoyment of a social hour, but for ethical ends, that 
 each may seek to bring out in the other the best that is 
 latent there. An ethical association, however, is not true 
 to its name or purpose when it does not provide inspira- 
 tion and opportunity for those who would do personal 
 work and render help to the lives of those with whom 
 they come in contact. I am depressed by the enormous 
 spectacle of wasted human lives. No one can study the 
 social conditions of our time without being depressed with 
 the spectacle. There are thousands of our young men, 
 and men who are no longer young, going down in ethical 
 and spiritual decay. We are depressed when we read of 
 80,000 men falling on the battlefields of Manchuria, and 
 we ought to be depressed ; the heart of humanity ought to 
 break beneath the strain of sympathy for our brothers 
 who are going down to death. But we overlook the fact 
 that in every one of our great cities an equal number of 
 men are going down to death without the shedding of 
 blood upon a battlefield. Professor Jordan, some years 
 ago, told in the Forum his experiences while coming 
 across the continent on a slow train which stopped at 
 nearly every station. There were groups of young men 
 all along the road, idling and loitering, drifting into ways 
 of vice and sin, with no thought of life's duties, going 
 down into intellectual and spiritual decay. Walk out 
 upon the streets of Philadelphia any evening, and you 
 will see throngs of young people going to the devil, as 
 they say in New York, because they have nowhere else to 
 go to. Look into every section of the community and 
 you will find uninspired, unillumined lives of men and 
 women. 
 
 I cannot see how an Ethical Society with its aims can 
 fail to become an animating power in the regenerating 
 work of humanity. And if it is true to its ideals, the
 
 194 WHAT AN ETHICAL CULTURE SOCIETY IS FOR. 
 
 Ethical Society must mean inspiration to every one of 
 its members to go out into the highways and byways, to 
 take by the hand the wayward and erring^, to help those 
 who are falling by the wayside because of the lack of a 
 haven, and bring them to a place where a helpful human 
 interest may illuminate them and awaken them to a sense 
 of their uselessness both to themself and to the com- 
 munity, The Ethical Society ought to be an important 
 regenerative force in every community, seeking to bring 
 in the erring; not a fellowship for the mere sake of fel- 
 lowship, not seeking to build up its organization if you 
 please, merely by bringing people into membership, but 
 to bring them under influences which will illuminate them 
 and make them better men and women. If true to its 
 mission, then, the Ethical Society is for the work of so- 
 cial redemption, for the inspiration of every member to 
 loyal human service, not simply in giving of alms, but in 
 bestowing that higher alms which consists in being a true 
 friend. 
 
 We come to the morning lectures not merely to hear 
 what the lecturer may say, not to meet our friends and 
 those with a kindred interest, not this alone — but we 
 come upon the day of rest and thought that in one place 
 we may meet face to face the ideal, the ideal which has 
 been born out of the ages of human life, nurtured by the 
 noble example of all the saints and saviors, prophets and 
 martyrs who have gone before, nurtured by every cur- 
 rent of religious life since the world began — each nation 
 with "its message from on high, each the Messiah of 
 some central thought for the fulfilment and delight of 
 man." We come here that we may meet that ideal which 
 has been enriched by the sacrifice and earnest toil of all 
 peoples in all time. The ideal we hold may perhaps have 
 a different interpretation for every one of us. In its
 
 WHAT AN ETHICAL CULTURE SOCIETY IS FOR. I95 
 
 formless glow we shall each see the face which is to 
 us most dear, which through education, association and 
 love has been impressed upon our consciousness. One 
 will see there the face of the man of Galilee, another the 
 face of Moses or Isaiah, another Buddha or Mohammed, 
 another Knox or Calvin or Emerson. Most of us will 
 probably see the face of a sainted mother, or some dear 
 friend who has been closer to us than a mother; but the 
 lineaments which we shall each discover for ourselves 
 will be dependent upon our point of view, and the me- 
 dium through which we look is secondary to the fact that 
 we shall look upon the ideal — the highest aspiration, the 
 deepest conception of human life which the ages have 
 developed — its meaning and its mission. The Ethical So- 
 ciety is an association for the preservation of the ideal, to 
 gather it from all the factors of human richness, and to 
 illuminate that ideal with a new reality and allegiance, 
 and to bring it to bear upon the question of individual ac- 
 tivity and the right attitude of men and women in all the 
 relations of life. It is the home of the ideal. 
 
 That which is significant in every religion is not its 
 dogma, but its vision; not its principles, but its inspira- 
 tions; not its beliefs, but its undertakings. In the pres- 
 ence of the ideal, inspirations, which surpass the power 
 of utterance in words but which lead us ever onward to 
 growth and fulfilment, shall more and more be infused 
 into the practical deeds of every day, to transform them 
 into the image of the ideal, and to fulfil them in terms of 
 vital human experience. It is for such things as these 
 that the Ethical Society exists. It is these things that 
 we individually need, that the world needs, and such 
 things as these can be supplied by the Ethical Society as 
 by no other human association.
 
 THE MORAL INSTRUCTION MOVE- 
 MENT ABROAD 
 
 [Some information regarding the moral instruction 
 movement abroad, compiled from printed documents by 
 a member of the Philadelphia Ethical Society and read at 
 its recent (twenty-second) annual meeting.] 
 
