^^Hf They Mib THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES GIFT Sift U.C. Library Why They Fail By REV, A. T, ROBINSON, A.M. Broadway Publishing Co. 835 Broadway : New York Copyright, 1912, hy A. T. Robinson To the faithful Friends of the Experiment, and all Parents and Teachers zvhose fingers are, ziilly-nilly, ivcaving the high destinies of To-morrow under the skulls of the dear boys and girls of To-day, this book is re- spectfully dedicated. 630974 CONTENTS Chapter I Things as They Are 9 Chapter II The Confusion of Tongues 51 Chapter III Why They Fail 79 Chapter IV The Remedy 115 Chapter V A Contribution 163 Chapter VI Conclusion 212 AUTHOR'S NOTE No apology is needed for the candid discussion of a great theme. We beHeve that elaborated in following pages to be of vital importance to all true parents and patriots. The writer is not alone in this opinion for some of the brightest minds between the two oceans, both in Canada and the United States, have thought the theme of this discussion abundantly worth while. Amongst these mention is here gratefully made of a devoted elder brother, J. M. Robinson, of Naramata, B. C, sometimes called "the Cecil Rhodes of the Okanagan Valley"; His Honor, G. H. V. Bulyea, B.A., L.L.D., Governor of Alberta, and that animated sunbeam — one of the last Sachems of the great tribe of humorists inhabiting this country in the closing decades of the Nineteenth Century, whose pens and voices moved the world to laughter and tears by turns, Rev. Robert J. Burdette, D.D., pastor emeritus of Temple Baptist Church, Los Angeles, who writes as follows: Pasadena, Gal. My dear friend Robinson : "Good stuff?" Why, the first chapter makes a man want to read the whole book. You have something to say, and — Man ! you do know how to say it ! Your book has red blood in it. It seems to me you should be able to pick and choose among the publishers. The very titles of your chapters make a good booklet for a man with a mind. To the print-shop with your MS J It's timely as twelve o'clock. / like it! Mrs. Robinson's verdict isn't a wife's partiality — it is a woman's judgment — and that woman Portia! Cordially yours, Robert J. Burdette. Santa Monica, Cal. Why They Fail Foreword to Chapter I "It seems almost incredible that such lawlessness and outrage and chicanery can exist in America — many of the outrages would disgrace Russia or Turkey — yet every episode related here has ten prototypes in life, in fact, not of twenty years ago, or yesterday, or the day before yesterday, but to-day." Agnes C. Laut. In "Freebooters of the Wilderness." CHAPTER I THINGS AS THEY ARE One day not long since the two following questions were sent out by the writer to five hundred of the leading business men between Winnipeg and Vic- toria : 1. How many people would you be willing to trust with $10,000 in the dark, i. e., assuming they could get away with it and no one be the wiser? 2. What proportion of our English-speaking population are in your judgment manly men, a manly man being thus defined : A manly man is a man who stands squarely on his own feet, looks the world steadily in the e3^e, "plays fair" in every game he enters, holds up his end of the burden 10 WHY THEY FAIL entailed by civilized society, is magnanimous in vic- tory, and in defeat takes his poison without a whimper? Of the replies received, the average of votes showed 18.91 per cent for honesty, and 23.01 per cent for manliness. That is, it is the general opin- ion in that group of men that of the population of western Canada, only 18.91 per cent can be trusted in the dark with $10,000; i. e., are unblench- ingly upright in character, and that only about 23.01 per cent are characterized by manliness as that trait is described above. A few pessimists (to be found in every such drag-net that was ever let down) reckoned one per cent would be about right in both cases. One of that stripe, who is not without a saving sense of humor, outdid them all by inti- mating that there was only one man in Canada who could fill that bill in his opinion, but his modesty forbade his mentioning the name. On the other hand, one gentleman who is in public life and evi- dently takes no chances on furnishing ammunition for the enemy's guns, gave ninety-nine per cent and seventy-five per cent as his estimates, while another, quite patently a cheerful optimist, simply thought any man who would ask such questions as that "ought to be taken in charge by his friends, if he has any." It is instructive to observe that these replies came from men who are "hard up against it" in every-day life. They reflected, not the opinions of preachers, teachers and editors, but opinions of cabinet ministers, princes of the business world and smaller tradespeople of the standard commercial lines, who would be most likely to have picked their wisdom from the thorny brambles of experience, and the verdicts given were not given hastily, some honest souls of the Puritan brand of conscientious- WHY THEY F'Ain 11 ness having chewed the end of reflection for weeks before venturing to say anything. Of course no one possessed of a spoonful of brains would presume to say that any man, or any number of men, can answer those questions correctly. The Omniscient alone can do that. But there is some- thing in numbers. The collective opinion is the hope of democracy. The law of averages comes in to pare down the crudities of individual judgment, so that nine times out of ten what five hundred sane men think is bound to be more nearly correct than what one may think — with all due deference to the tenth time when one man is right against the world. One thing more should be said. It will be observed that the information was sought from the representative business men of western Canada. This for two reasons — because the author's home was at that time at Summerland, in the beautiful Okanagan Valley, now world-famous for the quality of its climate, its scenery and its fruit, and partly because the general average of honesty is perhaps higher in western Canada than it is anywhere else on the continent at the present time. The land is settled for the most part by the hardy, adventurous, ag- gressive type which scorns weakness and meanness. Line-fence law-suits are unknown, and petty ac- tions-at-law are very uncommon. As in Alaska the miners used to leave their golddust lying about in unlocked cabins, so in the Canadian West doors are left unlocked and things are left lying about in a way calculated to raise the hair of an eastern man. So is the way of the frontier, for, "East is East and West is West." This is not saying that when the West is as old as eastern Canada it will be any better. It may be far worse. Again it may not be unfair to infer that this in- 12 WHY THEY FAIL duction is symptomatic of conditions in the Great Republic, for if western Canada has a higher level of integrity than eastern Canada, Canada as a whole must be conceded to have a level of integrity as much higher than that of the United States as its own is lower than that of England and Scotland, and if these things be done in the green tree what shall be done in the dry? No one who is familiar with conditions on both sides of the water and on both sides of the forty-ninth parallel of latitude will deny this. Canada's graft- ers and would-be grafters are cooing doves and sucking babes when compared with the gentlemen south of the line. What little they know they got on their visits to New York and other large centres, and what little they know they find it particularly hard to practice over there. Two things must be said here, though : One, that the Canadian people have had their eyes opened lately to the drift of things by reason of the pub- licity crusades of the American magazines; the other that Canada is relatively small and compara- tively homogeneous. When she attains a popula- tion ofover ninety millions with large admixtures of foreign blood she may be as bad or even worse, which Heaven forefend. But who can tell? Like causes produce like results. Independently, however, of all imperfect and hasty generalizations and inferences, who will afifirm that in these United States things are as they should be, or even as they might reasonably be expected to be? The most cursory study of every-day affairs arouses a suspicion which subsequent investigation does not serve to allay, that there is a serious and wide-spread degeneration of the moral fibre in the warp and woof of society. Were the delinquency merely sporadic and evanescent it might be re- WHY THEY FAIL 13 garded lightly, no matter how atrocious the lapse might be, since we have not yet attained the golden age of moral perfection when evil shall be no longer with us. But the fact is that evils are apparently increasing beyond the ratio of compatibility with the nation's health. There must always be cases of physical illness and we can stand so many pneumo- cocci, streptococci and tubercle bacilli ; but when their numbers and distribution pass a certain limit uneasiness gives place to implacable hostility; the people's health officers get busy, and woe to the luckless wight who dares to gainsay or resist. The evil is dealt with promptly and efficiently and it doesn't make any difference who is concerned. Pauper or plutocrat, he is quarantined for smallpox and all the people rise up and say, ''Amen." But with regard to our moral and economic plagues it is not quite so. Theoretically the law of quarantine is as clear and just for the latter as for the former, but the difficulty is to give effect to the moral health regulations. Voices of alarm, of pro- test, are undoubtedly raised in the land. Their call is a clarion call, long and loud ; but somehow it fails to do more than galvanize the public into a transient and ebullient activity. Like the early cloud and the morning dew the righteous indignation soon passes away. Of twenty towns which abolished the saloon, eighteen were found the year following to have elected mayors in sympathy with the liquor business. There seems to be left little or no power of persistent and effective rebuke, but rather an easy-going tolerance of crimes against the public weal which would probably have been better dealt with by the rude and irregular but mightily effective methods of shot-gun and hemp as in other days. A sad and significant thing is that our Sir Gala- hads have not been better sustained. While all of 14 WHY THEY FAIL fair mind admit the justice of the cause they plead, not all find grace to follow them to the charge. Many millions nod emphatic assents, and if assents would clean out the nests of evil-doers the work would soon be done ; but unfortunately they won't, and only a comparativel}' few thousands of Gideons are found to gather themselves together to the battle. Even the voice of the prophet of God, once so imperative, is now become to the nation as little more than the "sound of one who has a pleasant voice and can play well on an instrument." If these things be true then it would seem to be high time to institute an enquiry into causes, to consider candidly any hypothesis and remedy which may reasonably be advanced, and withal to make sure of digging deep about the very roots of things with the unsparing hand of the husbandman whose best tree is menaced underground. Few will be so foolish as to think or say there is nothing, or even little of good left in the nation's life. To take up the refrain of the poet of the Irish melodies and wail out as some are wont to do : "There's nothing bright but Heaven, And false the light on Glory's plume As fading hues at even. And Love and Hope and Beauty's bloom Are blossoms gathered for the tomb ; There's nothing bright but Heaven " is simply pietistic pessimism, which is a shade more irrational and vastly less agreeable than the view of the cheerful optimist who sees, or professes to see, nothing wrong. Calamity howlers who howl merely for the mournful joy they find in doing so are not desirable companions to have with us, and just so long as "this sad old earth must borrow its WHY THEY FAIL 15 mirth," because it "has sorrow enough of its own" — just so long will our rose-water and nepenthe friends who see all things in the rainbow arch of their own ardent enthusiasms find a warm place in our hearts. But the very warmth which the cheerful, fatuous and ever-lovable optimist brings to us proves the chill that is in our hearts. We rejoice in the November sun because we are cold. The true path- way lies between the pessimism which gives up discouraged on the one hand, and the foolish opti- mism which does nothing on the other, because everything is getting on finely as it is. Aristotle's golden mean is much to be desired. A sane view which takes in things as they are is the best prepa- ration for therapeutic treatment of conditions. Such a view at once reveals the wealth of good in the nation's life at the present time. The great Hartford humorist in cynical moments may talk confidentially in poisoned adjectives of what he was pleased to term "the damned human race," but most of us would rather adopt the phrase of which the cultured and scholarly sociologist, Dr. C. R. Henderson, is so fond, and speak of "the climbing majority," for the leaven of the Christ spirit is everywhere in evidence. A century ago the world was egoistic body and soul. Carey, the apostle of modern missions, was lampooned as a fool and a fanatic even by those who bore the sacred name of the Supreme Missionary. Religion was for the most part a form, a fad, or a cloak. Lord Melbourne, stalking indignantly out of church during the serv- ice muttering that "things have come to a pretty pass when religion invades the sphere of private life," is typical of the body of public sentiment in that day. At the same time slaves clanked their chains and nursed their horrors in hopeless silence; 16 WHY THEY FAIL disease, filth and death held high carnival in prisons filled with people confined there for the most part because they had been unfortunate in meeting their financial obligations ; women and small children wore out their lives in exhausting toil in foul mines and fouler factories ; "wine and wassail" were so common that the grossest inebriety marked not only society generally but the very priests of Christ as well. And as for political corruption, it was but a short time before that that Horace Walpole, the statesman, could say "every man has his price," and a little earlier still, as Lord Macaulay informs us, that the very navy of Britain, the protecting aegis of the "tight little isle," was so helplessly in the grip of grafters that the very ships of the line were deflected to the carrying of private merchan- dise, while the one hope of safety for the crew in rough weather lay in getting the land-owning, gentleman-captain so intoxicated he could not go on deck in order that one of the seamen might have a chance to take his place at the helm. Thus we see that however recent the word "graft" may be the thing itself is neither new nor indigen- ous to American soil. It bloomed luxuriantly long before we had existence as a nation and its rankest growth came from a hard soil of unadulterated human selfishness. Altruism, which exists to-day in a thousand institutions of charity and in ten thous- and laws for the amelioration of social conditions, ranging from the merciful international restrictions of the grim dogs of war by the Red Cross Society down to the protection of the mongrel cur in Para- dise Lane, was then a word known only to dilettanti philosophers, who nourished their intellectual pride and spent their strength in wrangling over the finely sublimated attenuosities of metaphysics and the elusive subjectivities of moral distinctions. WHY THEY FAIL 17 Yet in spite of all this g-lorious advance upward in the spiral of human progress there is somewhat against us. If, looking backward, we are vastly to the good, looking forward we have fallen painfully short. Our day is not as theirs. We sin against light. Twilight is one thing; the full blaze of twentieth-century knowledge is quite another. We must be judged by those standards of information and opportunity which characterize our day. And who shall say, judging by such a metewand, that we are what we might reasonably be expected to be? One hundred years ago in aristocratic old Eng- land, the masses were not enfranchised. They were not free. The peerage dominated both Church and State. We have no feudal institutions, we have no established church ; we do have every necessary in- strument of political and economic freedom, and yet we are the slaves of corporate greed and groups of vile conspirators beside whom Cataline stands forth as a patriot. We have the light and the power and the opportunity to be free, to be clean, yet the body politic is full of sores, needless sores, un- sightly sores, intolerable sores. The most cursory survey of our common life makes this painfully evident. If we look, for in- stance, at the nation's life as it manifests itself in the heart-beat of our chambers of legislation, what do we see? Theoretically and popularly legislators are the servants of the people. As a matter of fact, are they? "Peer" was once "par," an equal; even so is the jest, "your obedient servant" in the official docu- ments of our day. The servants we exalt to do our bidding stand on our necks, count it condescension to speak to many of their electors on the street, and in scores of instances busy themselves chiefly in lining their own nests and those of their friends with our feathers. And for all this, as one excited 18 WHY THEY FAIL protestant put it one night on the platform, we are supposed to "kiss the hand that kicks us." The wealthy gentleman of ancient Athens counted it an honor to be permitted to fit out a trireme, oars, sails, paint and all, for the defense of the republic, but in our day the wealthy gentle- man of New York, Chicago or Massachusetts would rather cast a golden lariat over the legislators of the republic to lead them around for his own private use. Let a man of affairs speak. The man is Herbert E. Miles, a manufacturer of farming implements and he is speaking through the Review of Reviews (Vol. 1909, p. 82). After inti- mating that the secret of the trusts lies in "the criminally unjust tariff drawn up by men grossly ignorant of that complex phase of economics," while Germany had a body of twenty experts employed for twenty years in preparing a tariff, "consulting in that time two thousand other experts in an inquiry that was exhaustive, non-partisan and semi-judicial," and changed in only one particular by the Reichstag after months of deliberation, he goes on to say : "The Dingley committee had among its members only four