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RIGHT AND WRONG 
 AFTER THE WAR 
 
RIGHT AND WRONG 
 AFTER THE WAR 
 
 AN ELEMENTARY CONSIDERATION 
 
 OF CHRISTIAN MORALS IN THE LIGHT OF 
 
 MODERN SOCIAL PROBLEMS 
 
 BY 
 
 BERNARD IDDINGS BELL 
 
 DEAN OF ST. PAUL'S CATHEDRAL CHURCH 
 
 FOND DU LAC, WISCONSIN 
 
 MEMBER OF THE JOINT COMMISSION ON SOCIAL SERVICE 
 
 OF THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH 
 
 BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
 
 HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 
 
 (Cbe fiifcewitie prcs£ Cambridge 
 
 1918 
 
3\ 
 
 <3* 
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1918, BY BERNARD IDDINGS BELL 
 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 
 
 Published May igi8 
 
 ■ • 
 
 . ■ ■ . 
 
TO MY FATHER 
 
 CHARLES WRIGHT BELL 
 
 THIS BOOK IS AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED 
 
 385014 
 
PREFACE 
 
 The chapters of this book were origi- 
 nally lectures delivered at the 19 17 
 Conference for Church Workers at the 
 Episcopal Theological School in Cam- 
 bridge, Massachusetts. At the request of 
 a number of the members of my class, 
 men and women keenly interested in re- 
 ligion and in our modern social life, as 
 it is and as it is to be, I have prepared 
 them for publication. 
 
 It is to be hoped that no one will sup- 
 pose them to be presented as final con- 
 clusions, dogmatically stated. He would 
 be a madman, indeed, who thought that 
 he had either the authority or the ability 
 to tell the Christian world just how, in 
 these times of flux and confusion, it ought 
 to be applying the principles of Chris- 
 
 • • 
 
 Vll 
 
PREFACE 
 
 tian ethics to that way of living which 
 is in process of becoming. He would, 
 however, be a blind man who did not 
 see that the old ways of teaching ethics 
 to Christian people and the old ways of 
 comprehending ethics by those people 
 are no longer vital. It is the part of wis- 
 dom that each of us should seek for him- 
 self to apply Christian moral principles 
 to the new problems of living, and that 
 he should be willing to offer his tentative 
 conclusions for criticism by his fellows 
 and assistance to his fellows. Only after 
 many have done this can the Church as 
 a whole, roused to the importance of the 
 task, be enabled corporately to teach the 
 men of the new age how they may follow 
 Jesus in their day. It is this preliminary 
 sort of thing which I have endeavored to 
 do in this book. 
 
 Its only values, therefore, will be in 
 
 • • • 
 
 Vlll 
 
PREFACE 
 
 the revelation of how one priest's mind 
 has reacted in the face of the necessity 
 of teaching the old morality in the terms 
 of the new life, and in the stimulation 
 of the thought of the reader along this 
 line. 
 
 It would be futile to claim originality 
 for much that is herein contained. There 
 has been no conscious plagiarizing, but 
 much has been absorbed from many 
 books and from conversations with people 
 whose expert knowledge of various pha- 
 ses of the problem I have gladly drunk 
 up, in so far as I have been able to do 
 so. To all who have taught me, I hereby 
 express my appreciation. Especially do 
 I wish to thank the members of my class 
 at Cambridge for their kindly and illu- 
 minating criticism of many of the posi- 
 tions I have taken. 
 
 Bernard Iddings Bell 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 I. The Problem of Restatement . i 
 
 II. Problems connected with the 
 
 Hunger Urge .... 23 
 
 III. Problems connected with the 
 
 Sex Urge . . . . . 58 
 
 IV. Problems of the Local Com- 
 munity 100 
 
 V. National and International 
 
 Problems 147 
 
RIGHT AND WRONG 
 AFTER THE WAR 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 THE PROBLEM OF RESTATEMENT 
 
 Therefore every scribe who hath been made a disciple to 
 the kingdom is like unto a man that is a householder y which 
 br in geth forth out of bis treasure things new and old. 
 
 ST. MATTHEW, 13:52 
 
 I 
 
 To many people the advocate of a re- 
 statement of Christian ethics appears as 
 one who would reject the ancient faith 
 for some modern substitute. This is due 
 to a common confusion in thought, by 
 which being good and being religious 
 are supposed to be two names for the 
 same thing. Religion and ethics are not, 
 in fact, identical. Their relationship to 
 one another is that of antecedent and 
 
RIGHT AND WRONG 
 
 consequent. No religion has ever been 
 merely a collection of rules about being 
 good. The essence of religion is a mys- 
 tical contact with a supernatural Being, 
 by which worshippers gain the courage 
 and the grit necessary to live up to some 
 system of ethics which has come into 
 being as the result, largely, of economic 
 and social necessities. The fruit of a re- 
 ligion is a certain type of life. 
 
 Despite occasional persons and pe- 
 riods in religious development which 
 may seem to say otherwise, mankind 
 has known from the beginning — pagan 
 and Christian alike — that men attain 
 salvation from failure in human life by 
 their conduct. It is a safe rule of thumb 
 that in any people he is esteemed good 
 who so lives as to advance the welfare 
 of the social group of which he is a mem- 
 ber; he is esteemed bad whose conduct 
 
AFTER THE WAR 
 
 is that of one who prostitutes the com- 
 mon weal to his own advantage. The 
 purpose of religion in any social group, 
 from the tiny clan to the international 
 brotherhood, is to give to men super- 
 natural sanction for and supernatural 
 power toward fulfilling a code of ethics 
 based upon the social welfare of the 
 group. 
 
 Consequently, it seems plain that social 
 changes need involve a change in theol- 
 ogy and in religious activities only if the 
 new conditions are inconsistent with the 
 character of the old divinities. If the gods 
 of a people's devotion are sufficiently 
 sublime to be capable of inspiring and 
 invigorating a moral code suitable for 
 the new day, there need be no change 
 in religion, even though the minutiae of 
 ethics be changed almost past recogni- 
 tion. 
 
RIGHT AND WRONG 
 
 It is not a transformation of religion 
 that this book is talking about when it 
 advocates, indeed states the inevitable 
 necessity of, a restatement of Christian 
 ethics. To this author there seems no 
 necessity for a new divinity, for the 
 simple reason that the Christian God, 
 Jesus Christ, is a Deity the character of 
 whom is so sublime as to make Him the 
 unimprovable Patron of an ethical sys- 
 tem, not merely adequate to the new 
 and socialized era into which we are 
 entering, but also adequate to any sys- 
 tem of human living possible for the 
 mind of man to imagine as existing on 
 this earth. 
 
 The Christian religion does not, can- 
 not, change in any essential particular, 
 because it is the means of coming into 
 contact with this incomparably good 
 Deity, Jesus Christ, who, because of His 
 
 4 
 
AFTER THE WAR 
 
 moral perfection, is the same yesterday, 
 to-day, and forever. It cannot change 
 because its look is not manward but 
 Godward, to Him than whom in hu- 
 man terms man cannot conceive a more 
 perfect One. 
 
 It may be objected, however, that re- 
 ligion must change for all that, because, 
 although the God Jesus is beyond im- 
 provement, man the worshipper does 
 change very much indeed from age to 
 age. This is not as true an objection as 
 it might at first appear. Man, after all, 
 varies but little as the ages come and go. 
 The differences are accidental, not essen- 
 tial. We may not carry food from dish 
 to mouth on knife blades, as did George 
 Washington and John Adams ; we wear 
 neither knee-breeches nor powdered 
 wigs ; when we get fevers we are inocu- 
 lated instead of bled ; we write our s's 
 
RIGHT AND WRONG 
 
 above the line and not below it ; we talk 
 in the patois of biology and psychology 
 instead of in the argot of Deism and the 
 French Revolution ; but after all, they 
 and we are little different in things funda- 
 mental. The same passions rule us; the 
 same needs and hungers impel us; the 
 same sort of mental and physical equip- 
 ment expresses itself in us as expressed 
 itself in them. The great moving forces 
 of human life are one, in all ages. The 
 species does not gradually evolve into a 
 species of supermen. If Jesus is a Deity 
 who cannot be surpassed, and if man- 
 kind remains essentially the same, it will 
 easily be seen that religion need not, 
 cannot change. The inner experience 
 of men meeting Christ to-day is exactly 
 that of the men who found Christ in 
 the days of the catacombs. 
 
AFTER THE WAR 
 
 ii 
 Nor, by advocating a readjustment of 
 Christian morals, can a right-thinking 
 person mean any change in the fun- 
 damental principle of Christ's teaching 
 to men, namely, that man attains unto 
 salvation only through sacrifice. The 
 Golden Rule is not the essence of Chris- 
 tian ethics. A better expression of it in 
 brief is this : " He who would save his 
 own life shall lose it ; but he who loses 
 his life shall find it." In any system of 
 ethics which can under the broadest in- 
 terpretation be called Christian, this fun- 
 damental law of salvation through sacri- 
 fice must be the thing which unifies it 
 all, the thing which is being expressed. 
 It must not be obscured into salvation 
 through ceremonial, or salvation through 
 intellectual acceptance of dogma, or sal- 
 vation through mere good works. It is 
 
 7 
 
RIGHT AND WRONG 
 
 beneath each of these, and greater than 
 any of them. All right Christian cere- 
 monial is an attempt to figure salvation 
 by sacrifice; the sole possible use of in- 
 tellectually accepting Christ by faith is 
 to put one's will atune with Him who 
 impels mankind toward sacrifice; the 
 only works that are good in reality are 
 those proceeding from a will to sacrifice. 
 This fundamental soteriological prin- 
 ciple is symbolized in the Holy Cross, 
 which even downright and post-liberal 
 persons like Mr. H. G. Wells cannot un- 
 derstand. Jesus' prescription for conduct 
 is this, " He who would come after Me, 
 let him take up his cross and follow Me." 
 Much twaddle has been talked about 
 " bearing one's cross." Almost every sort 
 of unavoidable affliction has been spoken 
 of by spiritual ignoramuses as being 
 some one or other's " cross in life." The 
 
 8 
 
AFTER THE WAR 
 
 whole meaning of Christ's cross is lost un- 
 less one remembers that He did not have 
 to bear it, but that He chose to bear it, at 
 great cost to Himself, because He loved 
 human folks. No man can be said to be 
 bearing his cross after Christ unless he de- 
 liberately and voluntarily endures depriva- 
 tion, labor, pain, suffering, which he might 
 have escaped, but which he took upon 
 him because he loved the brethren. 
 
 The desire so to sacrifice one's self is 
 the Christian virtue oi car it as or love. To 
 Jesus and His early interpreters, back of 
 all Christian morality was this love. To 
 Him and to them all the possible law and 
 all the possible prophecy were summed up 
 in the two commandments, "Thou shalt 
 love God," and "Thou shalt love thy 
 neighbor." All Christian conduct is but 
 the application of the desire to put one's 
 self out for God and man — to put one's 
 
 9 
 
RIGHT AND WRONG 
 
 self out of one's mind as an end to be 
 served, and to put them in in one's stead. 
 The failure to live so is sin and cuts us off 
 from God. The endeavoring so to live is 
 the process of salvation. 
 
 This principle cannot be omitted or 
 slurred in any moral system calling itself 
 Christian. 
 
 It is, however, not only possible but 
 necessary to vary the application of this 
 basic principle to the actual problems of 
 our lives. As these problems change, so 
 in details must our ethical code change 
 also. Things judged morally defensible 
 in one generation may be grievous sins 
 in a succeeding generation. Conduct es- 
 teemed vicious in one age may be seen to 
 further high moral goods in another age. 
 For example, Sts. Chrysostom and Am- 
 brose — to take only two of a multitude 
 — denounced all taking of interest on 
 
 10 
 
AFTER THE WAR 
 
 money as a heinous violation of the com-* 
 mandment against theft, sufficiently grave 
 to justify formal excommunication of an 
 offender. Yet these last months it has 
 been a common thing to hear clergy urg- 
 ing their people as a moral duty to invest 
 their money in the Liberty Loan, at four 
 per cent. Other vivid variations of teach- 
 ing may be found regarding sex morality 
 and the marriage relationship. Develop- 
 ing types of culture, changing economic 
 systems, the social desirability of stimu- 
 lating or restraining certain natural im- 
 pulsesof human nature varyingfrom time 
 to time, — all these change ethical teach- 
 ing among Christians from age to age. 1 
 
 1 At a recent Church congress a woman who teaches in 
 one of our great colleges visited a fort with a number of the 
 clergy. She looked at the great guns with a pacifist's dis- 
 like, and finally said, «* I wonder what the Apostles would 
 have said at the sight of those guns." Thereupon one of the 
 clergy promptly rejoined, " They would have said nothing 
 
 I I 
 
RIGHT AND WRONG 
 
 in 
 It is hardly more than a truism to say 
 that in our day society is being rapidly 
 metamorphosed, that a new era in mat- 
 ters civic, industrial, and social is rapidly 
 emerging from the worn-out remnants 
 of an age which has seen great days and 
 great achievements and then been out- 
 worn. The day that is dying is the day 
 of individualism, of commercialism, of 
 competition. It succeeded the feudal pe- 
 riod some three and a half centuries ago. 
 It reached senility about the beginning 
 of the present century, and the Great 
 War is now digging its grave. The new 
 
 of any particular importance. ' ' The professor was much 
 shocked ; but the answer was profoundly true. The sociol- 
 ogy of the Apostles is, fortunately, not binding upon the 
 Church. As a theologian, for instance, St, Paul is an im- 
 mortal leader. A good part of his sociology, including his 
 solemn pronouncements about the proper place of women in 
 the world, to-day is simply bosh. 
 
 12 
 
AFTER THE WAR 
 
 day is apparently to be a day of increasing 
 cooperation, socialization, collectivism. 
 As it dawns we are seeing more and more 
 clearly that the individual is primarily a 
 social creature. 
 
 Of course, even in the most individu- 
 alistic days, we never quite forgot that he 
 was such a creature ; but for a consider- 
 able number of decades and even gener- 
 ations that has not seemed to us the thing 
 of primary importance about him. He 
 has been an individual first and a mem- 
 ber of the social organism second. The 
 trend of things nowadays is to consider 
 him first as a social cooperator and only 
 secondarily as an individual. 
 
 This trend, which we may or may not 
 like, is manifested in all phases of life. 
 We see it in modern industry and busi- 
 ness, with its trend, so utterly independ- 
 ent of hysterical and theoretical oppo- 
 
 l 3 
 
RIGHT AND WRONG 
 
 sition, toward combination, cooperation, 
 and coordination of specialized and de- 
 pendent individuals into one whole. We 
 find it in modern law, where the right 
 of the whole group to regulate, limit, and 
 even abolish the privileges of individuals 
 is increasingly acknowledged. It is appar- 
 ent in contemporary education, which is 
 far less concerned than pedagogy used 
 to be with producing self-sufficient and 
 rounded individuals, and much more oc- 
 cupied with developing specially skilled 
 cooperatorsin a whole much greater than 
 any individual. Modern medicine exhib- 
 its the same tendency when it concerns 
 itself more and more with prevention of 
 disease, instead of stressing the cure of 
 individual sufferers merely. In modern 
 criminology retribution has given place 
 as the motive for punishment to educa- 
 tion and social restoration of the crimi- 
 
AFTER THE WAR 
 
 nal. Modern charity refuses to be longer 
 content with relieving sporadic instances 
 of poverty, and more and more insists — 
 often to the grave discomfiture of its 
 largest supporters — upon trying to cure 
 the social cancers of which individual 
 cases of want are usually only manifest- 
 ing sores. 
 
 Of course the enthusiasts in all these 
 lines of activity go to extremes. Some- 
 times we feel there is danger that the 
 individual shall be even more forgotten 
 to-morrow than the social group was 
 yesterday. However, discounting the 
 extravagances of extremists, it neverthe- 
 less remains as plain as the nose on 
 Savonarola's face that within the last 
 fifty years or so, in every phase of life 
 and thought, we have turned to the 
 right-about-face from the position taken 
 by our ancestors as to the relative im- 
 
 15 
 
RIGHT AND WRONG 
 
 portance of the individual and the social 
 organism. We had made great progress 
 in this process of turning round and 
 starting the other way even before the 
 days of the great World War. 
 
 Now, urging along at breakneck speed 
 a development which was already com- 
 ing faster than we were ready to meet 
 it with Christian moral influences and 
 restraints, comes the international con- 
 flict. The war is socializing things and 
 thoughts with the speed of a prestidigi- 
 tator. Surtaxes on incomes and profits, 
 prohibitions of speculations hitherto con- 
 sidered legitimate, appointments of food 
 dictators, selective conscription of our 
 manhood, commissions for the settle- 
 ment of labor disputes, maximum and 
 minimum prices publicly regulated, — 
 these and similar things come along and 
 we accept them without question, often 
 
 16 
 
AFTER THE WAR 
 
 little realizing the mighty social changes 
 of which they are indices. When we 
 consider what the war has done to the 
 life of the European combatants, we 
 can easily perceive what it is in process 
 of doing to us. What otherwise might 
 have been the social progress of a cen- 
 tury is being crowded into a half-decade. 
 All this readjustment is furnishing a 
 challenge to the Church and to Church 
 people unequalled since the challenge 
 which issued from the social and indus- 
 trial readjustments of the latest previous 
 stress period in the development of the 
 world, that great period when the rise 
 of the merchant classes to power upon the 
 ruins of feudalism brought in the era of 
 unrestrained commercial individualism 
 — the period of stress which in realms 
 secular produced capitalism and in realms 
 religious projected Protestantism. Just 
 
 *7 
 
RIGHT AND WRONG 
 
 as that age and its developing needs 
 cried out for a new Christian ethics, so 
 does ours cry out. Feudal ethics passed 
 with feudalism. Capitalistic ethics are 
 passing with capitalism. Collectivist 
 ethics must come in with the coming 
 collectivism. Christian Churchmen must 
 perceive and preach the relationship of 
 their Deity and His fundamental moral 
 principle to the collectivist regime or 
 else deprive the new age of the sanction 
 and inspiring power which is in Jesus. 
 They must preach Jesus in the terms of 
 the new day or else perish as a moral 
 influence from the earth. 
 
 This is the greatest of all the great 
 problems confronting the Church to- 
 day. The interest of the people is not 
 in new theologies, not in a new state- 
 ment of the mystical essence of devo- 
 tion. Popular indifference to Christian- 
 
 18 
 
AFTER THE WAR 
 
 ity is not explainable by a lack of new 
 and novel dogmas. No one is interested 
 particularly in the subtleties of mod- 
 ernism or in the ingenious theories 
 of the higher critics of the Bible — no 
 one except a tiny group of intellectuals 
 whose intellectualism in these virile days 
 has already the fragile beauty of old 
 lace laid away in lavender. The great 
 masses of folks do not fault the Church 
 for its old concepts of God. Billy Sun- 
 day, the world's most popular evangel- 
 ist to-day, has not found that ignorance 
 of higher criticism or belief in the an- 
 cient formularies has decreased his power 
 with the souls of common people, or of 
 uncommon people either, for that mat- 
 ter. Probably more people have found 
 spiritual meat in the writings of Mr. 
 H. G. Wells than in any other books since 
 the war broke out, and yet Mr. Wells's 
 
 l 9 
 
RIGHT AND WRONG 
 
 •'finite God" is nothing on earth but 
 the old-fashioned God Incarnate, Jesus 
 Christ. He thinks he is reacting from 
 Nicene and Catholic theology, but what 
 he has really rejected is the liberal and 
 neo-Protestant caricatures of Christianity 
 which have sought to wash the super- 
 natural out of God these many years. 
 