 The Moral Instruction League in E)igla)id was found- 
 ed in 1897. Its object is to introduce systematic non-theo- 
 logical moral instruction into all schools, and to make the 
 fomiation of character the chief aim of school life. It 
 has issued many leaflets and pamphlets. It has published 
 a Graduated Syllabus of Moral Instruction for Elemen- 
 tary Schools. It has presented a petition to the Board of 
 Education signed by members of the Lords and Com- 
 mons, university professors and other representative men, 
 asking the Board to make provision for lessons in personal 
 and civic duties. It gives twice a month, in the League's 
 Rooms, specimen lessons of Moral Instruction by capa- 
 ble teachers, before audiences of educational experts and 
 the general public. It is collecting material as illustrative 
 information under the several headings of its Graduated 
 Syllabus. It publishes and recommends, several moral 
 text-books. It is influencing Educational Authorities all 
 over the country — moral instruction being given in more 
 than 3,000 public schools to about 1,000,000 children. It 
 is communicating with all the head teachers and all the 
 Training Colleges in the land. It intends to, or has al- 
 ready, approached the new Government to press on it the 
 need of introducing Moral Instruction as a regular sub- 
 ject into all public schools — the religious instruction given 
 having proved morallv ineffective — twenty-seven educa- 
 tional authorities, in spite of an overcrowded curriculum, 
 having recently found it necessary to make additional 
 provision for moral instruction of a systematic kind. 
 
 196
 
 MORAL INSTRUCTION MOVEMENT ABROAD. I97 
 
 In several of the British Colonies — in Nova Scotia, 
 Manitoba, Jamaica, Queensland and South Australia, de- 
 finite instruction is given in morals and good manners. 
 
 In India an official Education Circular has been issued 
 (in Bengal) which states that teachers must aim at de- 
 veloping moral character by stories and examples of fa- 
 mous men, in their text-books, and by the example of the 
 teacher; that character is shaped by discipline, habits of 
 punctuality, obedience, regularity, method, and truthful- 
 ness, and the virtues of generosity, self-control, self-sac- 
 rifice, respect to superiors, tenderness to animals, and 
 compassion for the poor and aged. 
 
 In Germany the League for secular education and moral 
 instruction, possessing a membership of over 400 per- 
 sons, is setting up a publishing house at considerable cost, 
 for the purpose of encouraging and facilitating the pro- 
 duction of books on moral instruction. 
 
 In Austria a Moral Instruction League is in contem- 
 plation. The Austrian Board of Education has just is- 
 sued new regulations for schools which are conceived in 
 an ethical spirit, and show in detail the supreme import- 
 ance of teaching to the children the leading virtues. 
 
 In Holland, steps have also been taken toward the for- 
 mation of a Moral Instruction League, and to this end 
 several meetings have taken place at The Hague. 
 
 In Hungary, it is reported there is the possibility of 
 forming a Moral Instruction League. Moral instruction 
 in Hungary is supposed to be given in all schools, but it 
 forms only a part, and a very small part, of the denomina- 
 tional instruction given by priests and rabbis. 
 
 In the schools of Italy, Moral Instruction has been for 
 some time a separate regular subject. 
 
 In France, the impulse given in recent years to instruc- 
 tion in morals or practical ethics is most significant. The 
 subject there is not new ; moral instruction is found in 
 school programs antedating the Republic but always in 
 relation to religion. In 1882 the State schools were made 
 strictly secular, morals and civics being placed at the head 
 of the prescribed studies. For a while the scientific spirit 
 dominated. But within the past few years the primary
 
 198 MORAL INSTRUCTION MOVEMENT ABROAD. 
 
 school of France has undergone a subtle transformation. 
 The scientific spirit has given way to the ethical spirit. 
 The teaching of practical morals has become live and ef- 
 fective; and is intended to complete and ennoble all the 
 other instruction of the school. While each of the other 
 branches tends to develop a special order of aptitudes 
 or some kind useful knowledge — this study aims to de- 
 velop the man himself. 
 
 In Japan, for nearly forty years past^they have been 
 excluding from the schools all priestly influence. The 
 government has introduced moral instruction into all the 
 schools since 1868, and attaches especial importance to 
 such instruction being carried out. The greatest value is 
 placed on ethical influence permeating all classes of the 
 people, as the surest guarantee for a sound further devel- 
 opment. An eight-volume work dealing with moral in- 
 struction has been since 1903 in use in all the schools of 
 Japan — of elementary schools alone there are over 27,000. 
 In the lowest grades, text-books in moral instruction are 
 not used. The children are interested in moral conduct 
 by means of object-lessons. Even in the higher classes, 
 object lessons in morals are used. The examples of fa- 
 mous men, and the occurrences of daily life. The duties 
 succeed one another proceeding from the family to the 
 school, and from the school to the duties of the citizen. 
 In the higher classes, the various ethical systems are set 
 forth. Moral instruction in Japan is not anti-religious, 
 but has for its sole object the strengthening of the ethical 
 consciousness. The policy pursued by the Japanese au- 
 thorities is almost identical with the aim of the Moral In- 
 struction League of England.
 
 A NEW ETHICAL YEAR BOOK 
 
 A SENTIMENT IN VERSE FOR EVERY DAY JN 
 THE YEAR. Compiled by Walter L. Sheldon. 
 
 "The collection is designed for those who would like to 
 
 have Scriptures in verse The art of poetry, like 
 
 that of music, speaks for the sentiments natural to the hu- 
 man soul." — From Prefatory Note. 
 
 "For thirty years Mr. Sheldon has gleaned from the great poets 
 their noblest expression of the ethical life, and has embodied the result 
 of this long labor of love In this volume. He has used rare discrimina- 
 tion in selecting passages that ring strong and true with brave, cheerful, 
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