men, Messrs. Dingley, Payne, Dalzell and Hopkins, a newspaper editor and three attorneys and Mr. McMillan of the minority, with previous experience. That men so inexperienced should have hastily made a tariff for this country was worse than a blunder — it was a crime. They only made a great, blind jab at the task. They began wrong by taking classifications more than a generation old, inapplicable to our time, having neither knowledge nor time to consider that important phase of the subject adequately. Consequently we have had thirty thousand lawsuits on classifications alone, nine-tenths of which might have been avoided. They put together in one classification, for instance, but- WHY THEY FAIL 19 tons, stoves, electric fans, revolvers, nails, dress trim- mings, railway cars, enamelled portraits, 'cannon for war and crosses for churches.' With the en- actment of this law the United States Government went into the trust-making business up to its eyes. It was controlled by no guiding principles, no rule of measurement. Rates were doled out like liquor at a revel. "Congress in its refusal to establish the machinery necessary to the securing and collation of exact and underlying information in the making of the com- ing tariff, rests only upon a bull-headed insistence upon ancient habit, and back of this insistence is seen the ugly vision of trusts, a greater part of whose revenues comes from the excesses of loosely- made tariffs. . . . Take my own business for in- stance : A twenty per cent duty would more than cover the difference in cost of production here and abroad. The duty is, however on many products, forty-five per cent. In this prohibitive duty lies a Congressional permit amounting to an invitation that those engaged in my industry consolidate, form a trust under this Congressional permit which de- livers the home market to us exclusively and add to our prices the difference between the necessary twenty per cent of production and the forty-five per cent given in the law. Intelligent business men are to be expected to make use of an advantage like this especially granted by Congress, and this is just what every one of your big trusts has done. . . . The Standard Oil Company, for instance, which heads the list, has a total wage cost of six per cent, while the duty is for the main part ninety- nine per cent, or fifteen times the wage cost, and this remember, first given in the so-called free trade Wilson law, and continued in the Dingley law. The Heedlessness of this rate is evidenced by the fact 20 WHY THEY FAIL that this trust shipped abroad last year $78,228,819, selling it on the international market, as the Bureau of Corporations discloses, at thirty-five to sixty-five per cent less price than charged our domestic con- sumers. The tariff fattens this one trust to the extent of $35,000,000 a year, and yet Congressional 'dignity and economy' propose to leave the con- sumers open to dozens of like abuses rather than spend $100,000 per year on a safe-guarding com- mission." And so on with the Steel Trust, the Linseed Oil Trust, the Locomotive Trust and a long list of others. Now^, as has been intimated, our legislators are not supposed to be mean men. Presumably they are the Sauls of the Great Tribe, chosen to do for us because they stand head and shoulders above their fellows, because each one is to those who know him best "the expectancy and rose of state," if not "the glass of fashion and the mould of form." And yet — and yet — how many of them, judging by these tariff tokens, can be trusted with $10,000 of the government money in the dark, i. e., assuming that they could get away with it and nobody be the wiser? Charity suggests that the most of them know not what they do ; that they are led like sheep to the slaughter by the party leaders; that they dare not come back to their constituents empty-handed from the general raid on the public plunder, and yet, if they are not good little boys and do not stand pat and do just as they are told in the Big House they won't get any pie ; and so there they are in a very tight place indeed, the one way out being apparently to do as they are told by the elder brothers of the party and let them take the responsibility. All of which may be and undoubtedly is true, but as the patch for the "honesty" burn has to be WHY THEY FAIL 21 taken from the "manliness" leg, the skin-grafting on the honorable gentleman's character seems to be of that doubtful sort illustrated by the Irishman who would make his blanket longer by cutting off six inches at the bottom and sewing it on at the top. Mr. Thomas Lawson affirms in public print that the members of the Massachusetts Legislature are bought up like fish, like decayed fish in the market. Then he says it again more loudly, in large type, so that all may hear. And no man lays hands on him. Why? Evidently because there must have been more truth than poetry in the statement. And there are not wanting evidences of like conditions elsewhere. Who has not heard of "the sneak" or "the joker," that clause, comma or other device slipped sur- reptitiously into a bill with a view to nullifying the whole thing? Maybe it is a comma that is left out — ostensibly the printer's error, as in the famous case providing for the free entry of fruit plants, where the failure to insert a comma between "fruit" and "plants" cost the country hundreds of thousands of dollars in loss of customs receipts; or may be it is the alleged misprint of a word, as in another case where the sale of a piece of property to the lozvcst bidder was authorized. Legislation swarms with this kind of chicanery, which in principle is wholesale forgery and daylight robbery. To take what does not belong to me is theft. How it is done or from whom does not alter the essential nature of the transaction. To steal from a poor man may cause more misery than to steal from a million- aire, but the offense is at bottom the same. Yet it is strange how many people there are who seem to think they would be doing God service if they helped themselves to things belonging to some 22 WHY THEY FAIL wealthy citizen, corporation or the government — especially the government. As if stealing from a million people is any the less stealing than stealing from one ! By whatever devil's logic we may seek to justify such a transaction, happily conscience, that priceless watchdog of our highest welfare, always bays a protest, which protest we do well to heed. As Attorney-General Bonaparte, of the Roose- velt Administration, observed, "The underlying evil in our national affairs is simply dishonesty," but it would be a mistake to think that our legislators have a monopoly of it. It is easy to throw mud at the man on the pedestal. He makes a good tar- get ; but there is never such a target bespattered with mud but a good many dirty fingers may be found in the vicinity. The old proverb which says "like priest, like people" should be amended to read, "like people, like legislators," for it is only a shallow interpretation of life which does not look on law- maker and law-administrator as an effect rather than a cause, a resultant of the forces that made them rather than a guiding inspiration of the nation's character. One-third of the electors of Adams County, Ohio, were indicted for receiving bribes in the election of 1910. Mr. La Follette's election expenses were $4,000.00, while his opponent's were $400,000.00, and in another riding the contest cost one of the candidates $107,000.00. For what? The bad bo}^ comes from a bad home, and if little Billy is shifty, sneaky and strongly disposed to be light- fingered, it doesn't require any Sherlock Holmes sagacity to form a conception of his immediate pa- ternal ancestor. After all, it may be we are too thoughtless in our abuse of those who sit in the seats of the mighty. We do not have sufficient sympathy for them. The man on the masthead knows wind pressures of which we are, it may be fortunately for us, ignorant. WHY THEY F'Ain 23 Half the time we should be praying for these men instead of abusing them. The chances are they put up a far bigger struggle with themselves in the effort to do right than we know anything about. It is quite probable that few if any of them would be untrue to their trust if the currents which swirl about their feet were not so fierce. It is equally probable that nine-tenths of us if we were in their place would do no better and may be not half so well. The fact is, it is hard for these men and for us all to do right, and the trouble is in ourselves — a fatal weakness due chiefly to the one fatal over- sight in our youthful education, with which it will be the special business of this treatise to deal later on. Meanwhile, let it be reaffirmed that our men in public life are not necessarily "sinners above all that dwell in Jerusalem." Most of the men who look on would be as bad but that they lack oppor- tunity. If it were not so they would not allow others to do it in their name and at their expense. Just so long as the electors tolerate crookedness in public life, just so long will crookedness of infinite variety abound, human nature remaining as it is; and the electors are likely to tolerate it for an indefinite time — until such time as we can produce a race of men who will find themselves much more able to do the good they knozv than it is our good fortune to have produced up to the present moment. It is hard for the stream to reach higher than its source. Clean electors will soon make clean Con- gressmen and clean politics. At present the Con- gressman often finds that when he would do good, evil is present with him in the form of electoral friends, who apparently think they have elected him to look after their especial interests, regardless of his country's prior claims. Theodore Roosevelt, whose life strikingly exem- 24 WHY THEY FAIL plifies those qualities for the development of which this book pleads, in an article on "A Remedy for some Forms of Selfish Legislation," in the Outlook (Aug. 6, 1910) refers to another article by a Congressman of ten years' standing, showing the reason why the "pork barrel" special tariff favors and private pen- sion bills became law, the reason being that the dictum of the constituency to Congressmen is, get all you can for US. There are no restrictions upon his methods of getting it. "This serious charge against the American peo- ple," says Mr. Roosevelt, "for which there is un- questionably too much justification, the author pro- ceeds to substantiate by relating some of his own experiences with his constituents, which, however surprising they may seem to the general reader, will seem almost commonplace to all who know how the average constituency does, in acual prac- ice, treat its Congressman. "While the Payne-Aldrich tarifif law was under consideration in May, 1909, he received a letter from a powerful commercial association in his district urging him by a unanimous resolution to use every efifort to have the duties on three products named increased one cent on one, and one-half cent per pound on the other two respectively. He got the half-cent on the two and prevented reduction on the other A year later when the clamor arose against the bill, the same association denounced the bill as 'the most iniquitous measure ever enacted by Con- gress' and requested him to reply by letter why he had voted to pass the bill. On producing their letter they dropped their demand for an explanation. At the same time a leading paper of his district, while the bill was under debate, editorially commended him for his 'intelligent efforts' in behalf of the dis- trict and a year later denounced him as one of 'the WHY THEY FAIL 25 legislative banditti responsible for the Payne- Aid- rich measure.' " Another illustration cited in the article concerned the minister of a large and wealthy church who wrote him to get a pension for , a dependent member of his congregation. He admits the man deserted during the second year of the war but adds, "There must be some way the matter can be covered up and be given a pensionable status. Everyone seems to be able to get a pension. Why not he?" And this is no isolated example for the Congessman adds that he has "hundreds of such letters filed away. So has every other Congress- man." Another, according to the article, wanted his name put on the free mailing list for all public documents. Investigation showed he wanted the several tons of paper per month involved in his modest request, to use as raw material for his waste paper factory. It is said that more old soldiers are now drawing a pension after the lapse of forty-four years than were mustered out after the peace at Richmond. A miracle truly— either of graft or of longevity. "You pays your money an' you takes your choice." No wonder Professor Frank Giddings should say, "We are witnessing to-day, beyond question, the decay, — perhaps not permanent, but at any rate the decay — of republican institutions. No man in his right mind can deny it." And what better is it in our municipal govern- ment? The administration of our city affairs has long been the scandal of the world. It is hardly possible that corruption could have attained to greater lengths in purely heathen lands than it has reached in this land of open Bibles and Christian temples. To judge simply by some of the doings 26 WHY THEY FAIL in our great cities, Zeus, Bacchus and Venus might be their chief presiding divinities rather than the pure and beneficent triune Jehovah. What shame of ancient Rome is there which cannot be paralleled within our borders under protection of our police? If there are deplorable and reprehensible lapses and abuses in the legislative halls of our nation some poor stagger at extenuation might be made by refer- ring to the vastness and variety of the interests involved, coupled with the limited time available for the actual transaction of business; but our cities are not so situated. They are sizable propositions in every way. Their sons have grown up in them, know them well and could in a few hours have first- hand information, if they so desired, on almost every point under investigation. The afifairs of a city even as large as New York are not so large that a score of competent men could not handle them easily were the crooked places made straight. ]\Iany a business has a turnover as large as that of our metropolitan expenditures. London, which is nearly twice the size of New York, is governed honestly. Business men of acknowledged ability and integrity are in charge of its interests, and no one dreams of charging malfeasance of ofifice. Errors of judg- ment may be charged, are charged, and that with great spirit, but crookedness is not even hinted at. And if that can be done in London it should be done in New York where the public debt has reached the enormous total of a thousand million dollars, or within about thirty-two millions of being as large as the interest-bearing debt of the nation with its army, its navy, its wars and its ninety millions of people. But it is not done in New York. Boss Tweed, stealing New York City Hall and then renting it to the citizens at so much per, is the most significant joke of the Nineteenth Century, That was a good WHY THEY FAIL 27 many years ago, before electric light and wireless had come into the world to tell us about what other people are doing. But the more general dif- fusion of light and intelligence does not seem to have much disturbed the rats in Tammany Hall. It is even probable that if Boss Tweed could come back to his old haunts he would find that his suc- cessors in ofhce had vastly bettered his instructions. Mr. George Gibbe Turner, writing in McClure's Magazine (1909) says, in speaking of Tammany's control of New York : "From 1894 to the present day — fifteen years — it (the Democratic Party) has been in charge of New York two-thirds of the time. In all that period, with one doubtful exception, it has never had one majority of the popular vote at a city election that was not obtained through the votes of trained bands of 'repeaters' composed largely of professional criminals. The history of this arti- ficial control of a population of four million people and an annual expenditure of one hundred fifty million dollars, and its disastrous results, is strik- ing and important. . . . The government of the second largest city in the world, when the system is in full working order, depends at bottom upon the will of the criminal population — principally thieves and pimps. The Eighteenth Century gov- ernments founded on mercenary troops offer mild examples of social decadence as compared with this." If we cross the continent to the western gateway of the nation we find in San Francisco a state of affairs that in 1907 at least was not very much better. There the grafting oil seemed to have diiTused itself till every cog in the wheels of busi- ness was smeared with it. Hardly a wheel would move without it. It became the conditio sine qua Z8 WHY THEY FAIL non of conducting business at all. The "itching pahn" did not follow the prosperous; it effectively blocked their way till it was sufficiently greased. Save in the veneer of politeness with which it was done and that the thieves wore the garb of the people, the hold-up did not differ essentially from that of the highway robber. But that mattered little to the loser, whose one recourse was appar- ently to raise his prices and to take it out of the next wretch who came along to the doomed city. Mr. Lincoln Steffens whose long probe has profit- ably explored more than one grievous ulcer under the galled withers of the people, says, in the Ameri- can Magazine for 1908: "The 'Fight Trust' was one of the schemes by which the vices of the city were being organized and brought under orderly and profitable control. The supervisors used to grant permits for the prize fights. The several sporting rings quarrelled over the privilege till Reuf and the mayor brought to- gether the leaders into a company which was to have a monopoly of prize fighting. The other vice grafts were saloons, bawdy houses, gambling joints, slot machines and common crimes like burglaries, highway robberies, pocket-picking, etc." To that list he adds on the strength of the in- vestigation conducted by Mr. Heney, a list of larger game— "Light," "Telephone," "Street Railways," "Real Estate," and goes on to say : "There was more. Lonergan had the milk graft permitting favored dairymen to sell milk that wasn't necessarily 'pure,' especially to hospitals, for he let this privilege as chairman of the hospital committee. Mike Coffee, as chairman of the com- mittee on printing, had a rake-off on printers' sup- plies; Nicholaus, as chairman of 'Furniture' had ten per cent on all 