 The fault that is really found with 
 the Church, the reason for its being in- 
 creasingly neglected, is that it fails to 
 show men the relationship of Jesus 
 Christ to their actual problems and their 
 daily lives. Great sins and selfishness it 
 fails to rebuke in Jesus* name, merely 
 because those particular sins and selfish- 
 ness are of a newly developed sort. It 
 denounces, on the other hand, things 
 which once were very harmful socially, 
 but are of no great harm to-day. The 
 masses have become partly convinced 
 
 20 
 
AFTER THE WAR 
 
 that the Church is afraid to teach morals 
 vitally for fear she may lose her endow- 
 ments and the support of those who 
 have wealth, and partly convinced that 
 Christian ethics is irrevocably tied up 
 with a sort of life that is passing. When 
 the Church begins to preach Jesus, not 
 speculating about Him, but accepting 
 Him as her God without question or 
 theorizing, connecting Him up as the 
 sanction and the inspirer of certain atti- 
 tudes toward vital problems of the new 
 age, then and not till then will she re- 
 cover her place in the affections and 
 devotion of the people. Her weakness 
 lies, not in her antiquated theology, but 
 in her antiquated morality. 
 
 The one thing of importance is that 
 Churchmen should perceive, and then 
 help others to perceive, how the glory 
 and power that is in Jesus may be ap- 
 
 21 
 
RIGHT AND WRONG 
 
 plied to life among us, how we are to 
 transmute the vision gained from the 
 Crucified, the vision of the undying no- 
 bility of sacrifice, the perception of the 
 glory of the Cross, into such deeds as 
 shall make Christian people everywhere 
 supremely servants of salvation, bring- 
 ers-in of justice, exhibitors of love, fore- 
 runners of the Kingdom of God. If the 
 Church is to give this aid she must be 
 up and about her business, seeking to 
 understand the newer concepts of life 
 about her, and preaching the Cross as 
 one who brings out of her treasury things 
 in essence as old as God, but in their 
 application as new as the raw and un- 
 formed life about us. To do this is to 
 reinterpret Christian morals to a code- 
 less age. To do this is the highest form 
 of Christian social service. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 PROBLEMS CONNECTED WITH THE 
 HUNGER URGE 
 
 Much food is in the tilled land for the poor, 
 
 But there is that is destroyed by reason of injustice, 
 
 PROVERBS, 13 : 23 
 
 It is an established principle of sociology 
 that the two great needs which impel 
 mankind to most of its actions and which 
 determine most of its institutions are the 
 same two primary needs which impel 
 toward action and evolution all living 
 creatures, the need for food and the de- 
 sire for sex expression. He who would 
 in any age understand life about him 
 can arrive at a quick and adequate per- 
 ception of it in no way more quickly 
 than by examining just how the satis- 
 faction of these two needs is being pro- 
 
 2 3 
 
RIGHT AND WRONG 
 
 vided for or kept away from the masses 
 of the people. The food need is behind 
 that which we know in social science as 
 property. The sex need is back of that 
 which we call the family. Of course the 
 two are inextricably bound up together. 
 The desire for food hinders natural fam- 
 ily development. The desire for sex ex- 
 pression complicates the problem of pro- 
 viding food. 
 
 It is, however, possible to examine 
 them separately with some illuminating 
 results. We shall endeavor to do so in 
 this and the following chapter. Our 
 method shall be to ask a question, an- 
 swer it as well as we can, and then 
 formulate a thesis as to the application 
 of Christian ethics to the situation and 
 the Church's proper attitude toward it. 
 With these theses the reader may or 
 may not find himself in agreement. 
 
 24 
 
AFTER THE WAR 
 
 That matters little, however. Consid- 
 eration of the problems involved, rather 
 than final solution of them, is the need 
 for Churchmen in this present day. 
 
 I. IS POVERTY INCREASING ? 
 
 Poverty is, and has been for a num- 
 ber of years, rapidly increasing among 
 us. Only recently a report issued by the 
 Department of Labor, widely circulated 
 in the daily press, said what many an- 
 other bulletin and book has said these 
 many years, namely, that although in 
 the past ten years we have had unpre- 
 cedented prosperity, — a prosperity un- 
 naturally stimulated by our war manu- 
 factures, but nevertheless real, — and 
 although wages in dollars and cents 
 have risen quite considerably, yet the 
 cost of living has mounted so rapidly 
 that even with the increased wage the 
 
 2 5 
 
RIGHT AND WRONG 
 
 average worker is able to buy less than 
 he was able to purchase with his lesser 
 pay ten years ago. In other words, in 
 the last decade, when wages are meas- 
 ured in purchasing power it is seen that 
 they have decreased. Robert Hunter, in 
 his book called " Poverty," Professor 
 Edwards, of the University of Wiscon- 
 sin, Frank Streightoff, in his Hart, 
 Schaffner & Marx prize essay entitled 
 "The Standard of Living among the 
 Industrial People of America," are only 
 examples of many conservative observers 
 of the trend of things who have said, 
 and proved, that in America to-day at 
 least a tenth of the population lives be- 
 low the minimum decency wage level, 
 and that the proportion is increasing. 
 The observation of the casual onlooker 
 will corroborate their conclusions, for it 
 is a commonplace to say that the cost 
 
 26 
 
AFTER THE WAR 
 
 of living has risen these late years much 
 faster than salaries and wages. 
 
 This is, of course, a truism. It is not 
 realized by so many people, though, that 
 there is less and less opportunity among 
 us for those dissatisfied with their con- 
 dition to pull up stakes and go on to 
 new and greater opportunities elsewhere. 
 The existence of this opportunity long 
 blinded Americans to their actual eco- 
 nomic and social deterioration. The 
 great West, with rewards for the adven- 
 turous and the industrious, is no longer 
 a vast open territory. Some free land re- 
 mains, but it is for the most part neither 
 good land nor accessible land, and alto- 
 gether it is not in acreage very vast com- 
 pared to our population in more con- 
 gested sections of the country. It was the 
 great, boundless, fertile acres of the West 
 which both made America a haven for 
 
 27 
 
RIGHT AND WRONG 
 
 the peoples of the world and also hin- 
 dered any adequate grappling with our 
 social problems. Our people have pros- 
 pered unbelievably, but not because 
 our institutions were especially fine, our 
 justice even, or our industrial democracy 
 vital and more than a thing of paper 
 profession. It was due rather to our 
 mighty undeveloped resources. Now- 
 adays, however, the American social 
 system and its defects in distributing 
 wealth must be faced. The poor can no 
 longer obey Mr. Greeley's precept and 
 "go West." In the sense he used the 
 word there is no West. The poor man 
 and the young man must for the most 
 part stay where they are, or move to 
 some place nearly the exact counterpart 
 of the place they move from, so far 
 as opportunity for increased prosperity 
 goes. If the poor are not to get con- 
 
 28 
 
AFTER THE WAR 
 
 stantly poorer, we shall be obliged to 
 change some things concerned with dis- 
 tribution of wealth very radically. It is 
 most disconcerting to feel that one out 
 of every ten people in the United States 
 is living in poverty, hopeless poverty, 
 below a decency income figure, below 
 a minimum efficiency mark. It is in- 
 tolerable that the proportion should be 
 permitted to grow any larger or even to 
 remain for long as large as it is. 
 
 Is not the first duty of the Church 
 and her people in the face of this fact to 
 obey St. Paul's injunction and " remem- 
 ber the poor," assuming in the doing so 
 that the Apostle was speaking not euphe- 
 mistically but literally, — assuming that 
 he did not advise that we should merely 
 dole out to them donations, but that we 
 should never let them get off our mind? 
 
 When Christians eat good meals, 
 
 29 
 
RIGHT AND WRONG 
 
 cleanly prepared and served, they must re- 
 member the poor and say to themselves, 
 " One person in ten in my country can 
 never enjoy meals like these/ ' As we read 
 noble books, hear great singers, enjoy the 
 drama, are stimulated by lectures and 
 by converse with cultured people in 
 beautiful homes and clubs, we must re- 
 member the poor and say, " One in ten 
 in this land is forever barred from all 
 this. Between these things and them is 
 fixed a great gulf, for them impassable/' 
 As we send our sons and daughters to 
 higher schools of learning, we must re- 
 member the poor and remind ourselves 
 that thousands of loving parents, with 
 children as clever, it may be more clever, 
 each year are forced to withdraw those 
 children from school and send them all 
 too early into the blind-alley jobs which 
 will crush their spirits and enervate their 
 
 3° 
 
AFTER THE WAR 
 
 brains. We must remember the poor, 
 think of their poverty, be continually- 
 distressed by it, be unhappy because of it. 
 It surely is a part of the Church's busi- 
 ness to keep the fact of poverty before 
 her people. She should help them to re- 
 member, — not merely by urging us 
 sentimentally and gushingly and super- 
 ficially to give of our superfluity to the 
 pastor's discretionary fund or to this, 
 that, or the other charitable organiza- 
 tion, not one of which can do more than 
 palliate a few of the external manifesta- 
 tions of poverty, — but by showing us 
 constantly the bleak and discouraging 
 facts in the case. In doing so she will 
 not make us comfortable. Mr. Brand 
 Whitlock once said that the man or 
 woman who had looked American civi- 
 lization in the face could never have any 
 more peace of mind. It will not give us 
 
 3 1 
 
RIGHT AND WRONG 
 
 much of contented security. When Je- 
 sus told His followers that He came to 
 give peace " not as the world gives it," is it 
 not possible that He meant that, whereas 
 the worldly try to assist us to peace of 
 mind personally while socially there is 
 no peace, He gives His peace only to 
 those who are forever righting, as with 
 a sword, for social peace first ? His peace 
 comes not by forgetting. His peace 
 comes from remembering so hard that 
 the remembrance breaks down the wall 
 of selfishness between man and men, and 
 therefore between man and God. 
 
 Thesis: It is a part of the moral duty 
 of Christians and their Church to insist 
 upon every one* s facing the facts of poverty 
 squarely and unblinkingly , to insist that only 
 those who do their best to remedy the pathetic 
 situation are worthy of comradeship with 
 Jesus, who is Himself the brother, and 
 
 3 2 
 
AFTER THE WAR 
 
 insists on our being each the brother of every 
 human being. 
 
 II. IS POVERTY THE RESULT OF SIN ? 
 
 A certain clergyman told him who 
 pens these lines, not long ago, that he 
 had never known any one to be in pov- 
 erty who did not deserve to be. This man 
 was no young fledgling, fresh from the 
 seminary. He was the pastor of a church 
 of over one thousand communicant mem- 
 bers. He had the responsibility of super- 
 vising the religious education of over 
 three hundred children. He had what was 
 considered the third best parish in his 
 diocese. And the influence upon thought 
 which he exercised is plain from the re- 
 mark of perhaps the keenest and sanest 
 and most highly esteemed publicist of 
 his State who remarked: "I hear you 
 have been over to see the Reverend Dr. 
 
 33 
 
RIGHT AND WRONG 
 
 Blank. Is n't he the dearest old ass you 
 ever met?" 
 
 It is hard to see how there can be 
 people to-day blind enough to hold to 
 Dr. Blank's opinion as to the cause of 
 poverty. There are, however, a good 
 many still to be found in responsible 
 positions in the Church, who maintain 
 that each case of poverty is really the 
 result of the poor man's mistakes and 
 sins; and there are many who do not say 
 it merely because it seems to them a tru- 
 ism unnecessary of statement. 
 
 In this plain, old-fashioned sense that 
 the poor are poor because they deserve to 
 be, all modern knowledge, all contempo- 
 rary vision, denies the validity of the posi- 
 tion taken. Any one with eyes open to see 
 facts knows among his own friends able 
 men who cannot make enough to live 
 decently, and inefficients and incompe- 
 
 34 
 
AFTER THE WAR 
 
 tents who have a surplus of this world's 
 goods ; people who have souls honorable 
 and beautiful who starve, while others, 
 rascals fit for hell, hold places of power 
 and plenty. The Psalmist who wrote 
 that he never saw the righteous forsaken 
 nor his seed begging their bread was, as 
 has been well said, a man of very limited 
 observation ; but we all bow respectfully 
 to the wisdom of the other Psalmist who 
 looked on life and cried: "It is these, 
 the ungodly, who prosper in the world, 
 and have riches in their possession. Then 
 sought I to understand this, but it was 
 too much for me until I went unto the 
 altar of God. Then understood I the 
 end of these men." (Psalm 73.) Save 
 in exceptional cases, the poor owe not 
 their poverty to their own wickedness. 
 The drunkard and the wastrel are not 
 always poor. One of the richest men this 
 
 35 
 
RIGHT AND WRONG 
 
 writer knows is a half-imbecilic degen- 
 erate, whose father and grandfather were 
 rich degenerates before him. 
 
 Poverty is, however, the result of sin, 
 in another and a truer sense. It is the re- 
 sult of injustice in distributing the fruits 
 of the earth and of labor. It is the result 
 of social maladjustments which need not 
 be. Part of these are due to the deliber- 
 ate wickedness of a few men. Most of 
 them are due to the avoidable stupidities 
 of all of us. In the selfishness and wick- 
 edness which are deliberate, some of us 
 share; in this stupidity, almost all of us 
 share. Stupidity unrelieved because of 
 inertia, as ours is, is sin. It is our sin, 
 then, our common sin, which produces 
 the major part of the poverty of the 
 world. 
 
 The Church may well proclaim that 
 poverty results from sin, but let her re- 
 
 36 
 
AFTER THE WAR 
 
 member that the sin is not the sin of the 
 poor man alone, but the selfishness and 
 careless stupidity of all of us alike. 
 
 Thesis: The Church should teach that as 
 long as any person is selfishly opposing, or 
 through indifference preventing, such read- 
 justments in our social and economic system 
 as will remove from all men the burden and 
 the threat of poverty, he is a sinner unre- 
 pentant, a violator of the fundamental law 
 of God ; and that as long as any person 
 neglects to inform himself his children, and 
 his dependents of the facts about inequity 
 in our social organism, or fails to urge ac- 
 tion upon the basis of such information when 
 received, he is of those who contend for God 
 with stupidity if not with treachery; and that 
 it is almost wholly due to our common in- 
 ertia and selfishness that poverty remains a 
 thing possible among us. 
 
 37 
 
RIGHT AND WRONG 
 
 III. WHAT IS THE MALADJUSTMENT WHICH 
 PRODUCES POVERTY? 
 
 The maladjustment which causes 
 poverty is to be found in the arrange- 
 ment we have made for distributing the 
 products of land and labor. 
 
 There is little defect in our methods 
 of production to-day. Except in times 
 of war, when the world with ghastly 
 wantonness destroys wealth by the mil- 
 lions of dollars* worth each day, there is 
 little demand now, as there was only a 
 few decades ago, for more production. 
 Our inventions of the last half-century 
 have disproved the common statement 
 of the older political economists that be- 
 cause of the niggardly reluctance of Na- 
 ture there will always be great masses of 
 people who must suffer and even perish 
 for lack of sustenance. As long as this 
 was true the chief demand made upon 
 
 38 
 
AFTER THE WAR 
 
 Christians was that they should share 
 with their necessarily starving brethren. 
 It is no longer true. From a period of 
 deficit, as Professor Patton has clearly 
 shown in his " New Basis of Civiliza- 
 tion, " we have passed to a period of 
 surplus. Instead of having too little to 
 go around, we have more than we need. 
 It ought to be plain to the observant 
 Christian, therefore, that the problem 
 of poverty is no longer one of lack of 
 wealth, but one rather of inequitable 
 distribution of our surplus. 
 
 As things are now arranged, to speak 
 plainly, the surplus wealth of the world 
 is being obtained by the few who have 
 managed, by luck, by inheritance, by 
 control of machinery, or by privilege in 
 land, to get not merely what they them- 
 selves have earned and deserved from so- 
 ciety, but also much that they have not 
 
 39 
 
RIGHT AND WRONG 
 
 earned and which they have not deserved, 
 so that the many, who are getting only 
 what they earn, or less than what they 
 earn, have still in these times of plenty 
 not enough to live on. 
 
 Speaking in no technical terms, but 
 using words in their popular meaning, 
 what is the real value of any commod- 
 ity? Obviously the cost of getting it out 
 of the ground, labored over to make it 
 fit for human use, and transported to the 
 consumer. The value of all commodities 
 in the aggregate is the cost of getting 
 them all out of the ground, all labored 
 over, and all transported. If all people 
 were paid only for the share they have 
 borne, directly or indirectly, by brain- 
 work or brawn-work, in these various 
 services, there would be little or no pov- 
 erty anywhere. We pay, however, wealth 
 to people who do not, directly or indi- 
 
 40 
 
AFTER THE WAR 
 
 rectly, by brain or brawn, contribute any- 
 thing to any one of these three forms of 
 service. Some of these we pay in rent, 
 some in profits on invested capital. Ev- 
 ery time, for instance, that the consumer 
 buys a pair of shoes he not only pays the 
 actual cost of raising, laboring over, and 
 transporting to him those leather foot- 
 coverings, but also several rents and sev- 
 eral profits on investments, each of which 
 goes to some one who has not done in re- 
 turn for it any real service. The differ- 
 ence between what it costs society to 
 make things and the price that the con- 
 sumer pays for them has often been called 
 the " surplus value" of those commodi- 
 ties. This surplus value mostly goes to 
 investors, who are thus supported by 
 society. Society must make enough 
 wealth to supply itself and furnish large 
 sums as well to a rentier class. The sup- 
 
 4i 
 
RIGHT AND WRONG 
 
 port of this rentier class is what makes 
 possible the over-fed few and the still 
 under-fed many. 
 
 The economic and social problem of 
 our age, the unsolved problem which 
 is back of nine tenths of our unrest in- 
 dustrially, the problem which must be 
 solved somehow if undeserved poverty 
 is to be lifted from the shoulders of mil- 
 lions of human beings, is the problem of 
 how to socialize the surplus value, how 
 to get it out of the hands of the investors 
 into the hands of the producers. 
 
 An understanding of this is necessary 
 for the comprehension of the significant 
 social movements of our time. Every 
 labor struggle, every strike, every lock- 
 out, every labor-union, every Socialist 
 platform and agitation, every profit- 
 sharing plan, every bit of social insur- 
 ance, are but aspects, from one angle or 
 
 42 
 
AFTER THE WAR 
 
 another, of the great struggle between 
 those who seek to advance the profits of 
 the investor and those who seek to so- 
 cialize those profits. Indeed, even the 
 present World War was in its beginning 
 a conflict between investors, competing 
 for world opportunities to get, in the 
 far-flung fields of foreign exploitation, 
 profits such as an awakened public sen- 
 timent would no longer permit them to 
 obtain at home. Thus arise all imperi- 
 alisms ; and it was imperialistic greed 
 which caused the war. 
 