'furnishing' bills, and so on. This WHY THEY FAIL 29 was the custom in San Francisco and it is the custom in most cities and states to have each com- mittee represent a graft. And that, by the way, is why we see our legislators fighting so often to be assigned to preferred committees. We despise all this political graft, but it must be understood that this is one of the ways by which the big organized grafts pay our representatives to betray us. Every traitor must get 'his,' as Gallagher illustrates : Having no committee graft all his own the president of the board received ten per cent on all bills which he O. K.'d for collection for all supplies ! What are the big grafts in which they all shared? Look back over the list: Vice, gas, telephone, street railways, and real estate speculation." And so on with the other great centres of population. Boston's Good Government League in its first re- port laid its finger on one leak of a million dollars. Chicago, dominated and despoiled for years by an illiterate ward heeler, John Caughlin, whose twc bar-tending aldermanic satellites rejoiced in the names of "Hinky Dink" and "J^wney" Powers never failed him in any villainy, is another classic example of our civic misgovernment. The mainten- ance of its infernal royalty of graft cannot have cost that city less than fifty million dollars. Phila- delphia, Pittsburgh, Albany, St. Louis, New Orleans — but what's the use of citing others? Has not every city its own disgusting array of soiled linen to be washed, its people hypnotized by the glitter of infected wealth, or stupefied by the aromas of the party medicine bag; inane, helpless, knowing, protesting, making hideous grimaces, mimic ges- tures indicative of dire happenings later on, but apparently powerless to do anything, because, you see, that seventy-seven per cent of manliness can- not be reckoned on in a hard scrimmage. Well 30 WHY THEY FAIL might the editor of a leading magazine observe: "We who would enter the lists in behalf of the people betrayed by those appointed to represent them need not go far afield. The black trail of those who are disgracing representative govern- ment can be followed across the continent. Here the people's will is nullified by bribery; there a city council is honey-combed with graft ; further on a United States senator buys his election; another whole city government is devoted to robbing the city treasury ; and so on to the coast. Why do common honesty and the sense of civic rights so often and so conspicuously fail? Are men cheap? Is money dear? Or is the mere possession of it of more account than honor? Whatever the prem- ise, who is putting paltry dollars in the scale against men? The Cosmopolitan has undertaken to find out, and at the start of the trail has uncovered Privilege and Big Business at the capital o- the Empire State." "Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, Where wealth accumulates and men decay." Even that last refuge of the helpless, the Temple of Justice, has been unable to stand out against the general moral infection. Its own lofty ideals do not appear to have been for it a sufficient prophy- lactic. Plainly justice should be made easy for the poor, always the under dog in a fight. The scales should be held in an even hand. Right should be done in the courts if anywhere. But is right done in the courts and is justice made easy of access to those most likely to need it? Far from it. Justice is most apt to be accorded the man who can pay well for it. So numerous are the kinks and quirks of the law that, apart altogether from such hideous trav- PVHY THEY FAIL 31 esties of justice as are described by Judge Benjamin B. Lindsey, of Colorado, where the courts would appear to have been the menial servants of mori- bund corporations, a civil case, instead of being speedily tried on its merits, may be made to "drag a lengthening chain" till the plaintiff is financially worn out. As a simple matter of fact the processes of law are so interminable and costly that, unless the amount involved be a very large sum indeed, a man is very foolish to go to law to recover his rights. He would far better "bear the ills he has than fly to others he knows not of." Much has been written on the abuses of the criminal law. Among other things might be men- tioned Mr. Hugh C. Weir's article in The World To-day (June, 1909). It is both lucid and infor- mative, and it does not hesitate to brand the criminal law as the scandal of the civilized world. There seems to be no doubt about that. President Taft, as quoted, admits this when he says it is "a disgrace to civilization." Judge Amidon, of Dakota, adds his quota to much similar testimony when he says: "We have long since passed the time when it is possible to convict an innocent man. The problem which confronts us to-day is whether we can convict a guilty man." The judge may well make that remark when it can be said that only one murderer out of fifty ever suffers punishment of any kind. General Bingham, Police Commissioner of New York, and therefore a man not without experi- ence in such matters, assures us that "the law en- courages the criminal." Who will affirm that he has not some ground for his complaint when he finds that out of two hundred thousand cases, one hundred and sixty thousand get off with white-washed sentences or acquittals. Philadelphia in two years produces one hundred and thirty-five indictments for 32 WHY THEY FAIL murder, of which one hundred and twenty are abortive and fifteen are successfully carried into execution. Well may Judge Amidon make his remark about the difficulty of convicting the guilty, and the police get weary of catching birds of prey only to see them liberated by some invisible power higher up. A key of gold seems to unlock even the murderer's cell. Lawyers and judges seem more bent on pre- serving the forms of justice than on administering justice itself. Justice nine times out of ten is not only fallen in the street but kicked into the gutter, while legal gentlemen do their mental gymnastics and manifest their great acumen in discovering trifling spots no bigger than a fly-speck on the part of the prosecution, to the wonder and compulsion of an : dmiring court, which thereupon immediately grants freedom or a new trial. The records of the courts of Alabama, according to Mr. Weir, tell of one case in which a man indicted for murder was set free because the letter "i" in the word "malice" was left out in the indictment. Another murderer in a neighboring state, who had shot his victim in the heart, was set free because the clerk had misspelled the word "breast." In still another state, a nev/ trial was granted because the evidence was presented before the indictment, instead of vice versa. And in Seattle a man in whose office a set of teeth was found and who had, because of this and other clear evidence, been convicted of the illegal practice of dentistry, was granted a new trial on the ground that the indictment did not state whether the teeth were artificial or natural. So is the great cause of Justice bamboozled and befuddled. Justice is wounded in the house of her friends. She is bound hand and foot with a wilder- ness of tape in which the very lawyers and judges themselves would seem to have gotten all tangled WHY THEY FAIL 33 up in the frayed-out ends till their mental condi- tion would appear to have approximated that of the good old minister when he prayed, "O Lord, remember thy dust, and thy dust's dust, and thy dust's dust's dust." According- to our present jury system, none but idiots and recluses are, theoretically at least, elig- ible for service. If they have formed an opinion they are not competent to sit on the case. As if a man could escape having formed some kind of opinion regarding the crime with the news of which his whole world is ringing, or as if it were impos- sible for a sane man to change his opinion on the presentation of sufficient evidence to the contrary! Jury challenging has reached the status of a fine art in the legal profession, and long after the time that reparation should have been made we find the legal gladiators fighting over the men who are to sit on the case. The English courts tried, sent- enced and hanged the notorious Dr. Hawley Crip- pen in less time than it would have taken in America to empanel his jury. Such delays are unnecessary and vicious in their reflex influences. They encourage crime as much as delays of other kinds often discourage justice. It is no uncommon thing for cases to be dropped or dismissed because the witnesses on the case have died or moved away while waiting for the cause to be tried. The Donnelly-McArdle case in New York dragged on for twenty-three years. A suc- cession of forty judges sat on the case, of whom sixteen died without seeing a settlement, as also forty-two of the witnesses. Philadelphia has a rec- ord of two hundred fifty cases dropped in one year for that reason and it is said on good authority that the Court of Special Sessions of New York had five thousand cases awaiting trial at one time and 34 WHY THEY FAIL so were nearly six months behind with their work. The other extreme of over-working the courts might at the same time be seen in the petty courts of New York City, where the mills of Justice, grind- ing steadily with day and night shifts, railroaded the cases through with an average of six minutes to each. Indeed, the unofficial records of one court tell of one celebrated night in which the unfortunates were disposed of with an average of a minute to each, or one hundred cases tried and adjudged in one hundred minutes. Is it any wonder in view of these things that there should be manifested some disposition on the part of many people who have only common sense and the instinct of Justice to guide them, to take a turn at the administration of the law for themselves, in order to be real sure that it it administered? The wonder is rather that there have not been more out- breaks of the kind. Vigilance committees may make mistakes, but they can hardly have made more than have been made in the regular court pro- cedure, while their methods have been vastly more potent as a deterrent of crime. Judge Lynch is unknown where Justice is enthroned. Great Britain and Canada don't know what he looks like, for the simple reason that the courts protect. No one there thinks of crime going unpunished, once it is proven, and every policeman knows that every power the government possesses is behind him in the execu- tion of his task and whether the chase costs a thousand or a million doesn't really matter; the crime has to be dealt with. It is for that reason the "bad" men of our mining camps become good as pie on crossing the international boundary, and because of that a handful of mounted police have for years been able to maintain order over a terri- tory as large as that of ten countries of Europe. WHY. THEY FAIL 35 Statistics of our criminal procedure show that in 1885 there were 180S murders in the United States, 108 of the perpetrators of which were executed. Crime then advanced by steady progression far beyond the increase in population, till by 1904 the number of murders had grown to 8482. But while 6674 murderers were thus added to the list, all but eight of them escaped the gallows. Hence the reversion to the more primitive type of society — • where justice is administered by the tribe with scant attention to forms and processes; and hence the spectacle of 3337 lynchings in less than twenty years, of which 263? were of white men, according to Mr. Weir, and the balance negroes. And this in spite of the fact that we pay a billion and a half yearly in cold cash for the maintenance of order and lose an additional estimated three and a half bil- lions through the withdrawal of the army of justice from productive activity. Naturally where Justice is thrown down so read- ily and so hard in the legislatures and the courts, the interpretation of the divorce laws becomes very loose. Of course, the courts do not make the divorce laws, but the general looseness manifested in legislation and jurisprudence finds expression in laws that incline to laxity in morals and so it becomes easy to loose "what God hath joined together." This evil, as has often been remarked, strikes at the very roots of our civilization, which has its centre in the home, and its rapid growth of recent years has been a matter for grave apprehension on the part of all right-minded people. Heathen Japan is the only civilized nation in the world which is at all in the same class with us in this regard. We are by demerit raised to a very bad eminence. The United States statistical summary shows 945,625 divorces in twenty years (1887-1906), the rate of 36 WHY THEY FAIL increase over the previous two decades being nearly sixty-six per cent. From present indications within thirty-five years there will be one divorce for every marriage. The rate of increase in divorce as compared with the increase of population steadily continued till in the decade between 1890-1900 divorce had popula- tion beaten three times over. The sacred tie is dissolved for the most trivial reasons, and at least one case is on record where the trial, decree and subsequent remarriage of both parties was put through in thirty minutes. In Los Angeles and else- where last year one marriage for every four was invalidated. No wonder Mr. Brooke Adams should be con- Strained to say in the Atlantic Monthly: "Through divorce modern women assert and practically exer- cise the right of living with what men they please, as long as they please, and changing when they please, repudiating all obligations to anyone but themselves. The result has been the dissolution of the family in the sense that parental authority has nearly ceased as a constraining force in society. But parental authority has always been the source of all authority and the foundation upon which has rested the sanction of all coercive law. As the instinct of obedience is weakened by the decay of parental authority, so must the administration of the criminal law decay, and it has decayed." There are other symptoms which would also indi- cate that the stream of our national life is not so pure as it might be. The hard nature of monopo- lies and their evident disposition to over-reach and under-pay makes truer than ever Bobbie Burns' sentiment about man's inhumanity to man making countless thousands mourn. Of course we should not forget that these capitalists are in some meas- WHY THEY FAIL 37 lire creatures of their circumstances. We should not visit all our displeasure upon them, since back of them sits a board of directors, and a horde of stockholders howling for dividends. The old indi- vidual competition of the cobbler and the corner grocery has given place to group competition, that is all. So far as principle and intent go, the new is probably not a whit more "red in tooth and claw" than the old, but whereas the multiplied divisions of the old favored labor, the concentration of wit and wealth cripples it by giving almost absolute power to capital. The laborer has become simply a tool of production, to be cast aside for the slightest deficiency, as valuable engines go to the scrap heap immediately on the appearance of a better one. While, therefore, some sympathy should be shown for the capitalist, who, as surely as the lab- orer, is a cog in a wheel driven by powers beyond his control, the most lively sympathy should be given to those who are broken on the wheel — who, even when they toil receive no adequate recom- pense for their toil, but only such a pittance as will keep body and soul together, so they can work some more for the good of corporations — corpora- tions already grown fat upon the blood and brawn of millions made in the image of God, as certainly as were the directing officers of those corporations. The supreme peril of this nation lies in the pres- ent rapid and vast accumulation of capital in the hands of a few men. The world has never seen such a spectacle before. Something like a score of men absolutely control its foreign and domestic afifairs. This oligarchy is now entrenched and growing stronger every minute. When it chooses it can precipitate a panic. There is hardly a bank or a corporation which it could not cripple or break, should it choose to turn its baleful eye upon it. It 38 WHY THEY FAIL controls the transportation of this country and the banks, and anything- which controls those two fac- tors controls the nation. The bald fact is that we are not free. We are simply the economic servants of a small group of men whose unprincipled in- genuity in subverting legislators and courts, has diverted a million silver rivulets into the mighty current which now turns its mighty mill wheels. Any power which can precipitate a panic on de- positors, merchants and manufacturers without re- gard to natural causes, has those depositors, mer- chants and manufacturers, and those whom they employ, under its thumb. They are not free. And this is precisely what has happened to us in this, our day of boasted freedom. We are measurably free only as long as it is the pleasure of our masters of Wall Street to allow it. One act of insubordina- tion and the lash is drawn for the fool's back, as it was in the year of grace 1903, and as it will un- doubtedly be again. The Boston seer, Edward Bellamy, saw this day coming more than twenty years ago and foretold what would happen — the final revolt of a people goaded to desperation, and their violent seizure of that which by direct fraud and every indirection, had through the years been wrung from their reluctant hands. Surely it is the white teeth of the breakers ahead we see in the re- port of the Stanley Committee, showing that twenty- one directors and officers of the United States Steel Corporation are also directors in 213 other corpora- tions of which the total capital, surplus and funded debt amounts to $15,208,487,325. At the same time the total amount of money in circulation in the United States is only $3,284,152,496, with $3,621,117,239 in the Treasury. As the grinding of the faces of the poor and the dethronement of Justice preceded the downfall of WHY THEY FAIL 39 ancient Israel ; as the accumulation of vast wealth in few hands and its attendant vices with the cor- responding depression of the masses, disintegrated the mightiest republics of antiquity, so must the same causes now operating among us produce like results. Monkey dinners costing thousands, and eight thousand dollars a year or so for nurses, dent- ists and physicians to care for pug dogs while a few blocks away women starve, or bear the pangs of parturition without medical aid because of their dire poverty; feasts that eclipse Belshazzar's for