 Everywhere we see evidences that by 
 increasing masses of our people invest- 
 ment for profit is looked upon with grave 
 suspicion, as a thing demanding rigid 
 regulation at least and sometimes pro- 
 hibition. This fast-emerging conviction 
 that rent and interest must be more and 
 more curbed and surplus value be more 
 
 43 
 
RIGHT AND WRONG 
 
 and more socialized, either through in- 
 come and inheritance and profit taxes, 
 or through increases in wages so made 
 that the employer cannot pass the in- 
 creased cost on to the consumer, or 
 through maximum-minimum regula- 
 tion of prices under State control, has 
 received a tremendous impetus from the 
 necessities of the war. There emerges a 
 very profound conviction that since the 
 men who are doing the fighting are offer- 
 ing their lives, it is most unjust to make 
 their folks at home bear the brunt of 
 the financial burden, too, in increased 
 cost of living. The price of the war must 
 be paid out of profits. This determination 
 is slowly coming from across the water 
 to us of America. 
 
 From causes independent of the war, 
 but aided by war needs, too, profits are 
 become suspect. Even the most conserv- 
 
 44 
 
AFTER THE WAR 
 
 ative of the workers are no longer using 
 the old slogan of the American Feder- 
 ation of Labor, " A fair day's pay for a 
 fair day's work," but rather the new slo- 
 gan, " We want the profits of the business 
 diverted into our hands." 
 
 It should be remembered that all this 
 is not theory, but fact. It is not Marxian 
 Socialism, or the Single-Tax, or Syndi- 
 calism, or any other "ism" that we are 
 speaking about. It is a thing in actual 
 being, this growing popular disposition 
 to decrease profits and socialize surplus 
 values. In the face of this fact, it is high 
 time that the Church reexamine and 
 possibly restate her teachings about the 
 morals involved in rent and interest hold- 
 ings. 
 
 In this connection the first and most 
 obvious thing to say is that according to 
 all Christian teaching, — according to 
 
 45 
 
RIGHT AND WRONG 
 
 the law of love, — all property regula- 
 tions and privileges exist for persons and 
 their good, and not the other way about. 
 To love God and to love our neighbor 
 sums up the moral code. We are no- 
 where taught that stocks and bonds and 
 houses and lands are sacrosanct. Such 
 things are to be used as means toward 
 loving God and man. All property is 
 owned by, all wealth presented by God 
 to, the human race as a whole. With 
 God is no respect of persons. The only 
 rational basis, under the Christian dis- 
 pensation, under which a man may hold 
 any property whatsoever is as a trust to 
 be administered for the profit of its real 
 owners, namely, all his brethren. To 
 say this much is to say nothing new. 
 No reputable Christian moralist has ever 
 for a single moment taught anything 
 else. 
 
 46 
 
AFTER THE WAR 
 
 The question therefore arises, and has 
 ever arisen, whether or not an individual 
 who holds wealth has a right to rent it 
 out for others to use, demanding from 
 those others a fee in the shape of rent 
 or interest. Is such a practice right and 
 proper, or is it a gross abuse of trust ? 
 This question the Church cannot dodge 
 and retain the respect of the people. 
 
 For fifteen hundred years or there- 
 abouts the Church answered this ques- 
 tion in the negative, saying that to lend 
 wealth on interest was a sin under the 
 commandment forbidding theft. In the 
 Old Dispensation it had been forbidden 
 to a Jew to lend wealth for interest to 
 a brother Jew. The Christian Church 
 simply continued this teaching. It seems 
 that John Calvin was the first Christian 
 moralist who ever countenanced unre- 
 servedly the taking of interest on money. 
 
 47 
 
RIGHT AND WRONG 
 
 Even in Shakespeare's time the practice 
 was considered disgraceful. To us Shy- 
 lock is a pathetic figure. To an Eliza- 
 bethan audience he was execrable because 
 he loaned money on interest. That a 
 man should have saved up or otherwise 
 acquired wealth was thought to be no 
 crime; but that he should demand pay 
 for the use of it was unforgivable in any 
 Christian for many a long century. 
 
 Then the social change of the fif- 
 teenth and sixteenth centuries came. 
 What the world needed above all else 
 was increased production of goods. To 
 get it society found it necessary to offer 
 as a bait the privilege to the saver of 
 investing his surplus for interest and so 
 living off society without labor. This 
 bait, being a social necessity, it was right 
 and proper for the Church to encour- 
 age. This she did by removing the ban 
 
 4 8 
 
AFTER THE WAR 
 
 on rent and interest. Increasingly the 
 Christian moralists let down the bars. 
 
 It should be remembered, however, 
 that for the greater part of her history 
 the Church has prohibited the practice, 
 and that her reason for changing her 
 teaching is only, as all Christian moral- 
 ists agree, the necessity for the time 
 being of encouraging saving and stimu- 
 lating production. 
 
 At the present time, when the tend- 
 ency of society is evidently to withdraw 
 more and more the interest-taking privi- 
 lege which once it so freely bestowed, 
 what is the Church to say? Is she to 
 be permitted to act as conservator and 
 defender, on the ground of unchanging 
 morals, of rights which for most of her 
 career she has said it was sinful to exer- 
 cise ? Is she to be, or even to appear to 
 be, the ally of those profit-takers who 
 
 49 
 
RIGHT AND WRONG 
 
 are already struggling, and will doubt- 
 less increasingly struggle, to stem the 
 popular determination to restrict, and 
 possibly eventually to destroy, their privi- 
 leges? She will not permit herself to be 
 so used if she is as wise in the present 
 as she has been in the past. 
 
 Thesis : The Church's teaching about 
 property in the prese?it situation ought to be 
 something like this : All property is given 
 of God to the enti?~e human race. Rights to 
 private property are not rights proceeding 
 from God, but are delegated to private hold- 
 ers by the social group. The group may give 
 and take away these rights as it deems wise. 
 Whatever may happen to be the private 
 property regulations of society in this or any 
 other age y it is the duty of every Christian to 
 hold what property may be delegated to him as 
 a trust for others and not as a source of pri- 
 vate privilege and immunity from labor. It 
 
 5° 
 
AFTER THE WAR 
 
 is further the duty of every Christian quickly 
 and gladly to accojnmodate himself to what 
 is now or what shall come to be in the future 
 the public will concerning how that wealth 
 he holds is to be employed, hast of all, every 
 Christian should recognize that rents and 
 pro/its must be reduced at least to the point 
 which will enable such recompense of all 
 who labor as will give them opportunity for 
 a full human life, physically, mentally, and 
 spiritually. 
 
 IV. WHAT SHOULD BE THE CHURCH'S MESSAGE 
 TO THE RICH TO-DAY? 
 
 The thesis above stated ought to be 
 taught to every man, rich and poor, 
 within the Church, for the iniquity of 
 rent and interest, in so far as they in- 
 volve iniquity, is to be blamed not upon 
 the wealthy alone, but upon all who 
 would enjoy, if they could manage to 
 
 51 
 
RIGHT AND WRONG 
 
 gain them, special privileges and exemp- 
 tions from that toil which is the com- 
 mon lot of man. 
 
 A second message which in the in- 
 terim the Church should preach espe- 
 cially to the rich man is the urging of 
 voluntary poverty, not as a beautiful ex- 
 crescence upon the Christian life, but as 
 an integral part of it. It ought to be 
 pointed out to him in no uncertain man- 
 ner that his luxuries, his grand houses, his 
 motors of super-power, his yachts, his 
 country places, his reserved pews in the 
 choice parts of the church, his liveried 
 servants, his gorgeous entertainments, his 
 pomp and ceremony, are simple but pat- 
 ent evidences to all the world that his 
 religion amounts to very little. It is 
 inconceivable that Christ could, in a 
 world filled with suffering and misery 
 and want, live blatantly and contentedly 
 
 52 
 
AFTER THE WAR 
 
 in modern luxury. In the eyes of the 
 world one of the greatest evidences of 
 the futility of the Church is the world- 
 liness of those Church people who be- 
 cause of the way they misuse their wealth 
 are conspicuous before men. In plain, 
 loving terms the Church ought to be 
 showing these people how they make 
 themselves despised and cause Christ to 
 be mocked. 
 
 Thesis: The rich should be frequently 
 and earnestly admonished by the Church 
 that they must either divest themselves of 
 luxury and extravagance or live in imminent 
 danger of losing their own souls, as those who 
 profess with their lips to serve Jesus while 
 honoring Him not with their substance. 
 
 The third thing which the rich ought 
 to have preached to them is that one 
 cannot do one's duty by substituting 
 
 53 
 
RIGHT AND WRONG 
 
 charitable doles for social justice. To 
 help those who are in need is noble, but 
 to give little dribbles of water to a man 
 condemned to die of thirst, or to oil the 
 aching limbs of one upon the rack the 
 while the screws are turned ever tighter, 
 is cruel, exasperating, and a travesty upon 
 the sacred name of charity. 
 
 This is true of other things beside 
 purely alms-giving activities. It is true, 
 for instance, of factory " welfare work." 
 Most of it is excellently meant ; but 
 the hands neither appreciate nor wel- 
 come it. They do not wish bathrooms 
 and gymnasia and paid nursing and doc- 
 toring, and the rest of it. What they do 
 desire is their just share of what the busi- 
 ness produces and a chance to do their 
 own welfare work. Providing summer 
 vacations gratis for employees is appar- 
 ently a good thing to do. But what era- 
 
 54 
 
AFTER THE WAR 
 
 ployer wants anybody to plan his vaca- 
 tion for him? It would be much better 
 to pay the employees enough to enable 
 them to do as they please in their time 
 off. Welfare work is apt to be a sort of 
 social hypocrisy. 
 
 It is also true of such things as social 
 settlements. Institutions of this sort are 
 most excellent, provided they are places 
 where a neighborhood can congregate, 
 preferably in a school or other publicly 
 owned building, and run its own activi- 
 ties. But the workers are apt, even when 
 they use many of our social settlements, 
 to damn heartily the people who come 
 down, or as they more often choose to 
 phrase it, "come over, ,, to do good to 
 "the deserving but unfortunate classes. " 
 Just here, also, is where much of what is 
 called by the Church "social service ,, 
 goes wrong and does worse than no good. 
 
 55 
 
RIGHT AND WRONG 
 
 What wealthy person desires some one 
 else to prescribe the sort of life he shall 
 live and the sort of amusements he shall 
 enjoy ? The poor person likes it not one 
 whit better. 
 
 Thesis: The Church should earnestly warn 
 the rich among her people to beware, in this 
 present age, of all sorts of alms-giving, sci- 
 entific or otherwise. 
 
 V. WHAT SHOULD BE THE MESSAGE OF THE 
 CHURCH TO THE POOR TO-DAY? 
 
 Without preliminary discussion is pre- 
 sented this 
 
 Thesis : The Church should thus address 
 the dispossessed: "Be patient with the 
 wealthy, the privileged, and the profit-tak- 
 ing classes. They are what they are because 
 of a social system which your fathers as well 
 as theirs thought it necessary to make. Be 
 sure you yourselves desire justice for all men, 
 
 56 
 
AFTER THE WAR 
 
 and not merely their privileges for your- 
 selves. When you are sure your hands are 
 clean, be kindly disposed toward them. In 
 the readjustment which is very rapidly com- 
 ing, the initial stages of which are upon us, 
 their lot will be much harder than yours. 
 They need from you friendliness, patience, 
 prayers. The new adjustments will come. 
 Let tbem come without hate. The rich are 
 human beings, just as you are, not demons 
 disguised in flesh. Help them to share with 
 the workers of the world the vision of the 
 coming socialized State, of the dawning in- 
 dustrial brotherhood." 
 
 VI 
 
 These are some of the ways in which it 
 seems to at least one observer the Church 
 might well be adjusting her fundamental 
 morality to fit new problems connected 
 with the hunger urge to-day. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 PROBLEMS CONNECTED WITH THE 
 
 SEX URGE 
 
 And God created man in His own image ; 
 
 In the image of God created He bim ; 
 
 Male and female created He them : 
 
 And God blessed them, and God said, 
 
 Be fruitful and multiply, 
 
 Replenish the earth, and subdue it, 
 
 And have dominion. genesis, i : 27—28 
 
 In the preceding chapter we looked at 
 Christian duty in the light of certain 
 problems connected with the hunger for 
 food. Let us now consider certain other 
 grave questions connected with that hun- 
 ger which is nearly as strong as that for 
 nourishment, the hunger for sex-expres- 
 sion. From this hunger has come the 
 family, the most influential single factor 
 in social evolution. In it are involved, 
 first of all, the amative relationships of 
 
 58 
 
AFTER THE WAR 
 
 the sexes, and also, as a result of these 
 relationships, the production and the con- 
 servation of human young. If we are to 
 be intelligent Christians we must see to 
 it that we and our fellows are cognizant 
 of what is emerging among us, in this 
 dawning of a new period, in the way of 
 convictions and practices involved in the 
 satisfaction of the sex urge and in the 
 management of its results; and that we 
 apply thereto, strongly but sanely, the 
 fundamental principle of Christ's moral- 
 ity, the law of salvation through sacrifice. 
 
 I. WHAT IS FEMINISM ? 
 
 Before the great World War there was 
 a movement which above all others in 
 the social realm attracted attention. It is 
 destined to resume its place as soon as 
 the war is over. People call it, some- 
 what generally, Feminism. 
 
 59 
 
RIGHT AND WRONG 
 
 When we hear the word probably most 
 of us think at once of the demand of 
 women for equal suffrage at the polls. 
 This is not the whole of Feminism, but 
 it is one largely noticed phase of it. It 
 is surely not necessary here to argue 
 largely about equal suffrage. With every 
 desire to be fair and open-minded, and 
 with large willingness to listen to all the 
 arguments of the anti-suffragists, it is 
 difficult to see one good reason why a 
 woman should not be entitled to partici- 
 pate in the management of the State on 
 an equal plane with a man. On the other 
 hand, there are several good arguments 
 in favor of her doing so. The principal 
 reason is that a woman is in many im- 
 portant particulars different from a man, 
 and therefore needed to balance male 
 one-sidedness. 
 
 She differs from man first in that she 
 
 60 
 
AFTER THE WAR 
 
 is by nature entrusted with the major 
 part of child-production and child-rear- 
 ing. To most men the world is a place 
 inhabited by adults with a modicum 
 of children attached thereto. To most 
 women it is a place inhabited by chil- 
 dren, with a modicum of adults to take 
 care of them. If children are ever to re- 
 ceive their just due in society, if Jesus' 
 example of placing a child in the midst 
 is ever to be generally imitated, proba- 
 bly it will be first necessary to see that 
 woman has the vote. 
 
 She differs also in economic function. 
 Because she has always been largely con- 
 fined to the home and her children wo- 
 man has always been, and still is, pri- 
 marily the director of consumption, as 
 man is the director of production. If we 
 are to have a State whose first care is 
 to insure justice to the consumer rather 
 
 61 
 
RIGHT AND WRONG 
 
 than merely profits to the producer, and 
 where the person who consumes is re- 
 garded as more in value than the things 
 which he consumes, it will be because 
 woman has obtained enough power to 
 insist upon that being done. 
 
 In the third place, woman differs from 
 man in mental equipment. Man by the 
 nature of his labor these thousands of 
 generations has been made largely a crea- 
 ture whose affections and intuitions are 
 subservient to his cold, hard reason. 
 There are a hundred Gradgrinds who see 
 only " facts' ' for every female of the sort. 
 Everything in woman's life stimulates 
 those very intellectual and emotional 
 qualities which man lacks. Our age is 
 suffering from too great regard for facts 
 and not enough care for feelings, too 
 much prose and not enough poetry, too 
 much logic and not enough intuition, 
 
 62 
 
AFTER THE WAR 
 
 too much " kultur' and too little "cari- 
 tas." If giving woman the suffrage can 
 inject, as indeed it alone can do, that into 
 our civic life which will balance and 
 right our craft of State, at present listed 
 grievously and dangerously, it is hard to 
 see how we can long afford to deprive 
 her of a vote. 
 
 Talk about suffrage, however, matters 
 little. It is coming, like prohibition 
 and international peace after the war, 
 quite apart from whether we happen 
 to care for it or not. It is coming be- 
 cause it is but one phase of that great 
 Feminist movement which is sweeping 
 like a balmy summer breeze, or like the 
 black plague, — according to one's point 
 of view, — into the thought of our 
 time. 
 
 Feminism is the name given com- 
 monly to a varied series of movements 
 
 63 
 
RIGHT AND WRONG 
 
 all based upon the belief that a woman 
 is in all rights and privileges the equal 
 of a man, that he has no opportunities 
 which she also ought not to enjoy, that 
 she is under no obligation to sacrifice 
 herself in any manner, or submit her- 
 self in any degree, to the control of 
 man as a sex or of any man in particu- 
 lar, unless she herself, freely and under 
 no compulsion, wills so to do and agrees 
 thereto in such contractual relationship 
 as shall insure her receiving from him 
 the equivalent of that which she sur- 
 renders to him. This is a lengthy defini- 
 tion, to be sure. A definition often must 
 needs be more complex than the thing 
 it defines. Usually the more simple and 
 vital a thing is, the longer and more in- 
 volved must be its description. Possibly 
 we may define it in fewer words, and 
 yet get at the same thing, by saying that 
 
 6 4 
 
AFTER THE WAR 
 
 Feminism is a philosophy of social liv- 
 ing which maintains that a woman is as 
 free as a man to live in any way she 
 may see fit, except in so far as she shall 
 forego this right for the sake of benefits 
 derived from a freely entered upon co- 
 partnership. 
 
 This is the real basis of all Feminism. 
 It is an expression of that theory con- 
 cerning the sexes held by the writer of 
 the first chapter of Genesis, where God 
 makes man and woman and gives to 
 them jointly a commission to rule the 
 earth, rather than of the idea held by 
 the author of that other account of cre- 
 ation which immediately follows, where 
 woman, made out of a man's rib, acts as 
 humble companion to the lordly male 
 sovereign of creation. 
 
 The popularity of Feminism is not 
 to be marvelled at in this age, the key- 
 
 6S 
 
RIGHT AND WRONG 
 
 words to an understanding of which are 
 " socialization " and "democracy." Fem- 
 inism is nothing more than an exten- 
 sion of democracy from merely male 
 relationships to all human relationships. 
 More and more we have been learning 
 this long time that all government de- 
 rives its only just sanction from the con- 
 sent of the governed. We have seen 
 that this is true in matters political. We 
 are more than beginning to see that it 
 is also true in matters industrial. The 
 demand of the Feminist is that this, 
 which is now so largely true of the poli- 
 tics, the industry, the morals, the whole 
 activity of males, shall also be true of 
 the politics, industry, morals, the whole 
 activity of the entire human family. To 
 her (or to him, for quite often the Fem- 
 inist is a man) no less unendurable than 
 an aristocracy of birth or caste or wealth 
 
 66 
 
AFTER THE WAR 
 
 is an aristocracy of sex. Men have been 
 determining women's lives, women's con- 
 duct, women's work, women's duties, 
 and women's responsibilities for a long, 
 long time. The Feminists demand, and 
 apparently are going to get, the right 
 and privilege for women of helping 
 men in determining the lives of women, 
 and, incidentally, the lives of men as 
 well. 
 
 Such is Feminism. What attitude is 
 the Church to take toward it ? Is she to 
 imitate the king of old time and shout 
 defiance to the rising tide ? Only if she 
 can find in the new movement some 
 definite repudiation, not of St. Paul's so- 
 ciology, not of mediaeval canon law, not 
 of the opinions of St. Thomas Aquinas, 
 but of the fundamental principle that 
 human beings attain salvation through 
 voluntary self-sacrifice. 
 
 6 7 
 
RIGHT AND WRONG 
 
 In this connection it is well to em- 
 phasize that only voluntary sacrifice ful- 
 fils the Christian ideal. Obedience by- 
 slaves produces little or no character in 
 them, the sainted tentmaker of Tarsus 
 to the contrary notwithstanding. The 
 enforced submission of woman has never 
 ennobled her. The really great women 
 of history are those who have never 
 submitted, but, despite great difficulties, 
 have done the work of free beings. The 
 doctrine that being a slave is good for the 
 soul is psychologically very poor stuff, 
 indeed, and the Church can hardly con- 
 tinue to maintain that the subservience 
 of woman is to her advantage. The fact, 
 therefore, that the Feminist demands 
 definitely aim at making impossible in- 
 voluntary submission by woman is no 
 justification for the Church's opposition 
 or indifference to the movement. Unless 
 
 68 
 
AFTER THE WAR 
 
 the Feminist programme makes harder 
 the attainment of salvation through vol- 
 untary sacrifice, the Church and her peo- 
 ple have no business placing themselves 
 and their influence in the way of that pro- 
 gram me. The present writer is convinced 
 that the programme does not interfere in 
 the least with voluntary sacrifice. If such 
 be indeed the case, the Church ought to 
 be preparing to preach the Cross in Fem- 
 inist terms as the Feminists increas- 
 ingly come into control of the thought 
 of the world. 
 
 Preaching the Cross in terms of Fem- 
 inism involves the urgingin Christ's name 
 of what many of the better and more in- 
 fluential Feminists already see with some 
 clearness, namely, that this movement 
 is not in essence a demand for woman's 
 rights or for woman's privileges, but ra- 
 ther for woman's responsibilities. Their 
 
 6 9 
 
: RIGHT AND WRONG 
 
 complaint ought to be, as much of the 
 time it is, that feminine responsibilities 
 are much too light. The trouble with 
 women to-day is that too many of them 
 have too little of responsibilities, and that 
 all women have too little variation in re- 
 sponsibilities. 
 
 Whenever one says this, one subcon- 
 sciously feels a wave of contempt coming 
 back from a large portion of one's audi- 
 ence at one's stupidity. Too little re- 
 sponsibility, indeed ! Let a woman stick 
 to her home and her family and she will 
 have absolutely all, and more than all, 
 that she can possibly attend to. However 
 many people may feel this to be the case, 
 it is not true. Women of ability, brains, 
 initiative, and proper education in an 
 un-Feminist society have nowhere near 
 enough to do in taking care of their homes 
 and their husbands and their children. 
 
 7° 
 
AFTER THE WAR 
 
 This was, of course, far from true in 
 former times. In days gone by the house- 
 wife and mother had many and varied re- 
 sponsibilities, dignified, engrossing, self- 
 expressive. They were noble, character- 
 building tasks. But the old duties of 
 woman have been taken away from her 
 one by one. Cultivation of food she lost 
 many years ago. To a large extent the 
 bakery has taken away her task of mak- 
 ing bread. Sensible women, except in 
 war-times, are ceasing to can fruits as 
 their mothers ceased to put up vegetables 
 and their grandmothers ceased to cure 
 their own hams and bacon, because these 
 things can be done cheaper and better 
 in large factories. Our grandmothers 
 worked for a day with a broom to do 
 what took our mothers half a day with 
 a carpet sweeper and what our wives do 
 in an hour or two with a vacuum cleaner. 
 
 7 1 
 
RIGHT AND WRONG 
 
 The domestic garment-maker will ere 
 long be as rare as the domestic spinner 
 and weaver. The factory will have taken 
 over her work. Once the entire task of 
 educating children devolved upon the 
 mother, with some small assistance from 
 the father. Now it is relegated to special- 
 ists in the schools. Once every case of 
 sickness was nursed by the house-mother. 
 Increasingly the sick are being sent to 
 hospitals to-day. Time was when eco- 
 nomic needs demanded and got from 
 most women from five to ten or more 
 children, and took literally years of the 
 mother's life for the tasks of gestation and 
 nursing. Now it is a rare family which 
 can afford more than four children at the 
 outside. Thus for the wife from three or 
 four to nine or ten years of exhausting 
 but dignified labor are saved. It is a great 
 problem for woman, relieved from all 
 
 72 
 
AFTER THE WAR 
 
 this labor, and much other labor into 
 which it would be profitless to enter here, 
 to know what to do with her spare time. 
 Some women fritter it away in "so- 
 ciety " ; some use it with small advantage 
 in useless tasks; some cultivate petulancy 
 and sicknesses; some fly hither and yon 
 pursuing every new fad; but for most 
 women their inactivity has become in- 
 tolerable and they are demanding, in 
 stronger and stronger tones, work to re- 
 place that which has been lost to them. 
 They are demanding responsibility. 1 
 
 Furthermore, life is so organized that 
 there are probably at least tour million 
 women of marriageable age in our land 
 to-day who are unmarried. Most of 
 these are spinsters by necessity, not from 
 choice. Many men cannot afford to 
 
 1 In this connection read Olive Schreiner's Woman and 
 Labor , or Mary R. Coolidge's Why Women are So. 
 
 73 
 
RIGHT AND WRONG 
 
 marry and so many women get no 
 chance to do so. What are these women, 
 more in number than the entire popu- 
 lation of America at the time of the 
 Revolution, going to do with them- 
 selves ? Old-fashioned domestic occupa- 
 tions, even to the limited degree that 
 these are possible for any woman to-day, 
 are denied them. They are demanding 
 responsible and dignified employment. 
 
 When one remembers that probably 
 three fourths of the traditional respon- 
 sibilities of woman have been removed 
 from all women to-day, and that from 
 possibly one fifth of our women all such 
 responsibilities have been taken away, it 
 is easy to understand the Feminist move- 
 ment and to see in it a great opportunity , 
 for application of the Christ morality of 
 sacrifice. 
 
 Finally, it should be said again that 
 
 74 , 
 
AFTER THE WAR 
 
 the Feminists demand not merely more 
 work, but more varied work. Among 
 the Feminists are thousands of women 
 who are full of rebellion at being con- 
 demned by tradition to keep house and 
 tend babies whether or not they are par- 
 ticularly fitted to do these things well, 
 whether or not they have exceptional 
 talents for doing other things instead. 
 Into this cry we need not enter here, 
 further than to notice that it is really a 
 cry to be liberated from a convention- 
 enforced slavery into a free life where 
 service that is rendered may come not 
 from compulsion, but from volition. 
 
 Thesis : The Church ought to be welcom- 
 ing the Feminist movement, recognizing not 
 merely its inevitability, but its possibilities 
 of service to the race, and should be seeking 
 to fill women with such a love and admira- 
 tion for Jesus Christ as will enable them to 
 
 75 
 
RIGHT AND WRONG 
 
 make of each Feminist gain not merely a 
 new freedom, but a new consecration of free- 
 dom, a new opportunity for greater and more 
 varied service to humanity and to God, a 
 greater chance for laying down their lives 
 in voluntary and unselfish service. 
 
 II. HOW WILL FEMINISM AFFECT THE FAMILY? 
 
 One thing which makes many people 
 mistrust Feminism is a feeling that the 
 granting of its position will in some 
 manner help to upset the institution 
 of the family, or to degrade, or even 
 to extinguish altogether, monogamous 
 marriage. This is worth a little discus- 
 sion. 
 
 The essence of marriage, as the Church 
 has ever declared, lies in a free contract 
 entered into by a man and a woman. A 
 religious blessing of the union, while a 
 very great advantage, is no essential part 
 
 7 6 
 
AFTER THE WAR 
 
 of the marriage. In former times, also, 
 the Church was very frank in declaring 
 the purpose of this contractual relation- 
 ship to be, what all nature declares it to 
 be, the propagation and the rearing of 
 children. Sociologically speaking, that 
 is the sole explanation of the origin of 
 marriage, and the sole justification for 
 the continuance of the family. Let it be 
 clearly borne in mind, therefore, that 
 the end and ai?n and reason for being of 
 marriage is the welfare of the progeny, not 
 the pleasure of the parents. 
 
 In the conduct and supervision of 
 this contractual relationship, with its 
 profoundly social end, the Feminists 
 claim that the privileges and burdens 
 of the two sexes are grossly dispropor- 
 tionate. They are convinced that this 
 is because these matters have long been 
 regulated, not by men and women 
 
 77 
 
RIGHT AND WRONG 
 
 for men and women, but by men for 
 both sexes. They believe, for instance, 
 that man now retains to a very large 
 degree freedom in entering into the 
 relationship, while about woman such 
 economic, social, and conventional re- 
 strictions have been placed as to limit 
 her freedom and often impel her into 
 unions not strictly of her own seeking. 
 Frequently, for instance, she must marry, 
 starve, or sell herself outside of wedlock. 
 These maladjustments last after mar- 
 riage is entered upon. Especially indica- 
 tive of them is the double standard of 
 morals, so-called, whereby a man may 
 be unfaithful and "get by" with it, 
 while a no more unfaithful woman is 
 socially ostracized and otherwise per- 
 secuted. The Feminist insists that all 
 such inequalities, both before marriage 
 and after it, must be done away with, 
 
 78 
 
AFTER THE WAR 
 
 and that men and women must enter 
 into and live within the marriage rela- 
 tionship on precisely equal terms. 
 
 This demand causes much alarm 
 among conservative persons, who seem 
 to think that the granting to woman of 
 equal say with man in matters of sex 
 and marriage is bound forthwith to spell 
 the downfall of the family and the cor- 
 ruption of woman. It is but fair to say 
 that certain Feminists, hysterical in sex 
 matters, like Miss Ellen Key and Mr. 
 Edward Carpenter, by their unbalanced 
 and often unhealthily erotic writings, 
 have given color to the anti-Feminist 
 statements. No sane person, however, 
 judges any movement by its eccentrics 
 and extremists. 
 
 Looking at the facts in the case apart 
 from hysteria, is it not plain that none 
 of these evil effects will ensue to the 
 
 79 
 
RIGHT AND WRONG 
 
 family, for a very simple and yet very pro- 
 found reason ? The reason is this : — 
 
 Since the sole natural purpose of mar- 
 riage is to insure the proper production 
 and rearing of children, it would seem 
 to be the wisest possible plan for society, 
 if it wishes the institution to be guarded 
 and preserved, to entrust its supervision 
 largely to those people who are most 
 interested in children. Such women 
 notoriously and incontrovertibly are. 
 Women are the last people to be apt to 
 injure that institution which, better than 
 any other plan yet devised, — and many 
 others have been tried from time to time, 
 — better than other plans because it is 
 Nature's own plan, secures the proper 
 safeguarding of their offspring. Women 
 will, rather, insist upon a more real and 
 a more meticulous recognition of the 
 sanctity of marriage by all concerned. 
 
 80 
 
AFTER THE WAR 
 
 They will insist, however, that the pres- 
 ervation of its sanctity shall be equally 
 the task of both sexes. There need be 
 feared little lowering of the morality of 
 women to the level of the average male. 
 Women will insist upon the raising of 
 the morality of men up to the level of 
 the average female. This insistence will 
 be rendered the more compelling be- 
 cause by virtue of physical organization 
 women are less tempted to sins of the 
 flesh than are men, and therefore less 
 apt to stray, because of passion, from 
 ideals. All this will mean that by giv- 
 ing women a large share in the man- 
 agement of sexual and marital matters 
 marriage will be lifted to a new plane 
 of sanctity, one of higher moral tone, 
 one of deeper spiritual possibility ; both 
 women and their husbands will be helped 
 to a new and greater respect for them- 
 
 81 
 
RIGHT AND WRONG 
 
 selves and for one another; and parent- 
 hood will be given a new dignity, a 
 novel beauty. 
 
 Thesis: The greatest blunder that the 
 Church can make morally to-day is to ad- 
 vocate, or by her silence let it be supposed 
 she is advocating, the strait-jacketing of 
 woman in order to protect her. In the first 
 place, she will not wear the strait-jacket 
 longer, whether she needs it or not. In the 
 second place, she does not need it. The 
 Church should advocate the fullest and 
 frankest equality of the sexes in all mat- 
 ters, and especially those dealing with mar- 
 riage and the home. Immediately she should 
 denounce the so-called " double standard of 
 morals J She should remove from the mar- 
 riage office the promise of the woman to obey 
 her husband, which seems to the world an 
 open advertisement of an anti-Feminist posi- 
 tion which the Church really is far from 
 
 82 
 
AFTER THE WAR 
 
 holding. She should grant to woman com- 
 plete suffrage in the government of the 
 Church itself equal to that exercised by 
 man. She should make plain that " in Christ 
 Jesus there is neither circumcision nor un- 
 circumcision y male or female , bond or free" 
 
 III. WHAT IS THE CHIEF ENEMY OF THE 
 
 FAMILY ? 
 
 Turning from Feminism, which is 
 not actually or potentially an enemy of 
 monogamous marriage or of the family, 
 it should be asked if there are any dan- 
 gers to these institutions which ought 
 to be combated by the Christian moral- 
 ist. 
 
 The chief enemy of them both is an 
 economic foe. The most penetrating in- 
 dictment of our present social order is 
 that it tends to destroy the family. It 
 condemns millions of men and women 
 
 .83 
 
RIGHT AND WRONG 
 
 to enforced celibacy — most potent pro- 
 moter of sexual vice, prostitution, and 
 other unnamable sins. It renders even 
 those who do marry unable to afford 
 what has become the " luxury of hav- 
 ing children/' The lack of children 
 is, of course, the most powerful con- 
 tributory cause to divorce ; naturally so, 
 since in the absence of children the 
 natural and divine reason for marriage 
 is removed. It herds people together in 
 great cities, whose congested districts 
 upset the mental and moral poise of 
 adults and poison the minds and souls 
 of growing children, and whose all 
 too common rookeries, whether called 
 " tenements " or "apartment houses," 
 are unfit for normal family living. It 
 forces men to labor so long and so hard 
 as to send them home exhausted, so 
 worn-out and fretful as to prevent them 
 
 84 
 
AFTER THE WAR 
 
 from being either thoughtful husbands 
 or considerate parents. It thrusts girls 
 in their adolescence and women in early 
 maturity into work of such a sort as to 
 render later pregnancy difficult and often 
 impossible. Meanwhile, it encourages 
 the parasitical, peacock woman at the 
 top of the social ladder and presents her 
 as the ideal to be aimed at by the entire 
 social group. It makes it easy for women 
 to marry as a source of relief from bit- 
 ter toil rather than as a response to a 
 God-implanted instinct. It — but why 
 go on ? 
 
 The family is to-day in grave danger 
 of becoming an obsolescent institution 
 chiefly because our economic and social 
 system tends to make it so. The great 
 enemy of the family and the home is 
 not the growing desire of women for a 
 share with men in all activities of life. 
 
 85 
 
RIGHT AND WRONG 
 
 The danger comes from no demagogues 
 and theorists. Our fundamental social in- 
 stitution is receiving dazing body-blows 
 every day from that economic system 
 which is commonly called Capitalism, 
 a system manufactured by, engineered 
 by, controlled by, men, not women. 
 
 Thesis : If the Church is really in ear- 
 nest about preserving the home and the 
 family and maintaining marriage as a sa- 
 cred institution , deserving of a fair chance 
 to succeed, she will earnestly set to work 
 attacking the econo??iic evils and abuses 
 which make marriage hard, the home diffi- 
 cult, and the rearing of a family a next to 
 impossible luxury for many people ; and she 
 will all the more urge full participation for 
 women in the State, realizing that women 
 will demand and gain such industrial re- 
 forms as will destroy the present danger to 
 these sacred institutions with a quickness 
 
 86 
 
AFTER THE WAR 
 
 and a thoroughness which men alone seem 
 incapable of manifesting. 
 
 IV. WHAT MUST BE DONE ABOUT SEX 
 EDUCATION? 
 
 There are other dangers to the fam- 
 ily which the Church ought to be con- 
 sidering in her desire to protect it. Next 
 to economic submarines probably the 
 family suffers most to-day from a lam- 
 entable ignorance on the part of our 
 people about the physiology, the hygi- 
 ene, and above all the psychology in- 
 volved in sex activity. The old possibil- 
 ities of proper guiding for the young in 
 these matters in the home, where kindly 
 words of wisdom were quietly dropped, 
 high and pure ideals inculcated, noble 
 sanctions for sexual activity imparted al- 
 most by instinct, and the whole matter 
 dealt with naturally and simply, are no 
 
 87 
 
RIGHT AND WRONG 
 
 longer easily possibilities for two reasons. 
 First of all, for the most part our people 
 no longer live each family apart. They 
 live in large groups, and it is therefore 
 hard for parents to maintain personal 
 contact with their adolescent children, 
 even though these be few in number. 
 Try as they will, conscientious parents 
 find themselves and their offspring tak- 
 ing the subconscious attitude toward 
 home life of the group around them. 
 One's boys and girls must have some- 
 thing approaching the liberty of their 
 fellows or rebellion is imminent. In the 
 second place, everything in our contem- 
 porary life tends to help the pre-matu- 
 rity of our boys and girls. They are 
 children one day, and men and women, 
 very inexperienced and immature but 
 blase and over-confident — the next day. 
 This cannot be helped. Too many 
 
 88 
 
AFTER THE WAR 
 
 causes contribute to produce the deplor- 
 able result. All we can do is to devise 
 ways to make the condition as little 
 harmful as possible. If the old way of 
 sex education in the home is too dif- 
 ficult to-day in the majority of cases, 
 then other agencies must take up the 
 work, supplementing the home when 
 possible, taking its place where there is 
 nothing to supplement. 
 
 Here the Church has plainly a duty 
 which in most instances she is either 
 dodging or performing very inadequately. 
 This author was astonished to find that 
 of twenty priests questioned by him only 
 one saw to it that his boys and girls had 
 received instruction in sex morality be- 
 fore they were presented for confirma- 
 tion. Of thirty-one priests questioned 
 only two gave any instruction, or saw 
 that others gave it, to those contemplat- 
 
 8 9 
 
RIGHT AND WRONG 
 
 ing matrimony on either the morality 
 or the psychology of married life. This 
 plainly must be remedied. Parents find 
 it increasingly difficult to instruct their 
 children — although, of course, often 
 the difficulty is really criminal negli- 
 gence on their part. The public schools 
 are unfitted to teach the subject. The 
 classes are too large, and attended by 
 both sexes; the teachers are mostly 
 women, which renders the subject diffi- 
 cult to teach to boys ; the whole atmos- 
 phere is neither mentally nor spiritually 
 proper for such instruction. Conse- 
 quently for the most part nobody teaches 
 children. Often brides are not informed 
 of facts they should possess; and grooms 
 in the great majority of cases go into 
 marriage with warped and vicious ideas 
 of conjugal life which promise distress 
 and often disaster to the marital craft 
 
 90 
 
AFTER THE WAR 
 
 before they can be changed. If there 
 ever was a job plainly belonging to the 
 Church, here is that job. 
 