splendor and orgies that shame the Bacchanals for vice ; shop girls who are forced to sell their virtue that their masters may keep up appearances in the fashionable rout, and factory men who sweat and drink the bitter waters of poverty, and die, in order that their master may build for himself monuments in cities he has never seen — all these things offend high Heaven and outrage that Divine Charity which regards the sparrow's fall, and feels for that con- summate flower of creation — man, who is made in the image of God and born to a destiny surpassing that of archangels. The rapid accumulation of wealth from the con- quest of vast natural resources and the pleasure and power manifestly attending its possession, have in turn served to obscure the higher things of life. Mammon is by far the most popular god in America. The dollar symbol covers all stains, opens all doors, atones for all sins. It appears to be the one object considered worthy of most feverish pur- suit. No matter how you get it — only get it. That is the attitude, if not the cry. The evidence of which disposition may be found in the ease with which people are swindled out of their hard-earned ducats, Post-Master General Hitchcock tells us that innocents have been swindled out of one 40 WHY THEY FAIL hundred million dollars in five years by a few crooks who made fraudulent use of the mails. Fifty millions it is estimated, was lost during the same time in bucket shop gambling, while even those last citadels of integrit}^ the banks and trust companies, were not immune, losing a matter of twenty-eight million dollars in the same time at the hands of dishonest employees. One railway company proposes to let the public go unwashed hereafter because the dear people stole $31,000.00 worth of towels from their trains last year. This gold itch reveals itself in other inconvenient ways. It has poisoned our food and slain more babies than Herod's sword. Stock gambling ap- peals to something more than greed; it appeals to the gambling instinct within us, for we all have got enough of the gambler in us to make us want to take chances on this or that, in one way or an- other; but the deliberate adulteration and poisoning of the people's food is a cold-blooded villainy which should have had short shrift at the hands of the law's officers. It has not received its due reward. Our moral executive is as yet too weak for that ; but we have at any rate scotched the tail of the fiend, thanks to men like Senator McCumber and Dr. Wiley, of pure food fame. Some years ago, when the dust was raised about this iniquity, the Secretary of Agriculture affirmed that thirty per cent of the money paid for food prod- ucts in the United States was paid for adulterated or misbranded goods. Bad enough, that, especially when Senator McCumber could say on the floor of the House that if the per cent were cut to fifteen in order to be sure to be on the safe side, the amount of that swindle would be about one billion, seven hundred and fifty million dollars. Stock gambling and post office swindles anu bank defalcations all put WHY THEY FAIL 41 together look small alongside of that, don't they? But when we remember that a portion of it went to pay for formaldehyde in the milk doled out to sick babies, the heart recoils from the cold rapacity of the game. Alcohol in medicines, powdered soap stone for flour, coal-tar and benzoic acid for fruit flavors are crooked enough and odious enough, but men who could poison the food of a helpless infant with formaldehyde, in which farmers kill rust, fungi and other pests on their wheat, are real Herods of the Twentieth Century who might well be con- ceived of as uttering in earnest the jesting reply of the genial Charles Lamb, bachelor, when a lady asked him how he liked babies — "B-b-boiled, madam." ^ The lack of honesty and manliness shows even in our sports, where presumably those qualities are at a premium. For instance in the brutal exhibition of human skill and animal prowess which had place at Reno, Nevada, in 1910, between Johnson, the black pugilist, and Jeffries, "the white man's hope," a spirit which was anything but fair was manifested. The management itself feared the crowd it had evoked. This was evidenced by the array of special constables armed with rifles, who stood near the ring, and by the further fact that every spectator was relieved of his weapons before entering the theatre of strife. If honesty and manliness are prominent among our virtues, how does it come that a negro who showed no fear and asked no favors had to be so amply protected during a struggle in which he stood all but alone? And why, immedi- ately on the awarding to him of the palm of victory so fairly won, should he have to be bundled out of the building and out of the town as if he were the vilest of criminals? And why should it be that while the people of his race, according to their light, were praying for their national champion, 43 WHY THEY FAIL mobs of white men should be hounding them with savage impulses, killing half a dozen and wound- ing hundreds who had probably never in their lives either harmed a white man or even laid eyes on "Mistah Johnsing?" It may be said that this illustration is unfortunate since it is drawn from an affair which does not truly represent American sentiment. That is true, for which praise be ! We may not be all we ought to be but thank God we have our limits, and they fall this side of Reno, Nevada. But unhappily the blight of unfairness appears to have touched other and fairer flowers of our society. Let us rise from the fetid air of the prize-ring with its odor of beer and mark of the beast. Let us hasten to the dec- orous East, home of the fine arts, beauty, brains and chivalrous culture. Let us take an illustration from thence. This time it is the sport of kings — aviation. And what may we reasonably expect to find there? Surely high courtesy, a disposition to yield the advantage, if there be any, to the foe, a generous hospitality, especially to the stranger within the gates. Were these hall-marks of honesty and manliness in sport found there? If they were why should a prominent American millionaire mem- ber of the Aero Club, himself an aviator of no mean repute and therefore familiar with all the rules of the game, rise up to protest against unfairness to the British aviator and ask to be permitted to with- draw his membership on the ground of an alleged breach of honorable dealing? Or again, take the horse show. If there is one form of sport which more than another may be deemed both clean and fashionable it is the horse show of our great cities. No other function seems to attract such crowds of our most representative citizenship day after day. Once again we deal with WHY THEY FAIL 43 the diversion of kings. This is no play of irrespons- ible boys, but the genuine avocation of people of high standing. Hundreds of millions of wealth one might say, attend the annual sessions of the New York Horse Show, and millionaires of national reputation are not ashamed to act as judges of the magnificent animals presented to their discriminat- ing eyes. This is not a horse race, mark you. One would expect to meet charges of unfairness there. This is merely a gentleman's exhibition of fine horses, fine horsemanship and, in a small degree, fine equi- pages. Surely there at least, will be no question as to the integrity of the awards made, however the judgment of the judges may be doubted. But alas, it is not so. In a certain Horse Show for 1910 the Canadian contingent was conspicuous by its absence, though competent judges think their horses fit for any ring, and more than fit for the one from which they excused themselves. They felt they didn't get a square deal and wouldn't come back. In another and smaller city the whole institution went to the wall after flourishing for a time, be- cause of the withdrawals of those who felt they had received the double cross ; and in still others there is trouble brewing. It is to be expected that not all will be satisfied with the awards made. That is so in almost every competition ; but where gentlemen who are men of affairs are concerned one must infer from the talk that there is either a want of fair dealing on the one hand, or on the other a lack of that quality in a man which enables him to take his lemon and suck it in silence. Finally, if we consider that highest efflorescence of the nation's life, the part of it which is supposed to express itself through the Church of Jesus Christ, 44 WHY THEY FAIL we find that even there, there is apparently a failure to measure up to the demands of the day and the op- portunity. Time was when the church was the theatre of the world's great drama. She dispensed its charities, shaped its laws, restrained brute force in its oppression of the weak ; sheltered the innocent (likewise the guilty sometimes) and was the con- servator and patron of literature and art. She can- not be accused of having ever coddled science, but if not, she was at any rate sufficiently influential to make science feel the weight of her hand. To-day she seems bereft of these ancient preroga- tives. The tide of the world's affairs seems to pour around her demesne rather than through it. She finds herself marooned — left like a beacon on a hill or a stump in a forest of saplings. She no longer holds in leash the dogs of war; no longer dic- tates terms to princes, peers and statesmen; no longer can she protect the weak and innocent or shelter the guilty; no longer does literature care what she thinks, good or ill; science is at open odds with her; public charities are dispensed by aliens, or in any event without leave asked of her, and the social life has shifted from the shadow of the church steeple to the busy marts of men. Is there a holy war to be waged on the infamous liquor traffic, then a legion of temper- ance societies is organized to do it; is vice to be challenged in its urban citadels, a Moral Reform Association will lead the charge; does the hideous and malodorous ulcer of a white slave traffic break out upon the body politic, then a lawyer will rise up to treat it with his mundane caustic ; are young men homeless and friendless in the strange city, then a Y. M. C A. will take care of them and find a place for them as the Y. W. C. A. looks after their sisters ; is woman to be granted her WHY THEY FAIL 46 standing by the side of man, society leaders will look after that ; is the brother stricken down sud- denly, then he is glad, since he has a wife and babies to be cared for at home, that he belongs to a Masons,' Oddfellows,' or any of a dozen other fraternal organizations, at whose hearth he has often warmed his soul. When the lodge by its in- surance fund and sick benefits has cared for his im- mediate needs and enabled him to square away his obligations and discharge his responsibilities as a man, then he is ready for the priest and the look into the beyond. Is there a huge injustice being done to some of the humbler and hard-working citizens of the town, atrocious hours, unsanitary conditions about home or workshop, starvation wages, or other limitation of natural rights, the Labor Union, not the Church, will take the matter up and deal with it till justice is done. Naturally the laborer comes to look to his Union for his temporal salvation, that being a matter both urgent and near at hand, and naturally there is a tendency to bless the hand that feeds him and to forget the institution whose members forgot him in the hour of his need, when he stood before the legislature, city council or board of arbitration. And so it comes that the laboring man, and many other men, have drifted away from the church and have come to look upon it somewhat as though it were simply an improved and animated prayer wheel, of no practical value, and of interest only to those peculiar people who care for the odd, the antiquated and the esoteric. Rev. Charles Stelzle, who has done such mag- nificent work for the Presbyterian body, and in- directly for the Church at large, in the way of lead- ing us to a better understanding of the working- man's attitude and just grievances, tells us that 46 WHY THEY FAIL workingmen are alienated from the Church because (1) having fought for and won religious and politi- cal democracy, they are now fighting for industrial democracy and get no help from the Church. It even opposes ameliorating laws as in England, where Churchmen voted for the saloon, and in New York against the better housing of the poor, be- cause the church had vile tenements of its own ; (2) because the Church is the tool of the rich man ; (3) "because the preacher lives in the clouds and has not enough of the man-to-man message style about him, as have labor leaders. He is more con- cerned with Jerusalem and Abraham than Chicago and the Polaks there," and (4) because "the Church denounces labor unions while at the same time it is the closest kind of a corporation itself, in other days persecuting all ecclesiastical scabs who did not belong to it." If we disentangle from the skein of this general statement the discolored, broken threads — the half truths blown in in the breadth of a tremendous indig- nation and conviction — such threads for example as that about the Church being "the closest kind of corporation" (as if in the nature of things, the initiative requirement being a new birth from above, it could be anything else) or that other general statement about owning tenements and opposing ameliorating laws (where only a part of the Church did so) we still have left a strange fabric — one that is far different from the pure white linen of the saints which the Church is supposed to be wearing. That the Church has lost her mediaeval grip on legislation, education, social life, benevolence, war and politics is not the cause for tears; the cause for tears is that she has lost her grip because she could not sufficiently adjust herself in spirit to changed conditions. War, politics, education, legislation. WHY THEY FAIL 47 economics and all that kind of thing is not the busi- ness of the Church. Her business is to help make men ; to help make them over again, under God, in the name of God into the image of God. This is at bottom a spiritual operation and a heavenly task. And if she only attends to her own proper business of making men over in the image of God, by the spirit of God, with all her might, war, politics, legis- lation, education, and social reform will take care of themselves. For the Church is like a medical school, which, though it does not treat human dis- eases yet turns out the men who do. Her sons will have light enough and influence enough to see to that out in the world. They will be the leaven that will leaven the lump, the grain of mustard seed which becomes a great tree into which the weary, panting birds of the air will flock for shelter from the burning heat of the day. Infinite trouble and infinite loss have been our portion because of our failure to distinguish ade- quately between the Church's influence and the Church as an organization. The Church as an or- ganization has no business with war, politics, litera- ture and art. As an institution she is no more of this world than her founder was. Her citizenship is in Heaven and her business is to keep on telling everywhere the good news contained in John 3 :16, and then to perfect holiness in the fear of God in her members according to the rules laid down in the Guide Book. That is her sole business; but if she does that faithfully, the influence of the Church will soon become a terrific force for righteousness, an influence in public life which can neither be ignored nor despised. The only way the Church can rule or should want to rule in the affairs of this world is indirectly, by her influence over the lives and consciences of men. 48 WHY THEY FAIL If the Church will only develop the right kind of men in her own organization, everything else will come right of itself. A Church composed of men and women who have not only the will, but the power to do right, will be indeed "fair as the moon, clear as the sun, and terrible as an army with banners." And a Church like that will compel the admiration, reverence and respect of the world. But the trouble is her sons are so often just like other men. They are Samsons shorn of their power ; inconsistent Lots whose words have lost their in- fluence ; Christians who have lost their savor, and are therefore fit only to be cast out and trodden under foot of men, as the Master long ago told us. If the Christian brother, who through cupidity takes a bribe, or for lack of Christian manliness fails to stand up and speak out, and so becomes in some shady transaction the silent partner of men who make no pretence of religion — if he could only see their sneers behind his back, he would have a new and lively appreciation of the Saviour's insight. He would see them, hardened sons of Belial though they might be, in a very real sense if not a literal one, wiping their feet on him, thanking God that however low they might have sunk, they hadn't yet sunk that low — so low as to be religious hypocrites. It is not without pain we have to admit that the Church of to-day fails to inspire that measure of respect which in other days, superstition aside, she was wont to be accorded, and that we see the crowds swinging down other streets and away from her doors. Not so many strong men are disposed to enter her ministry, and not so many men of any kind crowd her gates on Sunday morning or even- ing as should be there. Harsh things are said about her by those whom she is supposed to reach, and above all, in politics, civic life, commercial Hfe, WHY THEY FAIL 49 sports and the courts, such enemies have crept in as to force the conviction that to have allowed it to happen, with all her far-flung outposts, strons^ly entrenched centres and lines of battle innumerable, her sentries must either have been asleep at their posts, or else her commanding officers must have over- looked some very important, not to say strategic posi- tion. "Facts are the fingers of God," and "Truth is truth if it sears our eye-balls." We have to look at and deal with things as they are. Yet no one who thinks at all will be so silly as to think for all this, that the Church is either a doubtful insti- tution or a decrepit and negligible quantity so far as the every-day life of the people is concerned. Far from it. If things are as tainted as they are in spots, what would they have been like if there had been no Church? Let no man think that every- thing is going to the bow-wows. The heart of the various trees in the garden is reasonably sound, if they do appear to be dying at the top. Not all churches or church