 And where the Church is attempt- 
 ing to give the necessary instruction and 
 inspiration, all too often she is putting 
 the whole subject on a wrong plane. 
 All too often the thing desired seems to 
 be solely that Johnny and Mary Ann 
 shall be so taught that Johnny and Mary 
 Ann may remain personally "pure." 
 The whole matter is put onto an indi- 
 vidualistic basis. This creates morbidity 
 where it is heeded. For the most part 
 it has little or no effect. The modern 
 adolescent demands a greater sanction 
 for sexual propriety than fear of the 
 taboo of uncleanness. Creature of his 
 times as he is, he thinks socially, espe- 
 cially in these years of emotion, chivalry, 
 and great possibilities for appeal to un- 
 
 9 1 
 
RIGHT AND WRONG 
 
 selfishness. All too often sex educators 
 give the persons taught a great deal of 
 instruction as to the sexual function 
 itself without giving them any reason, 
 aside from the aforesaid personal taboo, 
 for not using the function as a source 
 of undisciplined and selfish pleasure. 
 
 When we begin to place our sexual 
 instruction on a social plane we can do 
 something. We must bid our young 
 men, our young women, to live cleanly, 
 chastely, modestly, not for their own 
 sakes merely, but for the sake of their 
 children who are yet to be. All sex in- 
 struction should begin with the question, 
 " Where does baby come from ? " rather 
 than with the physical nature of the per- 
 son being trained. Any such teaching 
 which does not stress all the time the 
 duties and the dignities of parenthood 
 is positively vicious. If we can make our 
 
 92 
 
AFTER THE WAR 
 
 young people see that, whatever may be 
 its incidental purposes, the fundamental 
 purpose of sex is the social purpose, that 
 their sex instinct and their sex activity 
 are most noble sources of service to the 
 Kingdom of God and to the State if 
 rightly used, and most potent sources of 
 disaster to God's purposes and the good 
 of mankind if misused, it will be possi- 
 ble so to appeal to their adolescent ideal- 
 ism as to save them from those vicious 
 things which come chiefly, not from 
 lack of physical knowledge, but from 
 lack of spiritual restraints. 
 
 It is surely not necessary to say that 
 sex education of some sort is imperative. 
 The days of squeamishness are mostly 
 over. If any pastor shrinks, if any par- 
 ent shudders, at the necessity of speak- 
 ing about sex to young people, let him 
 take courage. The modern adolescent 
 
 93 
 
RIGHT AND WRONG 
 
 will probably be much less embarrassed 
 than his instructors. 
 
 Thesis: The Church should help par- 
 ents , in so far as is possible, to give full, 
 clean instruction on matters of sex to their 
 children, and where this is impossible, she 
 should give the instruction herself All 
 children before confirmation should be given 
 sex-knowledge suitable to their years, and 
 the priest should see that it is given, by others 
 or by himself. All candidates for matrimony 
 should be carefully instructed on their duties 
 in married life, the physiology and the psy- 
 chology of the relationship; and the priest 
 ought to see that such has been given by 
 some one before a marriage is solemnized. 
 In all such instruction the child who is to 
 be should be the thing stressed, and thus the 
 whole matter presented from the social stand- 
 point. 
 
 94 
 
AFTER THE WAR 
 
 V. WHAT SHALL THE CHURCH SAY OF 
 BIRTH-CONTROL ? 
 
 When the subject of contraception or 
 birth-control is mentioned, the natural 
 tendency of Church people seems to be 
 to look horrified, as though Satan had 
 dashed through the room and left be- 
 hind him a brimstone smell, and to talk 
 as rapidly as possible about something 
 else. Herein lies a great weakness. The 
 Church may if she will damn birth-con- 
 trol and retain the respect of people. She 
 may approve of and allow birth-control 
 under proper restrictions and retain their 
 respect. But the one thing she must not, 
 cannot, continue to do is to avoid the 
 subject altogether. 
 
 Birth-control is a common practice 
 in our midst, laws and restrictions to 
 the contrary notwithstanding. It is com- 
 monly assumed by great masses of our 
 
 95 
 
RIGHT AND WRONG 
 
 people, including thousands of professing 
 Christian men and women, to be a thing 
 quite moral and permissible, even neces- 
 sary and advisable. As Sidney Webb says 
 of the matter, " If this course of conduct 
 is habitually and deliberately pursued by 
 vast numbers of otherwise well-conducted 
 people, forming probably a majority of 
 the whole educated class of the nation, 
 we must conclude that it does not con- 
 flict with their actual code of morality." * 
 It is common in Catholic countries, like 
 Belgium, Italy, and Spain ; in Protestant 
 countries like Norway, Sweden, and Ger- 
 many; in mixed countries like England 
 and the United States of America. 
 
 At present the Church's attitude to- 
 ward the practice is practically acquies- 
 cence. Probably there are many thou- 
 sands of people who do not know that the 
 
 1 Popular Science Monthly (1906), p. 526. 
 
 96 
 
AFTER THE WAR 
 
 Church cares one way or the other about 
 it. Officially her teaching is still against 
 it. Practically she condones it. The con- 
 fusion resulting removes from Christian 
 people any certainty about what they 
 ought to do and what principles ought 
 to control their conduct. 
 
 If, however, the Church is to continue 
 to condemn the practice of contracep- 
 tion, she ought to state her reasons there- 
 for clearly and anew. There must be a 
 better reason advanced than that the 
 Church always has forbidden the practice 
 and therefore always must. There must 
 be better argument put forth than the 
 statement that in the Book of Genesis it is 
 recorded that a certain patriarch believed 
 in birth-control and that God — admit- 
 tedly conceived of by the early narrator 
 in terms of a patriarchal culture demand- 
 ing prolific reproduction — killed him 
 
 97 
 
RIGHT AND WRONG 
 
 because of it. That is no sort of basis on 
 which to build rational moral teaching. 
 
 Does the practice of the law of sacri- 
 ficial love demand that people have large 
 numbers of children or else live unnat- 
 urally ? If so let the Church clearly and 
 plainly explain to her people whence 
 comes this necessity. 
 
 If, however, she is to change her moral 
 teaching on this point, then let her un- 
 derstand herself and let the world under- 
 stand just why she is changing. Let her 
 not longer appear in the position of one 
 who believes one thing, but for fear of 
 offending people acquiesces in its oppo- 
 site. 
 
 Thesis : The Church ought not to dodge 
 the problems connected with contraception, 
 but to examine the whole subject in the light 
 of the law of love. If in that light contra- 
 ception seems good under proper restrictions , 
 
 9 8 
 
AFTER THE WAR 
 
 let her teach her people what those restric- 
 tions are. If in that light it still seems a 
 thing inadmissible, then let her formulate her 
 reasons for this position in language compre- 
 hended by the people and persuasive of them. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 PROBLEMS OF THE LOCAL COMMUNITY 
 
 Then said Jesus to Saul, Rise and enter into the city, and 
 it shall be told thee what thou must do, 
 
 acts, 9 : 6 
 
 So far it has been our endeavor to make 
 some examination of Christian teaching 
 as applied to a life which is being trans- 
 formed first by the hunger urge and sec- 
 ond by the sex urge, and to suggest cer- 
 tain ways in which the Church ought, 
 if she is to continue to act as the moral 
 guide of her people, to adapt and apply 
 the law of salvation through sacrifice 
 along the lines of new developments. 
 It shall be our endeavor in this and the 
 next chapter to examine the fields in 
 which this application must be made, 
 considering them geographically. This 
 
 ioo 
 
> • 
 
 . . - • ■> » » 
 
 AFTER THE WAR 
 
 chapter will deal with the Christian face 
 to face with some of those problems of 
 social living which meet him or her in 
 the local community where the Church 
 is at work. The next chapter will be 
 concerned with certain pressing national 
 and international problems. 
 
 Obviously in this chapter the treat- 
 ment must be most general, quite un- 
 specific. The " local community " is a 
 varied thing. Whole books have been 
 written, for instance, on the Church in 
 the rural neighborhood. Other volumes 
 have dealt with one phase or another 
 of those problems peculiar to the large 
 city. Let us first look at such things 
 as are common to all sorts of local 
 situations. Then let us consider a few 
 problems peculiar to that sort of com- 
 munity about which least has been writ- 
 ten, which is neither rural nor largely 
 
 IOI 
 
RIGHT AND WRONG 
 
 urban, the town or city of from three 
 thousand to thirty thousand people. 
 
 I. WHAT OUGHT TO BE THE CHIEF INTEREST 
 OF ANY COMMUNITY? 
 
 Just as children are the end and rea- 
 son for being of a family, so they are 
 also the end and reason for being of a 
 community. No one really understands 
 any community, its life, its problems, its 
 duties, or its needs, until he has per- 
 ceived that it is composed of growing 
 children, ranging in development from 
 babyhood to maturity, with some grown 
 people whose main job it is to take 
 care of them. Incidentally, to see a 
 community so is to see it with increased 
 perception of its possibilities in reli- 
 gion. There are some who become of 
 the blessed by laying down their lives 
 for their mature friends. There are a 
 
 102 
 
AFTER THE WAR 
 
 few who attain blessedness by putting 
 themselves out for their parents and 
 elders. But for one who does either of 
 these things there are hundreds who ap- 
 proach to Christian character by sacrific- 
 ing themselves for their children. When 
 Jesus' disciples asked what they should 
 do to attain eternal life, the Master 
 knew human nature exceedingly well 
 when in answer he placed a child in the 
 midst, and told them to see to it that 
 no stumbling-blocks were put in the 
 way of these little ones. 
 
 The centre of the family is the child. 
 The centre of the local community is 
 its children. The centre of the nation 
 is its young. The centre of civilization 
 is the next generation. The Lord ut- 
 tered his second severest condemnation 
 to those who acted on another basis. 
 Concerning him who injures a child He 
 
 io 3 
 
RIGHT AND WRONG 
 
 said, " Better were it for such an one if 
 a millstone were tied about his neck 
 and he were drowned in the depths of 
 the sea." As one reads this it is easy to 
 remember that other " better were it," 
 uttered of Judas, "Better were it for 
 that man if he had never been born." 
 Judas who betrayed the Master and one 
 who betrays a child — in Jesus' con- 
 demnations they belong together. This 
 which is true of the individual is also 
 true of the community. 
 
 Thesis: Perhaps the largest contribution 
 which the Church can make to a local com- 
 munity is the constant iteration of the great 
 fact that that community is properly a nur- 
 turing-p lace for children rather than a dwell- 
 ing-place for grown-up people. It is from 
 this point of view — God's point of view — 
 that the Church must teach her people to re- 
 gard it. The Church should help people to 
 
 104 
 
AFTER THE WAR 
 
 realize that in comparison with child welfare 
 such things as how well paved the streets 
 are, how high the buildings are, how large 
 the bank deposits are, how many the churches 
 are, how popular are art and music, how 
 many are the clubs and societies, sink into 
 relative insignificance; that nothing matters 
 nearly so much as what sort of children the 
 community is rearing. This should be the 
 primary social message of the Church to 
 any community in which it is working. 
 
 II. HOW DOES HOUSING AFFECT COMMUNITY 
 
 i 
 
 WELFARE ? 
 
 He who writes these lines has min- 
 istered as a priest in three very different 
 communities, urban, suburban, and semi- 
 urban. He has also known intimately 
 by observation two rural neighborhoods. 
 In every one of the five the housing con- 
 ditions of the people have been found 
 
 105 
 
RIGHT AND WRONG 
 
 bad in many respects. The city had its 
 rookeries ; but the others had their shacks : 
 and it is hard to tell which is the worse. 
 On the whole he has come to believe that 
 in proportion to the population housing 
 conditions have been worse in the smaller 
 places. The country has been worst of 
 all. In this somewhat surprising conclu- 
 sion he has found that one of the Church's 
 bishops, whose diocese, in one of the 
 older parts of the country, is almost en- 
 tirely rural, most heartily agrees with 
 him. This conclusion has been reached 
 despite the fact that the city in question 
 is Chicago, notoriously one of the worst 
 in the country from the point of view 
 of tenement inspection and regulation. 
 The smaller the community the less rigid 
 is apt to be the supervision, the less 
 aroused that public opinion which alone 
 can regulate bad housing. In all places, 
 
 106 
 
AFTER THE WAR 
 
 large and small, are rent-grabbers and 
 jerry-builders who are willing to furnish 
 dwellings with insufficient light and air 
 space, with cheap plumbing or some- 
 times none at all, with physical rottenness 
 scarcely or not at all concealed ; to keep 
 them in the least repair that a careless 
 public will permit them to "get by" 
 with ; to neglect fumigation between 
 tenants, even where the former residents 
 have had contagious diseases, especially 
 tuberculosis; to permit and even to wel- 
 come overcrowding where that means 
 increased rents ; and otherwise to regard 
 their property, not as a trust to be ad- 
 ministered for human welfare, but as a 
 source of all the income that can be 
 squeezed out of it. 
 
 All of this has a vicious effect upon 
 the children who grow up hampered by 
 these conditions. Their bodies are weak- 
 
 107 
 
RIGHT AND WRONG 
 
 ened thereby. Fresh air, cleanliness, and 
 undisturbed rest are difficult for them to 
 obtain. Mental efficiency and nervous 
 poise are also interfered with. Finally 
 the children are in evil housing condi- 
 tions morally miseducated. We all real- 
 ize to-day that the school is not really 
 the educator of the child, but rather the 
 home. In that home which is of neces- 
 sity nerve-racking and morally careless 
 because of the house in which it exists 
 lies the germ of very much of our juve- 
 nile delinquency and adolescent immo- 
 rality. 
 
 When a community can be persuaded 
 to look on its housing with the eyes of 
 Christ, its duty becomes plain enough. 
 It must insist that landlords be forced 
 properly to house their tenants. Further- 
 more, this public service must be so su- 
 pervised that the landlords will not make 
 
 108 
 
AFTER THE WAR 
 
 up for their increased costs by prohibi- 
 tively raising prices. This will involve in- 
 evitably community regulation of rents, 
 a revolutionary but absolutely essential 
 procedure. Such regulation is now going 
 on in England as a war measure. Why 
 not make it a peace measure, too? It is 
 a thing notorious that slum property, in 
 city, small town, and country-side alike, 
 brings in very high returns on invest- 
 ment. These returns, as things are now, 
 are often the price of physical, mental, 
 and moral degeneration of childhood. 
 They should be rigorously supervised and 
 controlled. Surely the Church ought to 
 be a leader in making people see this ne- 
 cessity. 
 
 Into this matter of housing enters, 
 too, the great question of what are the 
 best methods of taxation. Somehow or 
 other we must make it possible for our 
 
 109 
 
RIGHT AND WRONG 
 
 people to spread out of congested dis- 
 tricts, even in the largest cities, so that 
 families may have garden room, at least 
 a bit of greensward, and a play-place for 
 children. They cannot with social safety 
 be left much longer in crowded rooms 
 and "apartments' with a wilting gera- 
 nium on the window-sill as their sole 
 share of God's growing things, and a fire- 
 escape or an asphalt street for play. The 
 holding of land vacant, for speculative 
 purposes, when it might be used, must 
 be made so unprofitable that it will cease. 
 Increasingly thinking people are adopt- 
 ing the theories of taxation advanced by 
 Henry George as the sanest method of 
 stopping land speculation and prevent- 
 ing congestions. In a book like this 
 there is no time to elucidate his method, 
 the so-called "single-tax," to those un- 
 familiar with it. Surely it is not too 
 
 1 10 
 
AFTER THE WAR 
 
 much, however, to ask the Church to 
 urge people to consider the problem of 
 land taxation as seriously as our griev- 
 ous maladjustments justify, and to seek 
 some rational solution to an intolerably 
 individualistic muddle. 
 
 Thesis: The Church should be helping 
 her people and those about her to see that 
 it is their duty to bring about the provision 
 of proper housing acco?nmodations for the peo- 
 ple ; to rouse public sentiment i?i the matter ; 
 to advocate community regulation of rents; 
 and seriously to study the problems involved 
 in land taxation. 
 
 III. WHAT IS TO BE DONE ABOUT THE SALOON? 
 
 The principal danger to the com- 
 munity from the saloon does not lie 
 in the fact that in it adults occasion- 
 ally imbibe too much alcohol. An in- 
 toxicated grown-up person is not alto- 
 
 1 1 1 
 
RIGHT AND WRONG 
 
 gether to be blamed on the saloon. He 
 has had a considerable share in the pro- 
 duction of his own miserable condition. 
 A drunken adult ought to arouse as much 
 blame for the individual as indignation 
 against the liquor traffic. Also a goodly 
 share of what indignation there is should 
 be visited upon our industrial and social 
 system, for which we all are responsible. 
 Great numbers of people take to drink 
 mainly because their lives are, thanks to 
 social injustice, so bare and cold and 
 cheerless and void of possible enjoyment 
 that they seek in alcohol the only kind 
 of "pep" available for them; because 
 they have almost no opportunity for the 
 stimulations which come from art and 
 beauty and harmony of home and de- 
 light of parenthood ; because they see 
 in life no possible blessing but " booze. " 
 The chief trouble with most of the pres- 
 
 1 12 
 
AFTER THE WAR 
 
 ent attacks on the liquor business is that 
 they are made in the interest of adults 
 supposedly corrupted by it. 
 
 Those who defend the saloon make 
 exactly the same mistake. They say 
 truly that it is the "poor man's club." 
 They almost invariably fail to say any- 
 thing about the cost of that poor man's 
 club, and who pays that cost. 
 
 As a matter of fact the proper angle 
 to look from in considering the dram- 
 shop is the angle of the children's in- 
 terests. It is they who pay the cost of 
 the poor man's club. It is they who are 
 the greatest sufferers. They pay for it, 
 directly and indirectly, with their health, 
 their comfort, their education, their 
 morals, often their very lives. Let the 
 saloon, therefore, be damned up hill and 
 down dale, not because men and women 
 get "stewed " in it, but because the fire 
 
 ll 3 
 
RIGHT AND WRONG 
 
 that cooks the "stew" is fed with the 
 warm and wasted heart's blood of God's 
 littleones — those children whose parents 
 are inebriates, and those who somehow 
 or other must be enticed into becoming 
 themselves inebriates if the saloons are 
 to continue to furnish money in sufficient 
 quantities to the breweries and distil- 
 leries to enable them to* pay interest to 
 their owners. 
 
 Theoretically it is possible to have 
 saloons in America so run that they will 
 not be paid for by the sufferings of chil- 
 dren. Many of us used to suppose that 
 if we made the proper appeal to the li- 
 quor people they would have the brains 
 and hearts to reform their business. 
 Most of us have changed our minds. 
 The trouble is fundamentally economic. 
 The saloon-keeper is as a rule not to 
 blame. Usually he is a very good sort. 
 
 114 
 
AFTER THE WAR 
 
 He rarely, however, owns his own sa- 
 loon. He is, sometimes directly, some- 
 times as a renter, merely the tool and 
 agent of the heavily capitalized brew- 
 eries and distilleries. They must sell ever 
 more and more of their product if they 
 are to avoid passing their dividends by 
 and so rousing the wrath of their stock- 
 holders. It is they who own the saloons. 
 It is they who insist that the keepers sell 
 — legitimately or illegitimately, law- 
 fully or unlawfully, rightly or wrongly, 
 just so they sell. In the face of this con- 
 dition the "good saloon-keeper " is pow- 
 erless. If he is too good he is eliminated. 
 No matter how good he is, he must meet 
 the competition of unscrupulous com- 
 petitors financed and controlled by the 
 liquor manufacturers. 
 
 As a reaction against this sort of thing 
 the Prohibition movement is sweeping 
 
 115 
 
RIGHT AND WRONG 
 
 with increasing momentum across the 
 country. Its basis, often subconscious, 
 is a great ire that capitalists should 
 be coining children's troubles and sor- 
 rows into gold by abuse of the traffic. 
 Many a citizen, himself unopposed to 
 the drinking of alcoholic liquor, is vot- 
 ing enthusiastically as a " dry " because 
 of this indignation. The Prohibition 
 movement shows how healthy is public 
 conscience when aroused. Millions of 
 property have been ruthlessly confiscated. 
 Millions of paying securities have been 
 sent without hesitation to the waste- 
 paper basket. The spirit of the thing is 
 this, " We care not one rap for vested 
 rights, so-called, when they interfere 
 with the welfare of our children. " 
 
 Thesis: For the sake of the children the 
 Church should be striving to the best of 
 her ability to bring about the stringent 
 
 116 
 
AFTER THE WAR 
 
 regulation of the saloon wherever it exists 
 and also the taking out of private hands 
 of all sale of alcoholic liquor. If this shall 
 prove too difficult an undertaking her only 
 course is to work with all her might to help 
 bring in nation-wide prohibition. 
 
 IV. SHALL SEXUAL VICE BE SEGREGATED? 
 
 In every community there is sexual 
 vice. One of the questions which de- 
 mands constant attention, therefore, is 
 how best to control that vice. This usu- 
 ally resolves itself into deciding whether 
 or not such vice shall be segregated 
 into certain districts of the community. 
 
 One has only to read the reports and 
 recommendations of the many commis- 
 sions which have made a careful study 
 of this problem of late years to realize 
 that it cannot be segregated. There is 
 just as much clandestine immorality 
 
 n 7 
 
RIGHT AND WRONG 
 
 scattered abroad in a community when 
 the vice district is running as there is 
 when the district is closed. The fact of 
 the matter is that a segregated district, 
 acting as a stimulant of vicious practices, 
 serves to arouse such cravings and to set 
 such standards as help rather than hinder 
 private and unprofessional unchastity. 
 
 Furthermore, it is unjust to segre- 
 gate it, unjust to those in whose neigh- 
 borhood the "district " is established. 
 These are always the poor. Did ever 
 one hear of a vice district placed in the 
 centre of a fashionable residence sec- 
 tion? How hard it is on the people 
 who needs must live in and about the 
 district because of their poverty, many 
 smug advocates of segregation never stop 
 to consider. 
 
 After all, one does not begin to under- 
 stand the enormity of segregated vice 
 
 118 
 
AFTER THE WAR 
 
 until one considers the problem from the 
 child-welfare point of view. Unsegre- 
 gated vice can be so watched and guarded 
 against in neighborhoods by the parents 
 of the children that, although it may min- 
 ister to many people's evil desires, it re- 
 mains relatively unknown and harmless 
 to children. Segregated vice, however, 
 tempts to the maximum the immature 
 and adolescent, whose desires are strong 
 and whose self-control is weak. It is, 
 and cannot help being, a thing publicly 
 known and easily available. Its very ex- 
 istence smirches the holy ideals of sex 
 in the eyes of those children and youth- 
 ful persons who know of its rottennesses 
 at least by reputation. Last, and by no 
 means least, it gives children the im- 
 pression that since sexual vice is a tol- 
 erated and condoned institution, it must 
 needs be, despite God's commandment 
 
 119 
 
RIGHT AND WRONG 
 
 and the moral precepts of school and 
 home, after all a tolerable thing. 
 
 Thesis: For the sake of boys and girls 
 the Church must act as inspirer of and 
 leader in action which will cleanse every 
 community from segregated vice and, indeed 9 
 tolerated commercialized vice of every sort. 
 
 V. HOW CAN THE PLAY NEEDS AND THE MAT- 
 ING NEEDS OF OUR YOUNG PEOPLE BE BEST 
 PROVIDED FOR? 
 
 It will not do for the Church in teach- 
 ing her people their duty to a local com- 
 munity to lay the major part of her 
 emphasis merely upon advocating the 
 prohibition of evil influences. All of us, 
 and especially children, are beings sub- 
 ject easily to external influences and 
 with great personal volition neither to- 
 ward good nor toward evil. We need, 
 not merely to be saved from evil, but 
 
 1 20 
 
AFTER THE WAR 
 
 also to be impelled toward good. Our 
 object must not be merely to secure for 
 ourselves, and particularly our young, 
 an environment free from the vices of 
 civilization, but rather one full of the 
 virtues of civilization. 
 
 We must endeavor, if we are to do 
 our duty in the local community, to 
 provide for our children the moulding 
 influence of directed play. 
 
 In the first place, there is nothing 
 which can take its place as a physical de- 
 veloper. Nowadays our leaders in phys- 
 ical education use little apparatus and 
 little drill. Instead they get their pupils 
 to playing games. They direct these 
 games in such a manner that their 
 charges gain well-balanced bodily de- 
 velopment. Directed play is merely nat- 
 ural exercise expertly supervised. In the 
 second place, play is a very powerful 
 
 121 
 
RIGHT AND WRONG 
 
 intellectual stimulator. More is learned 
 in an hour on the playground than in 
 an hour in the classroom. The child's 
 powers of quick and accurate percep- 
 tion, his capacity for shrewd judgment, 
 his quickness of coordination of ideas, 
 his sureness of reason, in short, all the 
 qualities and abilities of the human mind 
 are educated most easily through play. 
 Mere stored-up information does not 
 constitute an education. The power to 
 see facts, to see them in their proper 
 relationship to one another, to see the 
 spiritual reality behind them, and on 
 such perceptions to base one's actions 
 — these are things no books can teach. 
 For well-rounded mental education it 
 is necessary that boys and girls play to- 
 gether under such supervision as will see 
 that they get from their games a maxi- 
 mum of intellectual advantage. Finally, 
 
 122 
 
AFTER THE WAR 
 
 nowhere so well as on the playground 
 can be taught those arts of cooperation, 
 that willingness to sink one's self in the 
 group, that appreciation of the power 
 of coordinated specialists, that percep- 
 tion of the glory of team work, so neces- 
 sary for all social living and especially 
 for bringing to perfection our democratic 
 society. 
 
 Thesis: The Church ought to urge her 
 people to insist upon facilities for play being 
 provided i?i every community for every child, 
 and upon play being directed by persons 
 capable of leading it scientifically to the 
 greatest advantage of the children. Where 
 the community can do this as one whole \ 
 the Church should gladly welcome that 
 method; where the com?nunity will not 
 attend to the problem, the Church should 
 do what she can to provide the proper 
 tra'ming for as many children as possible. 
 
 123 
 
RIGHT AND WRONG . 
 
 When children reach middle adoles- 
 cence there enters a new need into the 
 problem of recreation, the need for pro- 
 per and natural opportunities for ac- 
 quaintance and eventually for courtship 
 between the sexes. Adolescence is the 
 flowering period of human life. It is 
 the natural time for what, if man is cared 
 for properly, is the long, slow ripening 
 of sexual love. Proper facilities for the 
 natural meeting of boys and girls and 
 their knowing one another will be of 
 the greatest service to them. By mak- 
 ing clandestine or unnatural association a 
 thing little sought, it will prevent that 
 which follows naturally upon such asso- 
 ciations, that which is stimulated by li- 
 quor and vicious dancing and the sense 
 of wrong-doing associated with secret 
 and frowned-upon meetings, namely, 
 pre-maturity. Normally, under civilized 
 
 124 
 
AFTER THE WAR 
 
 conditions, the process of courtship is a 
 long and gradual one. If boys and girls 
 can meet naturally, under sympathetic 
 and understanding patronage, there is 
 little danger that they will mate too 
 early, either legitimately or illegiti- 
 mately. Deprive them of plenty of these 
 natural relationships and they will revert 
 to the less civilized and more animal 
 status, and flower in love so early as to 
 make the bloom a gross and often a de- 
 grading thing. 
 
 In most communities the opportuni- 
 ties for natural courtship are constricted, 
 the while mighty influences tending to 
 pre-maturity are stimulated. The rem- 
 edy lies not merely in fighting the latter, 
 but in stimulating the former. We must 
 see not only that vicious dance-halls are 
 prohibited, but that good ones are pro- 
 vided in their stead ; not alone that com- 
 
 125 
 
RIGHT AND WRONG 
 
 mercialized poolrooms are suppressed, 
 but that socialized poolrooms take their 
 place; not simply that courtship in 
 parks and secret places is frowned upon, 
 but that courtship somewhere is smiled 
 upon; not merely that vicious movies are 
 censored, but that good movies are en- 
 couraged; not only that the corner gang, 
 often of both sexes, is policed, but that it 
 is drawn off the corner into some place 
 where it can havemoreand healthier fun. 
 Thesis: The Church ought to recognize 
 the great need of our young people for ra- 
 tional and healthy association between the 
 sexes y and ought to be doing her utmost to 
 see that such association is made possible. 
 She should be urging the community to take 
 hold of the problem, and she should be sup- 
 plementing the co?nmunity by every possible 
 assistance among her own boys a?id girls and 
 any others she may be able to reach. 
 
 126 
 
AFTER THE WAR 
 
 VI. HOW MAY THE CHURCH BEST MINISTER SO- 
 CIALLY IN THE MIDDLE-SIZED COMMUNITY? 
 
 There are, of course, many other 
 problems common to all communities 
 which the Church ought to be think- 
 ing of, preaching about, and working 
 for. The restriction of working hours 
 for women and the minimum wage for 
 them, and possibly for men as well; the 
 maintenance of educational standards and 
 the keeping of child-labor laws in spirit 
 as well as in letter; proper provision for 
 our public schools, in the support of 
 which, contrary to popular opinion, 
 many of our communities, especially 
 those in the country, are very niggardly, 
 indeed ; the administration of poor relief 
 by other than political appointees ; the 
 taking of public health administration 
 out of politics ; the giving of Saturday 
 half-holidays with pay by shops and fac- 
 
 127 
 
RIGHT AND WRONG 
 
 tories during the summer ; the assuring to 
 all persons employed at least one day's 
 rest in seven : these and other local needs 
 will occur to the mind of the reader in 
 large numbers. Many and varied are also 
 the industrial maladjustments, where the 
 Church must ever be careful in investi- 
 gation, slow to condemn either side, 
 anxious to act as mediator and informer 
 of public opinion, insistent upon the 
 right of labor to organize as well as capi- 
 tal; persuasive toward industrial demo- 
 cracy. 
 
 Passing rapidly over these, with again 
 the statement that the welfare of the 
 children is the key which makes even 
 the most puzzling social problems clear, 
 let us pass on to certain difficulties pecul- 
 iar to that least talked-of, least written- 
 about of all communities, the small city 
 of from three to thirty thousand inhab- 
 
 128 
 
AFTER THE WAR 
 
 itants. The problem of how to bring to 
 bear the moral influence of the Church 
 in such a place is very different from 
 the same problem in the large city or in 
 the hamlet or the country-side. Let us 
 see what are some of the peculiarities 
 socially and ecclesiastically of such a 
 community. 
 
 In the first place, such a city usually 
 has a dearth of aggressive and able young 
 men. Only a limited number of those 
 who grow up can be accommodated in 
 its local stores and shops. Scores of 
 them migrate annually to other places. 
 Most of the ones who leave for college 
 never permanently return. This weak- 
 ens the social influence of the Church. 
 The writer, who lives in such a city, 
 not long ago counted up in ten minutes 
 seventeen young men trained in his par- 
 ish, now between the ages of eighteen 
 
 129 
 
RIGHT AND WRONG 
 
 and twenty-five, every one of whom was 
 exercising loyal and efficient leadership 
 in some parish in a larger city. For 
 such young men every pastor in such 
 a small city devoutly gives thanks; but 
 their absence removes from the home 
 parish those who in work among boys 
 and men would naturally be the leaders. 
 Of course there are plenty of young peo- 
 ple always left — most of the girls and 
 many young men, but these latter usu- 
 ally the less aggressive of the city's crop. 
 The whole town is apt to suffer from 
 this, especially in its boy work. The 
 absence of leaders renders it necessary 
 to work with lads in larger groups than 
 would otherwise be considered neces- 
 sary or advisable. It is often literally 
 impossible to find within any one con- 
 gregation the proper leaders for that 
 congregation's own youngsters. 
 
 13°. 
 
AFTER THE WAR 
 
 In the second place, denominational 
 jealousies are much greater in these 
 smaller cities than they are in the larger 
 ones. To organize work among boys and 
 girls and young people, and even to some 
 extent among adults, along denomina- 
 tional lines always means the splitting of 
 friendships, the unnatural separation of 
 schoolmates, shopmates, and neighbors. 
 In one such city in a Mid-Western State 
 one of the congregations, anxious to be 
 of social service, started a sewing-school 
 and play-hour for children in its least 
 well-off neighborhood, a section of the 
 city dotted freely with deteriorating in- 
 fluences and with a school, closed except 
 in session time, as its only good influ- 
 ence, with no churches within a mile 
 of it, no clubs, no playgrounds, no social 
 centres. Everything went beautifully for 
 two weeks. Then three Lutheran pas- 
 
RIGHT AND WRONG 
 
 tors, two Roman priests, and two Prot- 
 estant ministers, fearful that their chil- 
 dren were being influenced away from 
 their respective folds, diligent pastors 
 urged on by equally fearful lay people, 
 severally saw to it that their children 
 were removed by their parents from this 
 church's dangerous ministrations. Of 
 course the church's own children con- 
 tinued to come, but the large neighbor- 
 hood service which it had been hoped 
 might be given was rendered impossi- 
 ble. Scout troops, camp-fires of girls, 
 the Girls' Friendly Society, and similar 
 socially ministering organizations suffer 
 in the same way. 
 
 Third, a community of the size we 
 are considering is almost invariably 
 " clubbed to death." Every club one 
 ever heard of in a big city must, so it 
 seems, be in the small town too. Of 
 
 132 
 
AFTER THE WAR 
 
 course, to keep them all going every one 
 must needs belong to a good many and 
 work hard at all of them. In a certain 
 midland city of twenty-two thousand 
 people there are listed in the directory 
 eighty-five clubs. The society editor of 
 the daily paper has a list of fifty-two 
 others, making one hundred and thirty- 
 seven in all. There are doubtless many 
 more. This, for a city of less than five 
 thousand families, keeps the adults rather 
 busy, as may be well imagined. Thus is 
 further augmented the Church's diffi- 
 culty in social ministration, especially 
 among the children, since what she lacks 
 are not opportunities for labor nearly so 
 much as workers. 
 
 Many churches in small cities con- 
 tinue to ignore these facts. Many boards 
 and commissions continue to send to 
 such churches programmes for work 
 
 *33 
 
RIGHT AND WRONG 
 
 that are, for the reasons above hinted 
 at, literally impossible of fulfilment. 
 Would that the Church might have 
 saved all the time she has wasted in such 
 communities trying, for instance, to or- 
 ganize and maintain men's clubs, only 
 to find that on whatever night the meet- 
 ings were set the men had to go to the 
 Masons', and the K.P.'s, and the Odd 
 Fellows', and the Elks', and the Social- 
 ist meetings, and the political rallies, 
 and the various bureaus of an over-or- 
 ganized commercial association, and the 
 "Twilight Club," and the E.F.U. and 
 N.F.L. and the other alphabetical soci- 
 eties for providing fraternal insurance, 
 and the volley-ball contests, and the 
 men's classes at the Y.M.C.A., and the 
 Public Health League, and Heaven only 
 knows what else. In a city of small 
 size when the Church aggravates the 
 
 *34 
 
AFTER THE WAR 
 
 trouble by organizing a men's club she 
 is, to put it kindly, "supplying a non- 
 existent social need." 
 
 In women's work the Church is apt 
 to make the same mistake. When women 
 already have far more organizations than 
 they can attend to, it is an almost crimi- 
 nal waste of time and a source of weak- 
 ness to both city and Church to get into 
 being two or three or a half-dozen soci- 
 eties within the Church itself. It might 
 be a good thing if many churches did 
 what one of them did in such a city, 
 namely, abolish all money-making guilds 
 and place finance upon a dignified basis, 
 and then establish just one organization 
 for women, a club which met once in 
 two weeks and, with the aid of good 
 speakers, furnished largely through the 
 State university, spent many profitable 
 afternoons discussing problems of liter- 
 
 135 
 
RIGHT AND WRONG 
 
 ary, social, and religious interest, with 
 special attention to education, both secu- 
 lar and religious, and industrial and social 
 justice. Of course the war put a stop to 
 it, because the members now must devote 
 all their spare moments to relief work 
 of various kinds, but for times of peace 
 it was a very helpful organization. 
 
 One finds in many places of this small- 
 ness that the Church is running sewing- 
 clubs for girls, when the continuation 
 and industrial schools are doing the work 
 as well as the Church, and often better. 
 One finds little gymnasia, badly equipped, 
 full of Church boys working without 
 adequate skilled supervision, even though 
 a Y.M.C.A. may furnish in the town 
 skilled direction at a price which most of 
 the boys can pay and which the Church 
 might well raise for the few who are too 
 poor to belong. 
 
 136 
 
AFTER THE WAR 
 
 These are only instances. The more 
 one examines the work of the Church 
 in small cities the more one is apt to be 
 convinced that where she attempts to 
 minister herself directly and as an organi- 
 zation to the social needs of the com- 
 munity, she does it badly, wastefully, 
 blunderingly. 
 
 What, then, can the Church in such 
 places do in the way of social service ? 
 It is possible to put the answer in two 
 sentences of eight words each: (i) She 
 can assist the community* s own social ac- 
 tivities. (2) She can preach religion related 
 to social needs. 
 
 The former is possible in many ways. 
 First, the clergy, the vestry, and other 
 men of the congregation can join the 
 commercial association and work within 
 it — not merely as citizens, but as a group 
 of Christian men who may take counsel 
 
 *37 \ 
 
RIGHT AND WRONG 
 
 with one another as to the best ways for 
 them to act through that organization 
 to further the good of the community, 
 in the light of Christ's teaching. They 
 can, if they will, make their special work 
 the promotion of the civic side of the 
 association's work. They will find their 
 efforts welcomed, if they exert common 
 sense and have a real love of their fellows 
 in their hearts. Every man admissible 
 can associate himself, not merely pas- 
 sively, but actively in the work of his 
 labor-union and in the Trades and La- 
 bor Council, and usually the pastor can 
 be made a fraternal delegate and attend 
 the meetings if he really wishes to do 
 so. Women can be urged to enter the 
 women's clubs, the mothers' clubs of 
 the schools, the Associated Charities, and 
 other existing secular organizations, de- 
 termined to help fill them with the 
 
 138 
 
AFTER THE WAR 
 
 spirit of Christ's religion and to assist 
 them to works of social betterment. The 
 Y.M.C.A. and Y.W.C.A. can be assisted, 
 not merely to do their large social work, 
 but to refrain themselves from a narrow- 
 ness which Church people can help to 
 broaden. Boys and girls can be enlisted 
 in these organizations, to their great 
 help, and taught how to be useful in and 
 through them. Pressure can be con- 
 stantly brought to bear, with patience 
 undiscouraged by rebuffs, until the com- 
 munity takes up for itself the recreation 
 problem, the social-centre problem, and 
 the neighborhood-guild problem, and 
 solves them. Ways of cooperation in- 
 numerable will be found by any Church 
 which honestly looks for them. 
 