members are objects of re- proach. There are still to be found Drexels in every form of sport, who are able to rise up in protest against what they deem unfairness or meanness. We have still our Bryans, Roosevelts, Folks, La Follettes, and a growing army of insurgents in politics ; our Gaynors, Pingrees, Weavers and Joneses in every city to cry out for good govern- ment; a healthy disposition toward being more "on the square" in commercial transactions and a great body of sentiment leaning always decidedly toward better things. The point is, not that we have no right sentiment no honesty, no manliness, no justice, but that we haven't got enough of it to go around ; that a small proportion even of those who have had a chance, 60 WHY THEY FAIL are conspicuous for such homely and necessary vir- tues as honesty, manHness, and beneficence, say twenty-five per cent, while seventy-five per cent come short; and that there must therefore have been some very grave leak somewhere, in our edu- cational systems, particularly in the methods of the Church whose peculiar function it is to develop morally efificient character, when, with all her years of painstaking, prayerful, conscientions efifort in training, supplemented by that of the home, the day-school and the denominational college, she turns out a moral product which goes down like a tenpin in the very first horse trade, real estate deal, or party mix-up in which the dear graduate pupil finds himself involved. WHY. ' THEY. FAIL 51 FOREWORD TO CHAPTER II "If it were possible to sum up in a few words the one thing that has most impressed me in visit- ing churches and talking with church leaders in various parts of the country, I think 1 should say, " 'The utter confusion of counsel among church leaders themselves.' "Upon the seriousness of the crisis which con- fronts them — the waning influence of the Church upon the lives of men and women, the tendency of able young men to avoid the ministry as a pro- fession — most leaders are quite in agreement, but as to what to do about it there exist the widest differences of opinion. The Church to-day is like a fort under sudden attack — in the night, with many of the captains fast asleep. There is a common and overwhelming sense of danger, but the defense so far has been without common plan or purpose — sallies here, retreats there, a promiscuous firing of big and little guns, and an altogether inordinate amount of noise." — Ray Stannard Baker, Journalist, in The American Magazine. CHAPTER II THE CONFUSION OF TONGUES If, now, we enquire why these things are so, a multitude of voices is at once heard in reply. The explanations offered are many, varied, interesting and sincere, but they do not go deep enough. They m WHY. THEY FAIL do not find the tap root of the evil and drag it out clearly into the light. The diagnoses and prescrip- tions for the most part are not unrelated to the plant but they concern chiefly the upward, outward and visible — the bole, stems, leaves and branches above ground, while the real trouble, the prolific mother of ills, lurks, unsuspected under ground. Let us take for illustration some of the diagnoses and prescriptions which have been made in regard to the ills which aftiict the Church, and through the Church, society at large, for woe to the land in which the temples are polluted or deserted, any kind of god being better than no god at all, as the philosophers of Rome long ago pointed out. It is a hopeful sign that so many thoughtful men are aware that something is wrong somewhere. That this is the case is evidenced by the fact that the so-called secular press has found it worth while to give serious attention to the matter. Among others The Delineator, a leading journal of fashion, took the matter up two years ago or more in a careful, frank, and, so far as the scope of its inter- ests allowed, a reasonably scientific fashion. In- stead of giving forth any half-baked, or even well- prepared personal opinion on the situation, the editor wrote a frank, manly letter to a number of ministers who are particularly prominent in the religious life of America, and asked them to con- tribute a brief article on the theme, "What's the Matter with the Churches?" Such a symposium may naturally be expected to carry more weight with it than if the editor had en- deavored to settle the matter by his ipse dixit. When an editor gets seriously ill with neuritis he does not call on a blacksmith or an electrician to treat him, however skilful or distinguished they may be along their own lines. He calls for a nerve WHY THEY FAIL 53 specialist, and if by any chance, being merely an unworldly-minded editor, whose business is to keep the crowd straight by telling them what to do, he has enough hard cash by him to secure a consultation of leading nerve specialists, he feels, editor though he may be, that what they tell him is something he will do well to receive, mark and inwardly digest. His reason for thinking this is that if they have given twenty or thirty years of their lives to the study of the nervous system they are likely to know more about what ails him than he is ; but when it comes to harpooning a senator, or to impaling a crooked congressman on a verbal spear point, the editor will then explain the rules of the game while the honorable medical gentlemen sit where he so mod- estly sat awhile before — on the learner's stool. Now^ the men to whom the editor of The Deline- ator appealed for an opinion are specialists in their line. They are "sun-crowned" leaders in the vari- ous denominations to which they belong, thought- ful, erudite, experienced. Moreover they were given the greater part of a year in which to formulate their views on the important matter under consid- eration. It may be taken for granted therefore, that what they had to say they said in all seriousness — as indeed they did. No one who reads their words in The Delineator (October to December, 1909) can for a moment doubt their deep heart-interest in the matter they discuss. They are concerned for the Kingdom of God and as they stand with fingers on the pulse of the situation, this is what in effect they have to say as to "What's the Matter with the Churches?" Dr. Charles H. Parkhurst, the well-known divine of New York, says: "(1) There is an unwarranted and embarrassing sharpness of discrimination be- tween the functions of the clergy and that of the 54 WHY THEY FAIL laity. (2) There is a large element that properly belongs inside of the Church, and that would be a very positive increment of strength to it, but that remains outside for the reason that the Church has allowed the opinion to prevail that membership must be conditioned upon the possession of a certain amount of moral attainment. (3) The failure to hold the theological views of the generality of Church membership. Doctrinal formulas count very much less with Christians than formerly. Men who think carefully and feel deeply discriminate much more sharply than formerly between theology and religion, between the part the intellect plays and the part the heart plays and will play in Christianity." Dr. Josiah Strong, who is something of an author- ity on social matters as they effect the Church, adds another word of wisdom. He says: "Omitting Roman Catholic statistics, which are made up on an entirely different basis from the others, the gains of all other denominations during the past nine years (1900-1909) have been as follows: In ministers, 5 per cent; in churches, 12.9 per cent, and in members 10.4 per cent. That is, the growth of Church membership has been less than two-thirds as rapid as that of the population and this notwith- standing the exceptional evangelistic effort. This would seem to be conclusive that something ails the Church. What is it? He points out that the same general conditions obtain in Europe, that Churches gained decidedly on population in the Nineteenth Century, most of it made in the first half, and goes on to say, "The rate of gain has been steadily falling since 1850, and in 1900 it had practically reached the vanishing point. During the past nine years it has fallen behind the population. "During the first half of the century an indi- WHY THEY FAIL 55 vidualistic religion was adapted to an individualistic civilization and in proportion made rapid growth. During the last half there was a marked develop- ment of the social spirit which increasingly checked the growth of the individualistic churches, because they did not meet the needs of the new conditions. What ails the churches is that they have failed to recognize the social side of their mission. Churches here and there have gained the social spirit and have made a surprising groivth, attracting men es- pecially." Dr. Len. G. Broughton, of Atlanta, Ga., is one of the most widely-known and successful Baptist min- isters in America. In his contribution he says : "The main deficiency, as I see it, is in its faith ; which is the result of ignorance of the Bible. This is particularly true of America. The Bible as a whole is not studied. The preachers themselves do not study it. What we want is men in the pulpit who know the Bible ; not simply texts from the Bible, not simply the ability to quote accurately passage after passage, but men who know the Bible as a whole and are able to teach it in this way. There will have to be a change in the method of teaching. We have been too anxious to teach all about the Bible and neglected the teaching of the Bible itself. . . . The Church also lacks in ap- plication. It will never command the respect of the world until it is keyed so as to respond to every human need. At present it consents for temporal needs to be supplied by outside agencies, agencies that name no religion, that have no Christ, and yet agencies which could not live but for the in- fluence of Christianity. The Church must do such work for itself. It cannot preach sympathy and friendship and then fold its arms and stand back, waiting for some other organization to bring the 56 WHY THEY FAIL supply. It must provide as far as possible to meet every condition of need. This must be done in the name of Christ. . . . Many men of brains shun the pulpit because they are unwilling to be shut out from an active business life. Let the Church direct its affairs as it should and there will be the greatest opportunity for the expression of brains and talents. The local Church, especially in our cities, must do this work as far as possible." Gipsy Smith, the noted evangelist, who has come into touch with more churches than most pastors, would suggest a general house-cleaning in the churches. He speaks out like a man and presents some plain facts for plain people as follows : "The Church to-day instead of being a place where every- body has the spirit and power to seek and to save that which was lost, is more of a mutual congratula- tion society where we fuss and fondle those we have already found. We have culture and refinement and organization, art, music, position and money, but we have lost touch with the common people, and are losing the common people, who are the coming people, and we have lost our grip on God. I know churches so-called, where if Christ himself came to preach, there would be nothing done until the atmosphere and the conditions changed, and there are churches where Jesus himself would not be wanted if he came as a preacher ; the fact is we are playing at church." Dr. Emil G. Hirsch, Rabbi of the Sinai Congre- gation in Chicago, called on for his opinion, finds the trouble to be in natural history and science de- veloping the ultra-critical spirit ; higher criticism underming the teachings of orthodoxy ; the shifting of the emphasis from the beyond as of yore to the present life; the impression that the Church is op- posed to progress; more justice and less charity; WHY THEY FAIL 57 the Church on the side of the upper dog; too much distinction between clergy and laity and pandering to wealth. Dr. Charles F. Aked, ex-pastor of the Fifth Ave- nue Baptist Church, New York City, finds the sec- ret of decadence in a poorly-paid ministry. He does not see how ministers who are paid less than labor- ing men and artisans, while obliged to keep them- selves and their families and their homes on a plane above that of the classes mentioned, can command the respect of men intellectually. They cannot grow because they cannot buy the necessary books on which to feed their minds; they cannot educate theii children because it takes all they make to keep the wolf from the door; they see no hope for the days of the "sere and yellow leaf," and so they drop out of a calling which no longer allows them to so develop with their congregations as to properly dis- charge their duties as ministers to the people and to discharofe their duties as fathers and husbands to their families. Dr. Aked says: "The nearest, most important single reform to be attempted by the religious people of his country is to double the salary of every preacher upon the continent." So much for the opinions of ecclesiastical gen- erals. If now we turn to the pews we shall find there another grist of answers to the question, "What ails the Church?" We can get it any day at first hand by taking a walk of six blocks and talking with the people we meet. They are always ready to discuss the theme. An ounce of soot on a white garment always attracts more attention and excites more remark than a pail full of soot on black trous- ers. There is not a preacher in Christendom who has not heard the growls. They run something like this : Poor preaching in the pulpit; the rise of intel- ligence in the pew; rented pews in the House of 58 WHY THEY FAIL God (a travesty on God's hospitality, sure enough) ; want of cordiality; too much cordiality; inconsist- ency of church members ; no enthusiasm ; too much en- thusiasm (noise) ; absence of members and so on. Aside from the question of literacy in the pulpit the objections filed resolve themselves for the most part into one word, "inconsistency." When church mem- bers are inconsistent in their lives, the whole structure of Christianity is imperilled and apt to go down about their ears. This is the view of Rev. Clyde Elbert Ord- way who writes in the Arena (1910) on the theme "Will the Church Survive?" As the article faithfully reflects the mind of many laymen a portion of it may be quoted here. Mr. Ordway notes the slackening grip of the Church upon "the life of the time as manifested by the resort to cheap, superficial attractions "rang- ing from the Seven-Cent Social to Chain W^hist ; from Circle Suppers to Amateur Dramatics ; from Ping-Pong Parties to Three-Day Fairs or Sales with their exorbitant prices and guessing contests (which under worldly auspices would be called lot- teries)." He sees her losing ground both at the top and the bottom — over wealthy men and working men, and he quotes Dr. Thomas, of Chicago, pastor of The People's Church. "Somehow the churches have lost their hold upon the confidence, sympathies and almost the respect of the laboring people. I asked a leader of a labor union of three hundred members, how many at- tended church. 'Practically none,' he said. 'A few women may go, but not half a dozen men in a year.' Whether right or wrong the laboring men feel that the churches in general are not their friends: that they are for the rich ; that money controls both the pulpit and the pew; that the preachers as a rule WHY THEY FAIL 59 either do not care for the rights of the laboring man or that they dare not plead his cause. "A further fact that keeps the world aloof from the churches, and distrustful of them, if not bitterly antagonistic to them, is the evil that exists in their own ranks. For example their quarrels among them- selves and their individual members; the hypocrisy and meanness of some of their members ; their fail- ure in general to live up to and exemplify the prin- ciples they profess. The church people claim a higher life and better principles than the world, their outside friends possess, and when this great body of outsiders who make no profession of holi- ness or superior character or principles, see within the church people as bad or worse than their own (at least no better than their own in a multitude of cases) they naturally look with distrust upon the whole institution and entertain but little re- spect for it either as sincere or efficient. The churches have done more to kill themselves, es- pecially in the eyes of the outside world, by their quarrels, bigotry, narrowness and littleness ; their hypocritical members, questionable morals and various exhibitions of an unchristian spirit than all their enemies have done. One member in a church who has a character which the outside world cannot respect, or one such church quarrel as we often witness, does the churches more harm than all the good preaching and faithful service can over- come in many years." We have heard from the pew and heard from the pulpit ; let us now hear from the professors. Let Prof. Rauschenbusch, of Rochester Theological Seminary, whose notable book, "Christianity and the Social Crisis," has brought him prominently be- fore the public eye, speak. But, instead of gleaning his sentiments from his lengthy and luminous 60 WHY THEY FAIL treatment of the subject in his book, let us for brevity's sake gather a few paragraphs from a later utterance as given to Mr. Ray Stannard Baker, the well-known writer, for the American Magazine of December, 1909. Incidentally, it may not be amiss to run in a sentence or two from Mr. Baker him- self. After noting some of the remedial measures be- ing employed — revivalism in the West "under the spirited, if spectacular, leadership of men of the type of Billy Sunday" ; in the East "Immanuelism to counteract the steady encroachments of Chris- tian Science and the New Thought," and every- where, "a still larger and more active group of lead- ers absorbed in building new outworks — parish houses and gymnasiums, bowling alleys and club rooms, carpenter shops, shooting galleries and dance halls to counteract or at least to parallel the advance of the social settlement idea and the ex- pansion of functions of the public schools and other municipal institutions," there follows the report of an interview with Prof. Rauschenbusch and a well-merited appreciation of that gentleman and his work. The article proceeds : "In my conversation with Prof. RauschenbuscH I endeavored to draw out just what he meant by the 'new evangelism' and what in his opinion the future of the churches in this country would be. "The new evangelism is made up of the same ele- ments as the old : First it seeks to convict other men of sin ; second to reconstruct their lives. But the conception of both