 The preaching of the social Gospel 
 is the second opportunity for social serv- 
 ice. Such preaching depends not only 
 
 139 
 
RIGHT AND WRONG 
 
 upon the pastor's knowing its necessity, 
 but also to a considerable degree upon the 
 congregation's feeling with him in the 
 matter. By preaching the social Gospel 
 is not in the least meant giving secular 
 discourses, disguised by a text and a few 
 pious words occasionally, on economics 
 and sociology. There is nothing quite 
 so pathetic as the prophet become the lec- 
 turer. What is meant is the leading of 
 the people through sermons to see them- 
 selves as social beings, to see sin as a 
 collective fact for which individuals are 
 all mutually responsible, to see salvation 
 both in terms of this world and in terms 
 of this world, to realize how fully each 
 man is his brother's keeper, to feel them- 
 selves obligated through allegiance to 
 Christ and adoption by Christ to become 
 with Him strugglers toward the King- 
 dom on earth. 
 
 140 
 
AFTER THE WAR 
 
 To preach the social Gospel is to 
 sound aloud the trumpet call of the 
 army of Jesus, to utter the battle-cry 
 of the Invisible King, to fill men not 
 merely with a vision of their social na- 
 ture, but with a supernatural enthusi- 
 asm and power from on high sufficient 
 to enable them to deny the attractive 
 appeals of the world, the subtle temp- 
 tations of the flesh, and the cynical 
 promptings of the selfish Devil, and to 
 remain the soldiers and servants of the 
 Lord Incarnate until their lives' ends. 
 It is to help them to see the sacraments, 
 not as pieces of miraculous mechanism 
 to be selfishly absorbed, but as means of 
 grace to help in time of need the armies 
 of God to quit them like men ; to assist 
 them to understand Baptism as a sealed 
 enlistment, Confirmation as an arma- 
 ment, Penance as a rededication and a 
 
 141 
 
RIGHT AND WRONG 
 
 reacceptance of the soldier, Communion 
 as the common martial Feast of the 
 heroic Captain of Salvation with His 
 varied forces both of the living and of 
 those passed over into the greater life. 
 To do something of all this, with a heart 
 on fire with an evangelism which is not 
 merely a means of saving individuals 
 from hell, but of restoring all creation, 
 "which groaneth and travaileth together 
 even until now," to union with Almighty 
 God, is to preach the social Gospel. 
 
 This is the most important social serv- 
 ice that the Church can render in any 
 community. In small communities it, 
 and cooperation in community-wide ac- 
 tivities, with all thought of the Church 
 itself as an end to be served eliminated, is 
 often the only social service the Church 
 can do without causing more harm and 
 confusion than she accomplishes good. 
 
 142 
 
AFTER THE WAR 
 
 Thesis: In communities of from three 
 thousand to thirty thousand people the Church 
 should be careful to cooperate with movements 
 of the community itself looking toward social 
 betterment and not to start social service 
 movements of her own which will compete 
 with these larger ones and so further divide 
 what is probably already a too greatly divided 
 community '. She should fearlessly and with 
 prophetic zeal preach in that community in 
 every possible way the social Gospel. By 
 cooperation and social evangelization she 
 will accomplish the maximum of good with 
 the minimum of evil. 
 
 VII. WHAT MOST HINDERS THE CHURCH IN 
 AIDING ANY LOCAL COMMUNITY? 
 
 Probably the greatest hindrance to 
 the local usefulness socially of any con- 
 gregation of Christians is their regard- 
 ing themselves and their being regarded 
 
 x 43 
 
RIGHT AND WRONG 
 
 by the community as an end to which the 
 community is expected to minister. It 
 is very easy for a church to forget that 
 what is wisdom from on high for its 
 individual members is also wisdom from 
 on high for the organization, namely, 
 that salvation comes only from self-for- 
 getful sacrifice. All too many churches 
 spend most of their time asking instead 
 of giving. All too many ecclesiastical 
 groups seem to have, as their sole idea 
 of a church, an organization for which 
 money must somehow or other be pro- 
 cured. Often it seems as though Church 
 people were laboring tremendously to 
 get a plant in running order and then 
 having no strength to use it when it 
 was prepared for service. It is an evi- 
 dence of petty vision that churches 
 are usually most filled with enthusiasm 
 when they are raising money for their 
 
 144 
 
AFTER THE WAR 
 
 own benefit, to build with, to pay a 
 mortgage with, to reduce a debt with, 
 and that often enthusiasm dies when 
 everything is ready and paid for and 
 usable. 
 
 If a church is to be useful in a com- 
 munity, if it is to demand respect, if it 
 is to be a power for righteousness, it 
 must venture greatly, give largely, think 
 unselfishly. Its eyes must be turned up 
 toward God and out toward the world, 
 never in upon itself. 
 
 Thesis: In any community , before the 
 Church can render social service effectively ', 
 it must see God very really and the people 
 round about it — their sins, their needs, their 
 wants, their hungers and their surfeits, their 
 falling short of the Kingdom ideal of justice 
 and love — very clearly; it must be on fire to 
 bring God and this people together that they 
 may, indeed, dwell together in such a com- 
 
RIGHT AND WRONG 
 
 monwealth as shall reflect heaven on earth; 
 and it must be willing to sink all thought of 
 itself in this tremendous task — this task 
 which is, after all, the Church's sole reason 
 for being in that community or on the earth. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL 
 PROBLEMS 
 
 Ye shall hear of wars and rumors of wars: see that ye 
 be not troubled: for these things must needs come to pass ; 
 but the end is not yet. 
 
 ST. MATTHEW, 24 : 6 
 
 In a time like this, when almost every 
 nation of the world, our own included, 
 is engaged in the mightiest war of his- 
 tory, a time when men's hearts are, in- 
 deed, failing them "for fear of what is 
 coming on the earth," a time when 
 ideas and ideals of internationalism pre- 
 viously held by many of us are being 
 tested in a giant crucible, a time when 
 patriotism, long a suspect virtue to think- 
 ing people, is being advanced as a virtue 
 challenging us to heroic sacrifices, it is 
 
 H7 
 
RIGHT AND WRONG 
 
 obvious that the Church must have some 
 message, if she is to be the moral teacher 
 of the world, to troubled, seeking souls. 
 Let us, in deep humility, recognizing 
 our great limitations, speak in this chap- 
 ter of the Christian's moral relationship 
 to the ideal of patriotism, the ideal of 
 internationalism, and the great, sad, ugly 
 fact of war. 
 
 I. WHAT SHALL BE THE CHRISTIAN ATTITUDE 
 TOWARD PATRIOTISM ' 
 
 While we are at war every one of us 
 runs through a twofold danger, a sort 
 of Scylla and Charybdis very difficult to 
 steer between. Scylla is the temptation 
 to magnify anything that calls itself pa- 
 triotism to an absurd, dangerous, and 
 immoral degree. Charybdis is the en- 
 ticement to lift internationalism into a 
 sentimental and irrational nonsensity. 
 
 148 
 
AFTER THE WAR 
 
 The thing we all have to do is to hold 
 to both patriotism and internationalism, 
 in balanced degrees. If this is to be done, 
 we must see each of them rationally. 
 
 Rational patriotism and rational in- 
 ternationalism mean, in the last analysis, 
 such patriotism and such international- 
 ism as conform to the moral law of 
 God. The highest achievement in the 
 realm of morals of which the human 
 mind has as yet become aware is that 
 sublime law, of which we have so often 
 spoken in this book, which states that 
 salvation is attained only by voluntary 
 self-sacrifice. Such a patriotism and such 
 an internationalism as are reflections of 
 that fundamental principle, and in con- 
 formity therewith, are to the highest 
 degree rational. 
 
 If one looks on patriotism as devotion 
 to one's country conceived of as a place 
 
 149 
 
RIGHT AND WRONG 
 
 where human beings may mutually sac- 
 rifice themselves for one another's wel- 
 fare and all together sacrifice themselves 
 for the welfare of other nations, then 
 one's patriotism is a rational patriotism. 
 If one's internationalism is a belief that 
 there should be a commonwealth of na- 
 tions wherein each may gladly substitute 
 the welfare of all instead of its own as a 
 national motive, then one's internation- 
 alism is intelligible. If, on the contrary, 
 one holds that a nation may rightly be 
 used for the benefit of some of its citi- 
 zens at the cost of most of them, one's 
 patriotism is criminal ; and if by interna- 
 tionalism is meant non-resistance by the 
 nations while one enslaves and prosti- 
 tutes the others for its own ends and the 
 satisfaction of its own ambitions and 
 lusts, one's internationalism has become 
 an immoral absurdity. 
 
 150 
 
AFTER THE WAR 
 
 Thesis : In this crisis , as in all times y it 
 is the business of every intelligent Christian 
 and Christian organization so to preach 
 Christ 's law of love that all men may per- 
 ceive the folly of attempting to build up 
 either nationalism or internationalism on any 
 basis save the basis of that law. 
 
 Patriotism means devotion to coun- 
 try. Christian patriotism means devo- 
 tion to country as a field for possible 
 mutual self-sacrifice, and therefore of 
 mutual salvation, on the part of its peo- 
 ple. It is plain that much which masks 
 under the sacred name of patriotism is 
 but a sorry caricature, based upon a 
 wholly different idea. Constantly we 
 hear people urged to love our country 
 because they make their living here, be- 
 cause they get wages here better than 
 are given elsewhere, because they enjoy 
 
RIGHT AND WRONG 
 
 better housing and food and clothing 
 and other material comforts than they 
 or their fathers had in the old lands. 
 The appeal is that we must make Amer- 
 ica triumph because it is a means for us 
 to get more than other peoples can get 
 of the things of the earth, earthy. This 
 patriotism for profits is a poor imitation 
 of real patriotism. It is, too, a positively 
 dangerous thing for the country's wel- 
 fare. Its obvious corollary is that if for 
 any reason any one should not get these 
 material rewards in great abundance he 
 had better stop being patriotic. It sug- 
 gests inevitably that if another nation 
 should be at war with us which could 
 promise better material advantages than 
 our people were getting, they, if they 
 were shrewd, would be justified in turn- 
 ing traitor. (As a matter of fact, by way 
 of illustration, the strongest card in the 
 
 152 
 
AFTER THE WAR 
 
 hands of pro-German agitators among 
 the more ignorant classes of labor in this 
 crisis is the fact that those classes are 
 better cared for physically in Germany 
 than they have been for a generation or 
 two at least in this country.) Another 
 corollary is this, that the moment a war 
 is to be waged for anything else than 
 material ends, a war for ideals, a war 
 for theories, a war for philosophies, — 
 a war, if you will, for democracy, — 
 thousands of believers in this false patri- 
 otism immediately become uninterested 
 slackers. 
 
 If America is regarded merely as a 
 place where individuals sometimes get 
 prosperous, it is a grave question whether 
 America will get or deserve to get the 
 sacrifices necessary to preserve her. Only 
 those who believe her the one place 
 where preeminently men may live in 
 
 J 53 
 
RIGHT AND WRONG 
 
 real democracy some day, sacrificing 
 themselves for one another in a great 
 brotherhood, will be willing to give 
 their all for her, including wealth, ma- 
 terial satisfactions, and even the blood 
 of life. 
 
 As a matter of fact, we Americans 
 have done all too little — and our proph- 
 ets in religion have been willing too 
 much to acquiesce in our doing that lit- 
 tle — to foster among our people the 
 ideal of mutual and socialized prosperity 
 as our national goal, a goal to be attained 
 by cooperation. Consequently we find, 
 in time of war, a nation considerable 
 fractions of which ask already, and will 
 continue more to ask as the screws are 
 turned tighter, exactly the questions one 
 might have expected they would ask, 
 namely, "Would German world dom- 
 ination hurt our pocketbooks any ?" and, 
 
 • 154 
 
AFTER THE WAR 
 
 " Are such things as international law 
 on the high seas and the abstract the- 
 ories of democracy worth giving up our 
 material security and prosperity to battle 
 for?" 
 
 Vast numbers of our people came to 
 this country in the first place frankly 
 for dollars and cents. Have we given 
 them any higher ideals since their ar- 
 rival ? Other vast numbers, especially 
 Russians, Poles, and Finns, have come 
 to us because the longing for a democ- 
 racy was as a burning fire in their breasts; 
 and instead of nurturing their love for 
 democracy as our choicest treasure, we 
 have quenched it in a flood of materialis- 
 tic and heartless industrialism. We have 
 rewarded such of them as forsook their 
 ideals and joined the mad scramble for 
 individual prosperity with the petty bau- 
 bles most of us have sought, and have 
 
 l 55 
 
RIGHT AND WRONG 
 
 turned the hopeful enthusiasm for Amer- 
 ica of such as have not surrendered into 
 bitter hate of ourselves in the light of 
 professions not lived up to. 
 
 The reason why in this crisis it is 
 such a difficult thing to rouse our people 
 to heights of patriotic fervor is that, 
 while we have regarded the Declaration 
 of Independence as a noble document, 
 we have little read and less believed it; 
 because the Constitution made to con- 
 serve democracy in our midst has been 
 itself used to prevent democracy from 
 growing; because we have made our 
 youth admire and imitate the ruthless 
 few who had scrambled over the many 
 to positions of power, those who had 
 achieved a spurious success in that they 
 "escaped out of the rut of common la- 
 bor/ 3 There is nothing to wonder at 
 in the spectacle of a nation, so encour- 
 
 i 5 6 
 
AFTER THE WAR 
 
 aged in selfishness and the negation of 
 fraternity, being sluggish in responding 
 now to what is its first real call for dec- 
 ades to sacrifice material things for great 
 ideals. 
 
 Thesis: Surely if Christians have any 
 message toward American nationalism in 
 these days it is something like this: "Amer- 
 ica, it is high time that we turn over per- 
 manently a new leaf. It is time that we read 
 again into our national life the old, half -for- 
 gotten social aims of our forefathers. It is 
 time that we made common labor so tolera- 
 ble that men should no longer seek, with an 
 ardor like that of the damned to escape from 
 hell, to get free from it and be among the 
 privileged. It is time that we learned to love 
 and to honor, in deed as well as word, those 
 who freely sacrifice their abilities for the 
 public good. America, until we make of 
 ourselves a nation whose people live, not by 
 
 iS7 
 
RIGHT AND WRONG 
 
 bread alone, but by every word of that su- 
 preme wisdom of sacrifice which is from 
 the mouth of God, our nationalism will be 
 weak and powerless, our patriotism suspect 
 before God and man. It is folly to cry, 
 * God save the State,' unless we acco?npany 
 it with the truly yneant cry, 'Brethren, let 
 us love one another? God can save only that 
 State which to its citizens is a means toward 
 the Kingdom, a commonwealth so much greater 
 than any of them as to demand of all of them 
 their all for one another." 
 
 This new idealism, this new national- 
 ism, this new patriotism, all of which are 
 in theory as old as our nation, we have 
 not hopelessly lost. We are rapidly re- 
 gaining them. Even in what were once 
 the most selfish of all our organiza- 
 tions, our chambers of commerce and 
 business men's associations, one can see 
 
 i 5 8 
 
AFTER THE WAR 
 
 the newer, nobler ideals emerging. In 
 the broadening of their vision from that 
 time when their sole purpose seemed to 
 be to produce more profits for their mem- 
 bers, until now, when their insistent cry 
 is for the common weal, one cannot but 
 see a very significant straw in the wind 
 to show the trend of thought among us. 
 The world is moving rapidly and rightly 
 when such a great organization of com- 
 mercial and manufacturing and profes- 
 sional men as the Rotary Clubs can come 
 into being and grow rapidly, those clubs 
 whose membership is drawn for the most 
 part from those who have been the devo- 
 tees rather than the victims of Mammon, 
 but which take, nevertheless, as their 
 fundamental conviction the belief that he 
 best succeeds who serves the good of 
 others than himself. Things are moving, 
 indeed, when the commercial classes are 
 
 159 
 
RIGHT AND WRONG 
 
 thus saying that he who gains the whole 
 world and loses his own soul is the poor- 
 est kind of business man and the worst 
 sort of patriot. 
 
 The same tendency is easily seen 
 among the laboring classes. From indi- 
 vidualism to trades-unionism is itself a 
 great step forward in social and patriotic 
 thinking. Now we are seeing the rapid 
 completion of that further process by 
 which trades-unions are becoming fed- 
 erated, and the beginning of what is truly 
 if not in name an industrial union, of all 
 the workers, for common action and mu- 
 tual assistance. In labor as in business we 
 see the coming collectivism wherein lies 
 our hope of a noble and abiding nation- 
 alism. 
 
 In the third place, there is coming 
 into being a realization, on the part of 
 commercial and employing classes, on 
 
 160 
 
AFTER THE WAR 
 
 the one hand, and of workingmen, on the 
 other hand, that their interests are mu- 
 tual, not contradictory, a feeling that they 
 must needs get together. Of course this 
 movement is as yet hardly more than in 
 its infancy. Many employers do not see 
 it. Many laborers and labor organiza- 
 tions seem quite unaware of it. More 
 and more on each side, however, do see 
 it with every passing day. Now, in time 
 of war, the nation is, because it must be, 
 demanding it. The employer who says 
 that "his business is his own and he in- 
 tends to run it as he pleases, employing 
 and discharging whom he wills, paying 
 what he chooses, uncontrolled by any 
 damned labor organization or any med- 
 dling government inspectors," is rapidly 
 becoming as anachronistic as Tennyson's 
 poetry and Landseer's " Stag at Bay/ 3 
 He served his purpose, as did they, but 
 
 161 
 
RIGHT AND WRONG 
 
 as a product of the twentieth century 
 he is inexcusable. So, too, although the 
 I.W.W. maintains the contrary with a 
 vigor in itself evidential, the labor or- 
 ganization which looks on itself merely 
 as a means for holding up industry for 
 all it can bear and passing the cost on to 
 the consumer is to-day late-Victorian, a 
 curiosity, and a good bit of a bore. 
 
 Everywhere we look we see that the 
 new nationalism is coming. In this time 
 of national crisis most of us perceive, 
 dimly it may be and hardly more than 
 instinctively as yet, that great as is our 
 military and naval unpreparedness, our 
 financial unpreparedness, our emotional 
 unpreparedness, there is yet among us 
 another deficiency — an unpreparedness 
 due to an industrial system without na- 
 tional vision, fraternal aims, or social 
 ideals worth dying for. And seeing that 
 
 162 
 
AFTER THE WAR 
 
 unpreparedness we are rapidly and de- 
 terminedly trying to make good our 
 lack. 
 
 Thesis : All Christians should be for- 
 warding to the extent of their power the new 
 nationalism. They must not be content in this 
 time of crisis with urging the Liberty Loan 
 and the Red Cross and the Y.M.C.A., not 
 satisfied with saluting the flag and having 
 processions and singing the national anthem. 
 They 7nust also help all our people to realize 
 that those principles offreedo?n, equality, and 
 fraternity and those i?ialie?iable rights of 
 hu?nan beings to life, liberty, and the pur- 
 suit of happiness, which our fathers believed 
 in and for which they gave all they had and 
 were, are not mere political shibboleths, but 
 vital and necessary principles for all our 
 common living. They must assist us all to 
 believe that these ideals and principles may 
 yet be, and, please God, shall be, translated 
 
 163 
 
RIGHT AND WRONG 
 
 from paper and ink to the vital relationships 
 of mankind in America and through her as- 
 sistance to the entire world. 
 