sin and reconstruction in the new evangelism is immensely broader and deeper than in the old. It is as wide as humanity, with a vision and a message calculated to fire the souls of men as nothing in the past has ever fired them. *'The new evangelism greatly intensifies our con- WHY THEY FAIL 61 ception of sin. It shows how impossible it is to sin any sin which does no# pass along to others. It shows how all men are linked together, and that the sin of one injures all, so that each man realizes that he is involved in the whole sin of mankind." I asked Prof. Ratischenbusch for specific in- stances as to how the conviction of social sin ought to be brought about. He gave me as a single ex- ample the problem of the wage worker. "An idle woman living in wasteful luxury," he said, "wants more beautiful clothing, more jewelry. She has no thought of what her selfish wastefulness may cost. In order to get it her husband pinches his workingmen to the lowest possible wage. Let us say that one of these workingmen has a sick child and because he is so poor that he cannot get a doctor promptly, the child dies. Unconsciously, but with the certainty of cause and effect that wasteful and luxurious woman has helped to kill the child." In the same way Prof. Rauschenbusch would show that the crowded and unsanitary tenement is a "sin for which the whole city suffers the punish- ment of tuberculosis and other diseases. The pun- ishment of the ruined woman infects the homes of the rich equally with those of the poor. The pun- ishment of debauched politics finally but inevitably leads to the ruin of the fairest city and the finest civilization. No man can sin by himself nor be saved by himself. "It is not Christianity to pay the lowest wages to the man who has the hungriest family. "All the present teaching, whether within the churches or outside of them, of the responsibility of society for the ruin of the child-workers, for low- paid women, for the criminals, for the wasteful rich man, for sickness, for want and shame and ugli- 152 WHY. THEY FAIL ness, are all in the way of convicting humanity of its social sins. The present moral wave, which is beginning to sweep over this country, is an evi- dence of such a conviction of sin." The next step in the religious life after the con- viction of sin, is "salvation," a turning about, a new life. Just as in the old evangelism the individual has to be "born again," so the new evangelism demands a new birth for society. A complete change must take place; a new spirit must fire hu- manity. And every man and every organization, whether church leader or socialist, or labor agitator or publicist, or business man, who has a vision of the new time and is working toward it, is a new evangelist. But what will this regenerate society be like? What is then, the vision of the prophets? I give here the conviction of Prof. Rauschenbusch. In the old society, the society we know now — the greatest sins are war, strife, competition — with the resulting luxury for a few and want for the many. The new social life then, should change all this, should be a right-about face — if it is to be a true re-birth. There must be peace, not war; co- operation, not competition; and in place of ex- tremes of luxury and want, a distribution of prop- erty which will assure every human being upon this earth a chance to make the most of the facul- ties God has given him. . . . Such is the new evangelism. What part must the Church and re- ligious leaders play in it? A very great part Prof. Rauschenbusch believes. The present decadence of Church influence and leadership he attributes to the lack of the new vision, so that much of the prophecy, many of the noblest works in the new evangelism, have been left to men and women who are outside of the churches. The trouble has been WHY THEY FAIL 63 that the Church has been too anxious to magnify itself, too little concerned in humanity. "The mischief begins when the Church makes herself the end. She does not exist for her own sake ; she is simply a working organization to create the Christian life in individuals and the Kingdom of God in human society." Religion in short must become, "less an institu- tion and more a diffused force." More and more the state, society at large, will be shot through and through with the spirit of religion, and yet there will never be a time, says Prof. Rauschenbusch, when there will not be a wide field of activity for the religious leader and teacher. Two great functions will occupy his attention. He will always fill the office of prophecy; he should be sensitized morally so that he will be the first to discern wrong and evil, and his visions will fire the souls of men. And he will also follow behind the rumbling wheels of the chariot of state and gather up the wounded and comfort the broken- hearted — Jesus perfectly combined both of these offices." Now no one who reads the foregoing reasons for failure on the part of the Church to realize her possibilities for good on the life of our time can help being impressed with the trenchant nature of the criticisms made. There is not one of those remarks but is significant because all are more or less true. Not one of them is an idle shot. We feel that the archers have done well — and yet "in- ners" as they are, most of them, we somehow feel that not one has hit the bull's eye. For if we examine these splendid and truly help- 64 WHY THEY FAIL ful criticisms we find that even when the lance goes deepest and cuts to the very bone it yet fails to do its work because the trouble lies deeper than the bone ; it lies hidden in the very marrow thereof. For instance when Prof. Rauschenbusch tells us that the present decadence of the Church's influ- ence is due to a lack of the social vision, which lack he would remedy with up-to-date information as to social conditions ; and due to pure egoism or selfishness, making herself an end instead of a means to an end, and that end the uplift of human- ity, its salvation, pbysicially, morally and mentally as well as spiritually — when he tells us all this we feel the weight of his words and acknowledge the justice of his cause. And when Dr. Hirsch comes forward with his subtle observations as to the efifect of natural science methods which count nothing settled until settled by an appeal to blowpipe or scalpel; when he tells of the loosening of the guy ropes of faith by the antics of a coterie of reckless and unreliable exponents of the "Higher Criticism"; when he points to the shifting of emphasis in a generation from the unseen and eternal futurity to the present and visible and sordid but tremendously real actu- ality; when he speaks of the need of more of that "justice" which would make the work of the Asso- ciated Charities so much easier, and when he men- tions the worship of Mammon and Rank, we feel somehow deeply impressed and are apt to say to ourselves, "That's it. That's it." Then comes along Dr. Josiah Strong to reinforce Prof. Rauschenbusch's finding by telling us that the Church is out of the procession because she has been too individualistic in a social age, and the venerable Dr. Parkhurst chimes in with a senti- ment to the effect that the hard-headed, busy man WHY. THEY FAIL 65 of to-day cares more for the deed than the creed, which sentiment is endorsed with loud applause by the people in the pew — with sundry additions of their own, as Mr. Ordway tells us and as, indeed, we all very well know. And to all this in shame and candor, we bow a melancholy assent. Dr. Aked comes up with his case of a scandal- ously underpaid ministry and that, too, we admit is a factor, though not nearly so close to the heart of the situation as some other factors. The ferv- ent and not impractical Dr. Len G. Broughton calls for more comprehensive Bible study and what is apparently an institutional church, not hearing the equally fervent, devoted and gifted Dr. A. C. Dixon telling us that the institutional church, as he found it, is a mistake and a boomerang, since the man recommended by the employment bureau not turn- ing out very well, the employer blames the Church, and therefore contracts a prejudice; the man hav- ing lost his job blames that on the Church by some strange process of reasoning and also goes away offended, while the loaves and the fishes attracting a multitude of proletariats, the self-respecting artisan goes off "huffed" in his turn, lest he be taken for one of them ; and so the Church, with the best intentions in the world, by her institutional- ism finds herself alienating the very classes she would seek to help. Lastly, Mr. Gipsy Smith in telling us that we are only "playing at church" and in virtually writing "Ichabod" above the doors, indirectly hints at the solution of the difficulty as he sees it. His remedy would be: Back to God! All of you. Down on your knees. Cry aloud for forgiveness and a real baptism of the Holy Ghost and everything else will take care of itself. And Gipsy Smith, the great evangelist, is un- 66 WHY THEY FAIL doubtedly right. That is he is right from his stand- point, which is also a pivotal one in the Church. When it comes to the choice of medicines purport- ing to be able to heal the acrid humors of the blood there is none like his. Dr. Len G. Broughton's pre- scription, allopathic doses of the Bible, goes well with it, and those two items are the mightiest in the whole foregoing program of social redemption. He who would seek to belittle them knows not what he does nor whereof he affirms. Important as the other considerations are they do not begin to com- pare with these two as a basis of treatment for what ails us all. But the trouble is they, too, come short. Theoretically and ideally, Gipsy Smith's remedy is sufficient. Were all church members living all the time in the atmosphere of a spirit-filled revival in which that chosen instrument of God passes his days, the world would be heaps better than it is. But the fact is we cannot all live all the time at the fever-heat of a genuine revival. It has never yet been done in the mass. The cares of life are too numerous and too insistent. The mightiest revivals the world has ever known have been but as great tidal waves from heaven's shores — waves which left the individual and the community on a higher plane of life than before, it is true, but left them also to take up "the trivial round, the common task" again as before. Great good is done in these revival times ; many crooked things are straightened out while they last, for it is then easier to do right all round; but alas! the impulse passes and all too soon things are pretty much as they were before. Fifty thousand head of stolen cattle may be re- stored through Evangelist Abe Mulkey's sermon on "Restitution," but he cannot be preaching that sermon all the time, and if he could, they would soon get tired of it and count it a bore. Evan WHY THEY FAIL 67 Roberts', Dwight L. Moody's and Charles G. Fin- ney's appeals did much to clean things up in their day, but many of the very converts who in those days kissed their worst enemies and threw their pipes into the ditch in an outburst of real Christian piety, have long since taken to buying new pipes and saying uncharitable things about the people they don't happen to like, whether in the Church or out of it. For all that revivals are blessed experiences. Don't take this word as in any sense a reflection on them. They are of God and there is no life that has been touched by them but must feel the healing in that touch. The point is that they do not last. They may bear us on their crest into the Kingdom of God, and they may give us a mighty boost heavenward when we are already in the Kingdom, but alas! the wave recedes and we are left on the strand, pilgrims as before, staff in hand, to go on as ordained of old, day by day struggling slowly, fal- teringly up the steep and rugged pathway of the Right and Duty, while the easy grades of Inclina- tion and Pleasure pass ever so appealingly near that we fervently wish, and often try, to travel with one foot on each, to the great discomfiture of our peace of mind. Yes, yes, there is Divine grace and all that; but it is that same all-wise Divine grace which, point- ing to the course we have to cover, said "they shall mount up on wings as eagles ; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint." There is Divine grace all the way through ; but it isn't a revival all the way through by any means. Mount- ing up on wings as eagles is all very beautiful, and, praise be, it is a fact ; but we soon come down to a run, and then to a walk, and even as Paul 68 WHY. THEY FAIL gently hints to the Ephesians, it may even take us all our time to "stand." That's where we come down — in the Christian walk and in the hour of pressure. We find we can- not "stand" against the temptation. The mounts of transfiguration and the soaring like eagles are blessed incidents, but incidents merely ; the more just and comprehensive figure is that of the long campaign which knows no truce, and the long, long way which cannot be taken on the run. The problem in its last analysis has in none of these contributions been either squarely stated or met. They tell us specifically of a good many things which ought not so to be. They tell us what the Church is not and what she reprehensibly is; they point out many blemishes and in some instances they point to a remedy, but the remedy is the wrong remedy for this particular case, since there is one factor which has been overlooked, viz., a grave error in the diagnosis. As a single error in his calculations may throw an astronomer out a billion miles in his results, and negative a lifetime of perfectly correct work: as in fact, the heavens were for centuries a Chinese puzzle because Ptolemy and his followers over- looked one simple little factor in the equation, that the sun and not the earth is the center of our planetary system, even so has the great and beautiful, the persistent, the magnificent, the truly glorious en- deavor of the Church and her allied forces steadily failed of attaining the goal toward which she panted, because they have never yet clearly recog- nized why it is that they do fail. The real trouble lies, not in the fact that those whom the Church and her allied forces have trained will not do the good, or do not knozv the good, but that they do not find themselves able to do the good they know. WHY THEY FAIL 69 There is an ethical insufficiency, and that ethical in- sufficiency is born of an oversight in our methods of education, which has sent childhood and youth out into the stern world of facts and action like Richard III, "but half made up." This it will con- tinue to do, with the certainty of death and taxes, until we wake up to the fact that the brain in a boy's skull is as directly and importantly related to his present and future moral action as it is to his present and future mental action, and consequent success in life, and begin to take notice of what goes on there and make some such intelligent and persistent efifort to help the boy build an ethically sufficient brain as we now take to help him build one that is mentally sufficient for life's demands. There is need of more social information it is true ; and there is need of a more comprehensive knowledge of the word of God ; but the supreme need of our day is neither the one nor the other, valuable as is the one and indispensable as is the other. Neither the Church nor society is languish- ing for lack of knowledge as to what we ought to do. politically, socially or ethically. They are lan- guishing because knowing the good they find them- selves somehow unable to do it. There's the rub and there's the hint, the Ariadne clue which will, if we follow it faithfully, lead us out of our laby- rinth of difficulties into the clear air of reasonably irreproachable lives. So general has been the failure to develop a type of character which will stand the shock and strain of temptation in our day that thoughtful men have been at times much exercised thereby. And not without profit. Help seems coming from a most unexpected quarter. As fraternal societies have undertaken to relieve the Church of much of her social burden, and as a brood of temperance and 70 WHY THEY FAIL moral reform organizations have arisen to lead the charge against entrenched evils, so the public school is now rising up to essay the task in which the Church as distinctively such, has once more failed, viz., the task of producing a type of char- acter which is ethically strong enough to stand in commerce, politics and civic relations generally. The most prominent educators of the land, look- ing at the lives that go down, and looking at the Church and her affiliated societies wringing their hands in helpless, confessed inability to cope with the situation, are saying to themselves: "Some- thing must be done. We have the children in our care; we have a costly plant ready to hand; we have a vast army of trained assistants; maybe it is our business to do more than we have been doing to help prepare the child to play his or her part in the drama of life, to help make a higher, stronger, truer type of citizenship. But it is not with that conception as a concep- tion we are concerned. That is not new either as a theory or in practice. Other nations have even shown us the way — the imperfect way — and good men and women have zealously striven in our schools, even beyond what was written, to instruct the boys and girls in those guiding principles of conduct, a knowledge of which is supposed to be all that is necessary to produce the desired ethical result on the street. France and Germany, and even Japan, have all labored real hard at this. They take the work seriously over seas and attend to it religiously. In France, for instance, children from seven to eleven are given two thirty-minute doses of moral instruction per week. From eleven to thirteen years they get three doses of the same size, nor is there any let-up in the high school. And should the pupil be an WHY THEY FAIL 71 aspirant for pedagogical honors then the medicine must be given four times a week throughout the subsequent two-year course at the Normal School. If we turn to Germany we find that they are even more determined and thoroughgoing in this than the French. They take no chances. They give the youngsters four hours a week throughout the entire course. In Germany the teaching is apt to be administered by the Church, which is as truly a state institution over there as are the schools. No use in the state having priests if it doesn't make use of them. But in France the case is dif- ferent. They get along without God in their moral instruction in the schools. Duty and conscience will do, they say. And what is the result? Ger- many "reacts" unfavorably, going off in whole land- slides toward socialism, which in that country means atheism, while France for the most part deems it immaterial whether there be a God in the heavens at all or not. What is wrong then? Is it not admirable to have the state schools endeavor to turn out the very highest type of moral character? It is wholly ad- mirable so to do. And how shall the child becorne a moral man unless he be well instructed in his duties to his parents, brothers, neighbors, the state and humanity at large? True enough. It looks likeaQ.E.D., doesn't it? But The evil spot is in the way in which it is being done. If a boy be nothing more than a quart jug which invariably gives out precisely what has been put into it, no more, no less, then that logic is unassailable. But if the boy be not a quart jug, but a certain marvellous protean something which is sensitive as a photographer's plate and uncertain as a yearling colt, always breaking out in a new place in spite of all that can be done apparently 72 WHY THEY FAIL to prevent him, then it is possible there may be something wrong with our methods of handling him. It begins to dawn upon us as possible that loading him down with nice moral precepts may no more serve to change his innermost moral being than stringing buck-eyes on a cat's tail will change the nature of a feline veteran. Prof. John Dewey, of Chicago University, puts the matter very nicely when he observes "the incul- cation of moral rules is no more likely to make character than is that of astronomical formulae." Within the past ten years there has arisen not only a new demand for a general tightening-up of the fibers of moral character in the embryonic citi- zenship coming forth from our schools but there has happily also come to pass the discovery of a prin- ciple which is revolutionary and well adapted to produce the desired results in so far as the public school has to do with them. That principle is after all not a new principle. It has been in use in our schools for over a hundred years. What is new is its application. And it is revolutionary, because, as it revolutionized the system of acquiring an edu- cation when Froebel and Pestalozzi first preached it in the latter part of the Eighteenth Century, so now it will revolutionize the acquisition of moral character as it comes to be more and more generally and intelligently applied. Possibly the greatest deliverance on education ever made by man was that given by Froebel when he set forth his doctrine that self-activity is the creative factor in the child's life, urging that the child's whole self be active, not merely some special faculty, and that this activity, calling for the use of all its senses and powers, be stimulated and directed by the teacher in an environment adapted to the end in view. WHY THEY FAIL 73 The great, earnest thinkers of the educational world on this side of the water have noNv begun to clearly recognize that the same great principle applies to ethical education. And while it is as yet only at the top that this perception has become quite clear and the great body of the teaching profession as yet knows little of it, yet the day is not far distant when they will. No great discovery can be kept hidden from the world at large, and this new light is breaking in on ever lower strata of the profession, till, in twenty years from now or less, every cross-roads schoolhouse in the land will have seen the great light and begun to work effectively in the making of men and women. While this is not the place for any extended dis- cussion of this principle as it relates itself to our public school system, a paragraph or two may not be amiss at this point. The new conception of edu- cation exalts character where the old exalted scholarship. Of course the old did not despise char- acter. As has been said, it was far from doing so. Next to scholarship it thought upon character- building. Unfortunately it didn't know just how to build, so that the attempts were in the main fruit- less, as illustrated in the case of the boy who was expelled from a certain high school for misconduct and went forth exultantly remarking: 'T got fired, but I got ninety-eight per cent in ethics." Now there is a radical change not only of aim but of method. Not only is moral character to be put before scholarship, but the whole curriculum of studies is to ethicized and the whole school is to be turned into an ethical workshop and the campus into a training school of virtue. No more filling with moral maxims w^hich "rattle around in human skulls like dried seeds in poppy heads." No more squaring of the boy by the yardstick of a man's 74 WHY THEY FAIL world ; no more filling him up with information as to what voters and other functionaries (who are about as real to him as troglodytes) are expected to think and do; no more telling him to be, morally, a man when he is only a little boy. He is now to be regarded as a real boy in a real world — a boy's world it is true, but a world which is just as tre- mendously real, and just as important to him for all that, as is any other world he will ever inhabit in this life. This world, it is found, is, after all, but a minia- ture of our own. It is therefore a social world, and the unit in it has pretty much the same kind of re- lations to his fellows as he will have in the larger world outside later on. Hence as his brain is plastic in the boy-world and very susceptible to impres- sions he is to be got ready now for the big world's race of to-morrow, not by being made to wear his father's ethical boots, but by being made to wear his own of proper size and quality. As he grows they grow, and so wdien he gets into a man's world of action he will walk without a limp, for behold ! his feet and his boots and his father's boots are all of a size. Now the same principles run through boy-world that run through our own. And what is it we desire to see in our own? Is it not justice, kindness, helpfulness, courage, manliness, honesty and the like? Certainly it is. Then let us get our boys at it, say the teachers, and keep them at it, since their faculties are bound to "grow to the mode in which they are exercised." If we have to teach this boy to be helpful to others, the best way is to have him go at it and do it. Hence in his reading lesson he is to read something for the benefit of the school which the others do not know. If they don't know, he feels that he is doing something WHY THEY FAIL 75 for the good of his kind and his soul is filled with a glow of altruistic pleasure. Incidentally he learns how to read. Does he write? Then it is no dry-as- dust and hateful composition about something in which nobody under heaven is, or ever was, in- terested; he must write something that will be of use to somebody, for instance, an invitation to father or brother to come to the next ball game or Friday exercises. Of course, it has to be done in proper form. And so, incidentally he learns to write — but mostly he has learned to help — for has he not done something which has social meaning? And so on with the whole gamut of school studies. And the playground becomes another part of his moral training school. He is brought face to face there with his deed and with that thing that all men fear — public opinion. There it is just as real and just as dreadful as it is down at the club or in the sewing circle. "You may send your boy to the master," says Emerson, "but the boys will educate him." Now that education is to be supervised, that is all, tactfully, kindly, unobtrusively, but none the less truly, so that the bad impulses get nipped in the bud and the good ones are encouraged in the sunshine of a smile of public recognition, and the boy learns team play without crookedness; learns by something swifter, mightier, more living than any precepts he ever heard ; learns and is not laid by the heels when later he meets the old tricks in new forms. Everything he will ever do in manhood he is doing as a boy, and learning it by the doing of it. Therefore, our educational pow- ers are saying, let us see to it that he is kept busy, by one means or another, always doing the right thing, which in other words is the just thing or the altruistic thing. Now this is a glorious thought. It needs no 76 WHY THEY FAIL prophet's vision to see the mighty impetus toward righteousness this new conception is destined to bring in its wake. Its influence will be simply- revolutionary, as may possibly be more clearly dis- cerned in the light of succeeding pages. But the question arises, is this new and tremendously ef- ficient instrument to be left wholly to the far-seeing, patient and in every way splendid body of men and women who have charge of our secular education? They have been driven by the need of the hour and by ecclesiastical inefficiency to assume the re- sponsibility of character-building for the nation. They have taken the initial steps toward that end and they will yet accomplish wonders, for theirs is the longest grip of all on child life, on the man of to-morrow. For the greater part of the waking hours of five days in seven the boy is in the hands of the day-school teacher. For one, two, or three hours in the seven days of the week the Church gets his ear ; therefore the chief sphere of ethical training must be in the day-school. Yet the whole burden should not be, can not be, laid on the public-school teachers, because in the first place the rank and file of them are not as yet wiser than their forbears in this matter. Three- fourths of them it is said have not even had a normal school training. And in the second place, character-building is the essence of church work and responsibility. The first school, God Al- mighty's school, is the home, and the Church stands more nearly related to the home than does the state school. Man's relations to his Maker must ever take precedence of his relations to his fellow. So long as man remains "incurably religious" the church spire must remain in men's thought nearer to the family altar than "the little, red school- house." WHY THEY FAIL 77 Moreover, the Church is able to teach with some- thing more than the authority of the teachers of this world, and if she will only be wise enough to adopt their methods on occasion she will be able to improve on their work. The children of this world (darlings they are, some of them) are in their generation wiser than the children of light, but their reach does not extend so far in this case as docs that of the Church, functioning as the Sunday- school. They lack the compelling imperative which in the last analysis constrains us all, however we may brag and blow. The day-school will teach morals, but what are its sanctions? Conscience; Duty; Your Best Self; Humanity. But just why we should be constrained to unpleasant courses for those things is not clear to all men. If death end all, a short life and a merry one will suit some people who think "One crowded hour of glorious life is worth an age without a name." Moreover, who is to choose for us in the matter? By what authority does any man tell us that we must follow conscience, duty, our best selves or humanity? When someone told the great agnostic, Huxley, of August Comte's Positivist phil- osophy which teaches the worship of humanity, he said he would as soon worship a wilderness of apes as worship humanity. Who has authority to im- pose these standards upon us with authority? If it be said that happiness lies that way, then we say, "Permit us to judge as to what is happiness for us." And so it goes. But if we say, "Do these things because they are right, because they are fixed prin- ciples in the constitution of a universe which is at the bottom moral, based on righteousness, and be- cause there is One above us and outside of us who is both able and determined to see that each dere- liction shall meet with its due recompense of re- .78 WHY THEY FAIL ward, then, and then only have we got an impera- tive of life binding upon all men. It is the business of the Church to bring the soul face to face with God, who requires us to do justly, love mercy and walk humbly with Him. It is the business of the Church, knowing this dread sanction as no other institution does or can know it, to train up the child in the fear and knowledge of that Name, remembering that "the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom." The new life it is not ours to impart. That comes only from the Source of all life ; but it is ours to prepare the soul of the boy for its reception and development. To say otherwise is to discredit and decry the Sunday- school and the instruction we received at our mother's knee. No one is so idiotic as to advocate that. No one wants to say that the work of the Sunday-school is useless, or that what it already has, is, and is doing should be changed. What is said here is that its work has largely failed because it is incomplete. It is not a change that is needed ; it is an addition. And that addition is one of principle and method — the addition of a principle and method so common, so simple, so in- dispensable that no day-school teacher, no house- keeper, no farmer, no artisan, no business man, no preacher, no professor, no cook, no seamstress, no singer, no doer that ever did since "Adam delved and Eve span" has ever presumed to think that he or she could get along without it — none but the Church and her workers charged with the highest of all commissions, that of perfecting humanity in the fear of God. WHY. THEY FAIL 79 Foreword to Chapter III "Action is education," — Emerson. "The chief end of man is an action, not a thought." — Carlyle. "The harper is not made otherwise than harping, nor the just man otherwise than by doing just deeds." — Aristotle. CHAPTER III WHY THEY FAIL In the last analysis there are but two fundamental principles of education, viz., impression and reflex action. Church, homes, schools have lamentably failed in the supreme task of turning out an ethic- ally sufficient character for the simple reason that they have, ethically, all but ignored the second of these principles in their educational work. Once the Almighty ordains that a man shall walk on two legs it takes a very smart man to make equal prog- ress on one, and he is a mighty clever oarsman indeed, who can win a race with one oar, while the birdman or bird has yet to be found that can rise by the use of only one wing. When men can run on one foot and scull with one oar, then, and then only, may we hope to make adequate progress in ethical education by doing as we have been wont — using impression only where the Almighty has 80 WHY. THEY FAIL ordained the use of impression in conjunction with its necessary correlate, reflex action. Talk about why the Church fails ! There is no mystery about it. It is all plain as a pike staff. If there is any mystery about it the mystery is as to how she has managed to do, under the cir- cumstances, as much as she has accomplished. None but the Church could have done it under a similar handicap, and after all, she has done it because instinctively, blindly, she has in a small way made use of this secondary principle of educa- tion, otherwise she could hardly have lived in more than name. Without the great reflex of missions, home and foreign, the Church would long ago have been bundled to the scrap heap, or have dwindled into a social club — which is about what some of it3 branches are as it is. But what we have been doing blindly, instinctively in a small way, and for the most part not doing at all, it behooves us to do now intelligently, systematically and universally. We have found the leak that has been threatening to sink the ship in spite of all our pumping and baling; let us arise and heal the breach, and she will soon be riding the waves in her true char- acter as the white-winged messenger of heaven. In plain English, let the Church find adequate means of expression for the good impressions she has been creat- ing in such variety and profusion, and in less than two decades her reproach will have been taken away, for she will then have turned out the kind of citizen who will be able to discharge like a man his obligations to his home, his Church and his country. The Church's intentions are all right; she gets a black eye only because about three-fourths of all her effort is lost while only one-fourth of it comes to fruition. It was stated on a previous page that the reason WHY THEY FAIL 81 for our widespread failure lies in the fact that we have turned our boy out into the stern world of choice and action ethically "but half made-up" ; that we have been at little or no pains to develop intelli- gently the ethical action cells in his brain, for lack of the development of which he found himself un- able to do in manhood the good he knew and felt he ought to do. And the reason of that is found in the further fact that we have neglected the second, and, one might also say the more powerful, principle of all education, reflex action, without which it is absolutely impossible to build a brain capable of standing up against the odds of this highly refined and more exacting age. Were we living in an age of less social com- plexity and lower social ideals — such an age for instance as that which produced, not the barons of corporate greed, but the real, old-fashioned armor- plate kind who held that might is the right of the strongest; the age when men sold their lives for a pound and were hanged for the theft of a shilling, we might worry along very well without this doc- trine. But we are not living in such an age. We are living at a time when the complexities of eco- nomic life and its concentrations of capital not only afford strange temptations to financial delinquency but cause anxious quest to be made for uprightness in character, and anxious scrutiny to be made of all candidates presenting themselves for positions of trust, in hope that they may indeed be found worthy of the confidence of the thousands whose interests are necessarily placed in their hands, the days when John Doe could run his business to suit himself and keep his money in a sock, having some time ago departed. Business men naturally looked to the Church and the Sunday-school to produce the required brand of 82 WHY THEY FAIL character, but there are not wanting signs that their eyes fail of looking. The writer on one occasion went to eight of the leading business men of a cer- tain town in which he was staying and asked them this question : "If two men come to you asking for credit and absolutely all you know about them is that the one is a professing Christian and the other is not, would you give accommodation to the one who is a professing Christian any more quickly