 It is well to remember, however, that 
 in such a metamorphosis of American 
 life there is bound to develop a struggle. 
 All will not see the vision. Many will 
 insist upon the retention of their privi- 
 leges and exemptions, actual or hoped 
 for, no matter whether the public weal 
 justifies them or not. There will be 
 those who will insist upon their rents 
 and interest to the same extent that they 
 have up until now enjoyed them. Some 
 will certainly be found fighting to keep 
 down the tides of rising democracy. Ob- 
 viously, sooner or later, these persons 
 must be policed. 
 
 What attitude is the Church to take 
 toward this necessary and inevitable po- 
 
 164 
 
AFTER THE WAR 
 
 licingr Shall she be heard asking that 
 the many be passively non-resistant while 
 the few continue to exploit, while the 
 minority coerce the majority, while the 
 Divine law of cooperation is displaced 
 for the wisdom learned by man from 
 the beasts that prey ? Surely that will 
 not be the position she will take. 
 
 Thesis: The Church must, beginning 
 right now, preach the morality of Jesus 
 Christ so plainly that when the ti?ne comes 
 that those exploiters who are unconverted 
 shall be policed and dispossessed, it will not 
 be necessary for her personally to oppose the 
 anti-social remnant. Men, having heard 
 her and k?town her, shall understand what 
 Christians think of these things and exactly 
 where they stand. Social malefactors shall 
 perceive in her their enemy and shall shun 
 her support and her comradeship. The com- 
 mon people as they come into their own shall 
 
 165 
 
RIGHT AND WRONG 
 
 have found, ere the policing time comes , in 
 her preaching of the Master of Sacrifice 
 that toward which in their human wisdom 
 they are reaching out. What the Church is 
 to do in the day of readjustment is not the 
 question of moment. The thing that really 
 matters is what the Church is to do and 
 say between now and the dawning of that 
 day. 
 
 II. WHAT SHALL BE THE CHRISTIAN ATTITUDE 
 TOWARD INTERNATIONALISM? 
 
 In order to understand international- 
 ism, one must remember something of 
 the way in which civilization has de- 
 veloped. 
 
 The primary unit in society was the 
 family. Originally each family was a 
 group unto itself, its hand against every 
 other family's hand for a good part of 
 the time, and even in times of actual 
 
 1 66 
 
AFTER THE WAR 
 
 peace its mind a poisoned vat of sus- 
 picion against its neighbors. In those 
 early days if there had arisen one who 
 maintained as practicable a community 
 which should consist of several cooper- 
 ating families, he would doubtless have 
 been regarded as a silly fool. At length, 
 however, such groupings did actually 
 come into existence. Families, thrown 
 together by economic compulsion, found 
 in the first place that those they had es- 
 teemed as strangers to be hated were, 
 after all, little different from themselves, 
 and saw, in the second place, that it paid 
 better to cooperate than to seek to an- 
 nihilate one another. It was economic 
 advantage, coupled with propinquity, 
 which brought about the coalition of 
 families into clans. 
 
 Then the whole process was repeated, 
 different only in that the competitors 
 
 167 
 
RIGHT AND WRONG 
 
 who hated one another and fought one 
 another were now clans instead of fam- 
 ilies. At this point any poor idealist who 
 should have dreamed of a larger unit 
 composed of cooperating clans, had he 
 made public what he hoped might be, 
 would doubtless have been suspected of 
 disloyalty to his clan and possibly of 
 deficiency in ordinary common sense. 
 Nevertheless, the clans did unite at last; 
 and the two coupling forces were again 
 economic advantage and propinquity. 
 
 Once more similar events repeated 
 themselves. The tribes, each made up 
 of several clans, were intolerant of one 
 another. Each one loved its tribal breth- 
 ren, worked for them, fought for them, 
 sacrificed for them, and regarded with 
 distrust mingled with hate every other 
 one it met. If there were seers in those 
 days, as doubtless there occasionally were, 
 
 168 
 
AFTER THE WAR 
 
 who longed for a day by them deemed 
 possible when tribes might cooperate in- 
 stead of destroy one another, they were 
 scorned as impractical theorists beyond 
 all doubt. Again, notwithstanding this 
 scorn, economic advantage and propin- 
 quity overcame tribal jealousy enough 
 to produce that larger grouping which 
 we may call the city-state, where the 
 people were settled folk, or the confed- 
 eracy, as among such nomads as the 
 Israelites. Still again, the now familiar 
 process was repeated and these city-states 
 and nomadic confederacies were by the 
 same forces as we have already seen at 
 work united into that which we term 
 nations. 
 
 The process was not yet completed. 
 Time and development went on and na- 
 tions were at length united into em- 
 pires. It is really with empires that we 
 
 169 
 
RIGHT AND WRONG 
 
 are concerned to-day, not with nations, 
 in any proper sense of that word. Of 
 all the nations engaged in the Great 
 War, France is most a homogeneous na- 
 tion, but even she is not entirely so. 
 Italy is a little less so than France. Rus- 
 sia, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Great 
 Britain, even tiny Belgium are confed- 
 eracies unnatural from an ethnic point 
 of view. Our own United States is an 
 empire. Not only are there here min- 
 gled multitudes from every nation un- 
 der Heaven, but there are also three 
 great divisions of the country the dis- 
 tinctness of whose interests and customs 
 is only beginning to be blurred — the 
 North, the South, and the Pacific Coast. 
 However, for convenience, because of 
 custom, let us call all these empires na- 
 tions. With us the cooperating group 
 has developed until it is as large as the 
 
 170 
 
AFTER THE WAR 
 
 nation. There may be, there are, many 
 persons who think it is impossibly ideal- 
 istic, practically nonsensical, to hope for 
 a day when nation shall no longer rise 
 up against nation, no longer be suspi- 
 cious of nation, no longer compete with 
 nation commercially or by arms — a day 
 when all shall be united in cooperation 
 within the fold of one world-wide com- 
 monwealth. Yet, if there is anything to 
 be learned from the study of human his- 
 tory, it is as certain as the sun's rising 
 on the morrow that before long this 
 happy event shall have been brought to 
 pass because of the same two welding 
 forces that have ever been at work, eco- 
 nomic necessity and that acquaintance 
 which comes through increasing near- 
 ness to one another of the peoples of 
 the earth. As soon as men shall fully 
 see, as they were beginning to see before 
 
 171 
 
RIGHT AND WRONG 
 
 the Great War, and as they will see 
 again as soon as the war is over, — in- 
 deed, as they are seeing while the strug- 
 gle goes on, — the identity of their 
 economic interests and the waste inci- 
 dent to their national oppositions and 
 distrusts, and as soon as the acquaintance 
 between them which the steamship, the 
 railroad, the telephone, the telegraph, 
 the aeroplane, and the printing-press 
 will inevitably bring about, has grown 
 a very little more, there will come, re- 
 gardless of theorists for or against it, the 
 breaking-down of nationalities and the 
 coming-in of the United States of the 
 World. 
 
 In all this will lie a great opportunity 
 for Christians. It is therefore important 
 that no Christian be stampeded into that 
 sort of patriotism which cries, " My 
 country, right or wrong, good or bad, 
 
 172 
 
AFTER THE WAR 
 
 as an end in itself, my country. " Our 
 country is not, no nation can be, a su- 
 preme end in itself. All of them will 
 be swallowed up into the international 
 commonwealth by the inevitable process 
 of human evolution. No Christian can 
 afford to lose sight of that fact. The in- 
 ternational State will furnish Christian 
 ethics its greatest field for operation, and 
 is therefore a thing devoutly to be wished 
 for, prayed for. Brotherhood in Jesus is 
 not a thing of nations, of races, of colors. 
 Brotherhood is international. 
 
 Thesis : It is surely the business of the 
 Church to urge, even in time of war, the 
 unity of life interests between the peoples of 
 the world; to combat the development of 
 national hatreds ; to promote as best she may 
 international trust and charity ; to show the 
 world that in promoting internationalism lies 
 the greatest and most wide-reaching Chris- 
 
 173 
 
RIGHT AND WRONG 
 
 tian service that any Church, any nation, 
 any individual can possibly render. She must 
 teach as a noble expression of her Master s 
 morality the philosophy back of that most no- 
 ble of President Wilson s utterances, "Amer- 
 ica desires nothing for herself which she is 
 not willing all the nations of the world should 
 share" 
 
 III. WHAT SHALL BE THE CHRISTIAN ATTITUDE 
 
 TOWARD WAR? 
 
 For a proper judgment of war the first 
 thing that is necessary is to clear up a 
 confused point in much thinking upon 
 the subject. It is commonly said that war 
 is evil in itself. It is less commonly but 
 still occasionally said, that war is good 
 in itself. As a matter of fact, it is neither. 
 Goodness and badness are attributes of 
 beings who possess free will. War is an 
 inanimate thing. It is possible to say, 
 
 *74 
 
AFTER THE WAR 
 
 therefore, of it that it is good or bad 
 only according to the goodness or bad- 
 ness of its users. 
 
 This mistake of ascribing to things 
 moral qualities rightly ascribed only to 
 persons is a singularly common one to- 
 day. There was a time when people 
 rightly said that a proper use of alcohol 
 was a good thing, and that improper use 
 of it was a bad thing. Now one hears 
 constantly such statements as would in- 
 dicate that the alcohol itself is supposed 
 to be wicked. Probably no one means 
 quite that, but they say it or something 
 very like it and it leads to muddled 
 thought. Time was when ambition em- 
 ployed to further noble ends was called 
 good and ambition selfishly employed 
 was called evil. Now it is quite com- 
 mon to hear people say, " That man is 
 ambitious, and ambition is a good thing/' 
 
 *75 
 
RIGHT AND WRONG 
 
 quite apart from any consideration of 
 the use to which the man is putting it. 
 Time was when every one knew that 
 dancing could be made to minister to 
 beauty and religion, in which case it 
 was holy, or to license and voluptuous- 
 ness, in which case it was carnal and 
 corrupting. Then the Puritans came 
 along and said that all dancing was evil 
 in itself. We all reacted from this after 
 a while, until lately we were assuming 
 that dancing was good in itself. Of 
 course both attitudes were silly. 
 
 We do a similar thing in judging war. 
 We ascribe a moral quality to an im- 
 personal, and therefore non-moral thing. 
 War is not in itself wrong. Neither is it 
 right. The goodness or badness of war 
 cannot be rightly spoken of any more 
 than the hardness of black or the sooti- 
 ness of space. If war is a means used for 
 
 176 
 
AFTER THE WAR 
 
 the glory of God and the good of man- 
 kind, it may be called good; if war is 
 a thing used for the hindrance of these 
 things, it may be said to be bad. Again 
 let it be said that the goodness or bad- 
 ness lies not in the war, but in the war- 
 rior. To determine the morality of war 
 as a whole is therefore impossible. To 
 judge the goodness or badness of any par- 
 ticular war one must discover the motive 
 of those waging it. 
 
 But, it may be and often is objected, 
 God has forbidden killing of man by 
 man. No, what has been forbidden is 
 murder. A murder is an anti-social kill- 
 ing. It is in its anti-sociality, not in the 
 mere killing involved, that the sin of 
 murder lies. The commandment of Mo- 
 ses is embedded in other Jewish regula- 
 tions in which are specifically prescribed a 
 number of cases when killing of man by 
 
 177 
 
RIGHT AND WRONG 
 
 man is made a positive God-commanded 
 duty. Our Lord, when interpreting the 
 commandments, in the Sermon on the 
 Mount, does not enlarge the sixth one 
 so as to forbid all killing y but rather to 
 prohibit all hate. Not even in our Lord's 
 " non-resistance " statements is there any 
 prohibition of war. He did, indeed, for- 
 bid us to resist injury and oppression 
 done to ourselves ; but there is no state- 
 ment that His followers should stand 
 by while those who are weak and un- 
 able to protect themselves are oppressed 
 and even destroyed. Can any one imag- 
 ine Jesus coming upon a drunken man 
 who, wild with anger, mad with egotistic 
 wrath, was beating a baby to death, and 
 the Master standing by while the brutal 
 work was finished? Can one not see the 
 way in which He would rush to that 
 little one's protection? War is not for- 
 
 178 
 
AFTER THE WAR 
 
 bidden by God in either the Jewish or the 
 Christian dispensation, so far as the rec- 
 ords show. War for selfish revenge or 
 for anti-social ends is, indeed, but corpo- 
 rate murder; but all war is not murder. 
 
 It is necessary, therefore, of each war 
 that happens that men should ask what 
 are its motives, for what it is being 
 waged. Upon the answer to that query, 
 and upon that alone, depends the mo- 
 rality of fighting. 
 
 Thesis : Christian people should recognize 
 that each war is right or wrong, for or 
 against God's will, according to whether it 
 is being waged for self or for others who 
 are being oppressed. 
 
 IV. WHAT SHOULD BE THE CHRISTIAN ATTI- 
 TUDE TOWARD THE PRESENT WORLD WAR ? 
 
 We saw a few moments ago that the 
 world, impelled by economic interests 
 
 179 
 
RIGHT AND WRONG 
 
 and urged on by certain rapidly increas- 
 ing understandings between peoples of 
 various nations and tongues, engendered 
 by a propinquity in itself the result of 
 vastly improved means of intercommu- 
 nication, will doubtless move into inter- 
 nationalism in the early future. This in- 
 ternationalism would have come about 
 in our time or, at longest, in that of our 
 children had it not been for the exist- 
 ence in certain nations largely, and to 
 some extent in most nations, of castes 
 whose continuance in power was in- 
 volved in the preservation of nation- 
 alistic jealousies and conflicts. These 
 kingly, oligarchic, and militaristic beings 
 were in control of the machinery of gov- 
 ernment in Russia, Germany, Austria, 
 and to a considerable extent in England, 
 Italy, and France. In the last three their 
 power was a rapidly waning thing, of no 
 
 180 
 
AFTER THE WAR 
 
 particular importance except for the fact 
 that they were still managing the inter- 
 national and diplomatic relationships of 
 those countries. Before the war, to a 
 very large extent, perhaps to a greater 
 extent than our own country, these three 
 countries were internally democracies. 
 Internationally they were still controlled 
 by the ancient castes. In all six lands 
 the people themselves were eminently 
 friendly over their borders with their 
 neighbors. They were rapidly becoming 
 so friendly that they would soon have in- 
 sisted upon their governments becom- 
 ing parties to a world federation which 
 should have been the first step in fusing 
 into one people the nations of at least 
 the Occident. 
 
 It so happened that in 19 14 there 
 came to a head certain differences be- 
 tween the nations, largely economic dif- 
 
 181 
 
RIGHT AND WRONG 
 
 ferences in the Balkans between Russia 
 and Germany. The governing castes 
 which managed these countries smashed 
 their nations into war and forced their 
 unwilling but docile peoples with them. 
 Then the German military caste, with 
 no consultation of the German people, 
 decided to violate Belgium. In other 
 words, they determined to ignore those 
 international treaties which were the 
 early expression of the coming interna- 
 tional federation. By this action Ger- 
 many made plain to the world its nega- 
 tion, at the command of the ruling class, 
 of that internationalism which appar- 
 ently had been inevitable. Using its 
 mightily efficient organization this caste 
 had miseducated Germany for genera- 
 tions and now misled and coerced Ger- 
 many. England and France perceived 
 that this nation, gone foaming mad 
 
 182 
 
AFTER THE WAR 
 
 against international fraternity, was a 
 world menace demanding drastic op- 
 position. In self-defence these nations 
 joined with Russia to oppose the Ger- 
 man masters. Of course Russia at this 
 period of the war was not one whit bet- 
 ter than her Teutonic foe. She was less 
 efficient, but equally vicious. 
 
 Meanwhile America was outside the 
 struggle, and would have been glad to 
 keep out. It is a question whether or 
 not she ought to have seen the true na- 
 ture of the struggle and enlisted against 
 Germany from the very beginning. At 
 any rate, she did not, and she did not 
 desire so to do. However, the German 
 caste, either through an almost unbe- 
 lievable stupidity or through a deliberate 
 desire to make us fight that we might 
 be of less aid to the Allies in furnishing 
 supplies for war, adopted toward the 
 
 i8 3 
 
RIGHT AND WRONG 
 
 United States a policy of frightfulness, 
 contempt, and hypocrisy mixed in about 
 equal portions which finally became in- 
 tolerable. We were forced to enter the 
 war or acknowledge the right of Ger- 
 many to fight irresponsibly against the 
 world. We chose the former alterna- 
 tive. Fortunately for the clearing-up of 
 the international issue the Russian peo- 
 ple grew tired of their own Kaiserism 
 and militarism and shook them off, 
 emerging a free people, at almost the 
 same moment. 
 
 Such is the situation to-day. The 
 Germanic nations are left the only ones 
 in the Occidental world where the peo- 
 ple do not rule. The necessity is to fight 
 Germany so insistently that at length the 
 peoples of the Central Powers may wake 
 up to a realization of their bondage, cast 
 Wilhelm and the Junkers after Nicholas 
 
 184 
 
AFTER THE WAR 
 
 and his Grand Dukes, and assume con- 
 trol of their own affairs. Then, and not 
 till then, will democracy be safe and in- 
 ternationalism possible. Thus, and thus 
 only, can civilization be made secure 
 from a nation's running amuck under 
 the domination of a caste determined 
 to preserve its privileges even if their 
 perpetuation can be secured only by con- 
 flict with the internationalistic trend of 
 the twentieth century. 
 
 When the end shall come, and the 
 Central Powers are freed from their 
 own master classes, we shall have once 
 more the Occidental nations of Europe 
 and the Americas free to continue such 
 fraternizing and the development of 
 such common economic interests as shall 
 make easy the natural historical devel- 
 opment of the international State. The 
 Orient will still be outside, the Orient 
 
 i8 5 
 
RIGHT AND WRONG 
 
 whose ability to become democratic is 
 still the gravest question of the future. 
 If, however, a conflict between East and 
 West is to come in the days ahead of us, 
 — which may God forbid, — the West 
 shall face the peril one people united 
 either for world war or for world peace. 
 Internationalism, the creation of a 
 pan-national grouping, wherein democ- 
 racy may come to flower politically and 
 industrially, this is the end for which 
 the present conflict is being waged. The 
 Junkers of the world are ever seeking 
 to debase the issues involved. Even in 
 America a certain powerful group of 
 hate-mongering, imperialistic pseudo- 
 patriots is ever trying to turn our Cru- 
 sade into a petty conflict for our good at 
 the cost of a subject and crushed mid- 
 Europe. The issue, however, must be 
 seen clearly. From this war we shall go 
 
 186 
 
AFTER THE WAR 
 
 on to one of two things, International- 
 ism or Chaos. There will be no via media. 
 The sis : The Church should prophesy that 
 this war must be waged on behalf of inter- 
 national democracy and for no lesser, baser 
 reason whatsoever, and that as long as it 
 is fought for such a purpose by the free peo- 
 ples of the earth, it is a good war. God 
 grant we may fight it like Christian men! 
 Let the Church's voice sound forth with ?io 
 uncertain ring. Then shall the whole world 
 know that the determined shoutings of the 
 democratic combatants are but the echoes of 
 a thundering cry of the angelic hosts, pro- 
 claiming, "Deus vultf" Then shall we 
 hear above the thunder of the guns and the 
 moanings of the wounded the cry of those 
 who over Bethlehe?ns plain sang, " Peace 
 on earth to men of good will." 
 
 THE END 
 
CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS 
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