than you would to the other?" Five out of the eight said "No." One or two of the others thought they would rather trust the man who made no profession, and not one of them offered his opinion with the slightest sign of inward satisfaction. In fact, most of them were church members, and one of them, since gone to his re- ward, stands out in memory as a rare jewel in the Kingdom of God. With deep sadness in his voice he said, "I was not always thus, but I have learned in the hard school of bitter experience that church membership doesn't count for much in business." One may not make a general inference from so slight an induction it is true, but it cannot be denied that the foregoing incident is at least symptomatic. And when we place it alongside the conditions out- h'ned in Chapter I. it appears "all of a piece" — quite germane to the situation: it does not look like a soiled patch on an otherwise fair garment. Again we ask, Why are these things thusly? Why is that there are such moral landslides? Parents wonder, preachers wonder, teachers wonder, and all mourn because of it, for it has not come without the most heroic efforts to avert the disaster. Only heaven can properly appraise the volume of prayer, instruction and effort which has gone unselfishly outward and upward in behalf of the young. To understand properly the why of this immeas- WHY THEY FAIL 83 urably significant question, let us follow the physi- ologist, the neurologist and the psychologist into their secret chambers and shut-to the door behind us. The laboratory we shall find is a temple of learning in which they are the priests and we the acolytes. Sitting at the feet of these priests of the temple who offer up Hfe itself as the incense of their worship and the price of the information they would gain, we shall learn many things. Or to change the figure, we are the jury and these high priests of science are the experts who shall lay be- fore us their expert testimony, and we shall then be able to judge in the premises before us by the light of their evidence as to what is right and what is wrong in the case in hand. And so, calling up our Grays, our Carpenters and Alaudsleys, our Wundts, our ATossos and Schiaperellis, our Jameses and Baldwins, our Miinsterbergs, Thorndykes and Titcheners, our Goes and Deweys, our Judds and our Jastrows, we find that they bear explicit and eloquent testimony to the place and power of re- flex action in every manifestation of human life. But in order to understand this reflex action some knowledge of that most marvellous of all ma- chines, the human body, is necessary. Particularly must we know something of that superior order of the physical parts known as the nervous system. Skin, bone, sinew, gland and muscle fiber are all dependent for nutrition, action and their very life on that. Yea, the very thoughts we think in our present sphere of existence are conditioned by it. It is that, therefore, with which we shall have to do if we would understand why it is we have failed in our efforts at ethical education. Putting it as simply as possible, the nervous system of man is encased for the most part, like the delicate parts of a watch, in a hard covering, and for 84 WHY THEY FAIL the very same reason, that they may, as being so very important, be protected from injury. That hard covering is of bone and we call it the skull and the spinal column. The headquarters of the nervous system are not only in the brain but they consti- tute the brain and they have branch offices, so to speak, of varying importance in the back of the head and at intervals down the spinal column to the last vertebra. The substance of the brain and the spinal cord is essentially the same, a soft pulpy mass very unlike anything else in the body. Under the microscope it is found to be vastly different in structure from all the other tissues. It is stringy and in the backbone the strings run in well-defined bundles, much as fifty independent wires are bound together in a leaden tube on entering a telephone exchange. Having more space in the brain they are spread out and crossed and interlaced in all con- ceivable directions until they look under the micro- scope like nothing so much as an infinitely fine and infinitely diversified network of lace. Then, too, there is another reason why they should be differ- ently arranged in the skull. In the spinal column they are chiefly conducting wires running to and from the brain; but the brain is (as has more than once been said, because the likeness is inescapable) like a telephone exchange. There is one important difiference, however, between a nerve and a telephone wire — the wire is inert, but the nerve-fiber is not. It is alive in every part, and not only alive but every part of it is, so to speak, a battery, so that a sens- ory impulse is not only carried but reinforced as it is carried along to the brain. Like the tissues of all other living things, the nervous system is built up of cells, only the cells are not just what one might expect from a study of the vegetable, or other parts of the animal or- WHY THEY FAIL 85 ganism. When we think of a cell the image of some- thing like the cells made by bees for the secretion of their honey comes into mind. Such a conception may do for the sacs of irregular shape which form the structural units of other parts of the human body and other bodies, but it would be entirely misleading so far as the nervous system is concerned. In the nervous system, leaving out of count the purely- subsidiary blood vessels, lymphatics and connective tissue which nourish and support them, the nerve cells are sometimes quite lengthy bodies resembling a string which has been frayed out at both ends. Somew^here along that string there is a thickened part which is known as the nucleus or cell-body. Through it its parts seem to receive nourishm'ent ; apart from it they die. Sometimes the string is very short, may be an eighth of an inch in length ; again it is a yard long. From the thickened part or cell- body, the string goes in two directions. One sec- tion is longer than the other; it diminishes in size slowly and throws off a branch at odd intervals till it reaches the frayed-out end. That part is called the axis-cylinder process, or for short, the neuraxon or axone. The section of the string on the other side of the cell-body or nucleus is much shorter. It gets rapidly smaller and branches again and again till we have something very like a peach or apple tree. On this side of the cell-body there may be more than one such piece of the string, and with their branches they are called the dendritic processes or dendrites. The branches from the ax- one are called collaterals, and the frayed-out ends are called the terminal arborization, the likeness to the tree having been particularly strong in the mind of one of the earliest observers. Sometimes, though, the processes end in discs or plates. No collateral, no neurone, no dendritic process is isolated. Each 86 WHY THEY FAIL one is connected with contiguous fibers, not or- ganically but as one wire might touch another to form a contact and complete the circuit ; and so, theoretically at least, every part of the brain is in connection with every other part, associative, sen- sory or motor. The longer, or axis cylinder process, acquires, as the body grows and education advances, a pro- tecting sheath called the medullary sheath, and often when the fiber has to fare forth outside its bony protection into the softer parts of the body where it would be more exposed to injury, it ac- quires on top of that one another sheath, called after its discoverer, the sheath of Schwann. So much for the structure of the nerve cell. A queer-looking cell it is but divinely well adapted to the lofty part it has to play in the economy of life, for there is not less difference between the nerve cells and other cells in the body than there is be- tween the function of the nervous system and that of the circulatory, respiratory or digestive systems. It controls them all if it does in turn depend on them. Like all the other tissues of the body the nerve substance has the power of taking up from the blood whatever it needs to build itself and to keep itself in repair; but in addition to these powers it is dis- tinguished by certain other remarkable qualities which are peculiar to itself. One of these is sensi- tiveness. And here again we have functional dif- ferentiation. The fibers which make us sensible of heat and cold are not those which enable us to hear or see. Touch the optic nerve and we feel nothing but we see a light, as most people whose knowledge of astronomy has been gained in a roller skating rink will be ready to avow. Touch the auditory nerve and we feel no pain, but we hear a sound. WHY THEY FAIL 87 the volume of which is related to the violence of the irritation. And so on with the gustatory, ol- factory and other nerves of special function. Widely distributed over the body are those sensory nerves which have to do with temperature, touch and pain. Tiiese with their companions guard well the citadel of life, so that we are enabled to keep constantly in touch with our environment and adjusted to its changes. Meyer distinguishes sixteen diflferent varieties of sensation. Were it not for these mar- vellous guides and monitors we should not last long, and in fact, were it not for them, if we did manage to live it would be a mere existence for we should be without ideas and without enjoyment, mere bits of animated clay. The tutors of the mind are those impressions which stream into our consciousness over the sensory wires without one second's cessa- tion from the moment of waking till long after we close our eyes to sleep at night. Yes, even into our shnnbers they pursue us sometimes, as when on a chilly night, the covering off our poor little feet, we dream that some powerful enemy is holding us down in a snowbank with intent of freezing us to death ; or the cook rattling and slamming the fur- nace at an unchristian hour of the morning, as only graceless cooks know how to do, makes us dream we have found employment in a stamp mill or a box factory. A second functional characteristic of the nerve fiber is that whenever an irritation, stimulation or excitement is stirred up at one end of it, a similar disturbance is immediately caused at the other end. That is, the nerve has the power of transmitting its excitement throughout its length and on to other fibers connected with it. Often the excitement is so small that we are not conscious of it, but never- theless it is there as the delicate instruments of the 88 WHY THEY FAIL laboratory clearly show, and what is more, these subconscious stimulations are often found to be humble servitors of some more dignified conscious activity that is going on, as when for example it is not for nothing a man without knowing it clenches his teeth, contracts his eyebrows and grunts, on tackling a lift which he thinks may be if anything a little beyond him. In fact, his very scalp moves helpfully in the effort. The third peculiarity of the nervous system is that these living wires which transmit the impres- sions that come to them are essentially modifiable. They "grow to the modes in which they are exer- cised," and in the most uncanny way imaginable they learn to form and break connections among themselves, in the interests of the preservation of the individual. The three-year-old who is to-day attracted so strongly by the buzz-saw that he gets his fingers in it, w^ill, when he hears that same buzz to-morrow be seen to make tracks in the direction of the next county. Neurologists tell us that these nerve cells (don't forget the elongated shape of them) are thus of three kinds (a) sensory or environment cells, bear- ing impulses or messages to the brain; (b) motor or muscular contraction cells, which send out im- pulses or orders to the muscles, and (c) associative or connective cells, the "central" of the brain, by which incoming sensory impulses are transformed into outgoing motor impulses destined to move some muscular fiber in muscle or gland, as good soldiers are moved at the word of command. The discovery of these association cells and their approximate location in the center of the brain was one of the greatest triumphs of modern psy- chology. What was conjectured and postulated be- fore now became verifiable and more exact as a, WHY THEY FAIL 89 basis of knowledge and further investigation. In that large group of neurones or cells which consti- tutes at once the storehouse and the clearing-house of human life, lies the key to the solution of our problem in ethical education and the reason for our humiliating failures in the past. As Prof. Thorn- dyke, of Columbia University, says: "The bulk of the brain is given up to these connecting cells and the more important part of the work of the nervous system is the work, not of receiving stimuli from sensitive parts of the body, nor of discharging stimuli to the muscles, but of turning stimulus into discharge, connecting outgo properly with income, suiting expression to impression, action to circum- stances. Counting fifty a minute, it would take a man working twelve hours a day over two hundred years to merely count the nerve cells of one man." Mention has been made in the foregoing of reflex action. A muscular reflex action "is the result of a peripheral stimulation reaching motor spinal cen- ters and thence centrifugally manifest in a reaction. Thus in the pupil the stimulation caused by light falling on the retina travels by the sensory limb of the reflex arc to the medullary center and there calls forth energy which flows down the motor limb and causes pupillary contraction." Everyone knows the blinking and squinting that follow when we step out of darkness into a very bright light. Now the body is full of such unconscious and irrepressible actions as that. For instance, we know what is going to happen when some villain sprinkles red pepper on the hot stove. That irritation of the outward ends of the olfactory nerve produces, in spite of all we can do, a paroxysm of the respiratory tract which we call a sneeze. It is nature's prompt effort to expel the possibly dangerous intruder from (he sacred temple of aeration on which life depends. ,90 WHY THEY FAIL Coughing is the reflex action consequent upon the irritation of another nerve, and its response comes back swiftly to another set of muscles which quickly- clear the precious bronchial tubes of the gathering phlegm. Irritate still another nerve with a dose of mustard and water, ipecac, or atro-morphine, and the response is felt immediately in violent vomiting. Other reflexes there are which have not such a direct bearing on the preservation of life perhaps, but which are yet truly reflex actions. For example, snoring. We could do very well without that. "Spittin' an' gaggin' '' to use Eben Holden's expres- sion ; sighing like a furnace, sobbing, blushing, pal- lor, snuffling, tickling, tasting and sniffing are other illustrations of the same thing. In fact, moment by moment we are dependent on reflex action for our very lives. The beating of the heart, the circulation of the blood, the assimilation of our foovl and all the marvellous details of elimina- tion, waste and repair, depend upon an elaborate and balanced adjustment of reflexes, according to the gentle and predetermined mutual interaction of a vast complex of nerves, each doing its own particular work so quietly, swiftly and exactly that we do not even know they are at work till one of them is interrupted. The vagus nerve for instance, controls the beating of the heart. The latter most- important organ is like a race-horse, all the time ready to run away and dash itself and all its ruddy connections to destruction at the slightest release of control. It is for this reason the surgeon holds his breath when he operates in the region traversed by the vagus nerve. He knows that one un- fortunate slip severing that white thread and the heart would be like a hound out of leash, up and away to that land toward which the mournful un- dertaker leads the way. WHY THEY FAIL 91 The special business of the vagus nerve is to keep the heart down to an even pace, and, if we irritate it, instead of accelerating the pace of the heart as one might by analogy expect, we depress the heart's action. The respiratory rhythm affects the vaso- motor system of nerves — those nerves threading the velvet coats of the arteries to help the pumping heart lift the crimson tide throughout the body ; and in turn both the vaso-motor and the respiratory react upon the vagus and the whole sympathetic system, so that there is going on within us all the time a most elaborate and curious system of automatic reflexes from sensory nerve end to center, and back through motor nerve to muscle, without which we should immediately have to vacate the premises. Is this clear then? Over the sixteen or more dis- tinct varieties of nerve wires with their millions of branches, impression impulses keep pouring into the centers. In the "central" or its branch offices these impressions are handled and a reply is in- stantly flashed back over another wire, the motor nerve, telling the muscles what to do. That is re- flex action. Now the head office (no joke) for this kind of business is the brain (leaving out of count of course the blood vessels, lymphatics, connective tissue, etc., in which it rests) and the branch offices are located in the spinal cord and at the top of the spinal column in the back of the head. By far the most important branch office is that in the back of the head — seat of the quadrigemina, optic thalamus, etc., etc. The other centers are at regular intervals down the spinal cord, where the thirty-one pairs of nerve bundles sally forth from, or return to and enter the backbone, as one chooses to look at it. As in a large business enterprise the central of- 92 WHY THEY FAIL fice looks after the higher matters, policy, litigation, administration and so on, leaving to the branch offices the less important and the well-established or routine ; and as in that office business is handed over to the subordinate officials just as rapidly as they are able to take it on and handle it, so in the nervous system there goes on incessantly, the psy- chologists and neurologists tell us, a delegation by the brain to the lower centers of the care of a multi- tude of details in order that it may be free to attend to the higher things of life, thought processes, shap- ing of life policies, the cerebral litigations we call doubts, questionings, judgments, and so on. When we were babies we said "go to, now ; let us walk," and it took the central office with all hands busy and keyed-up to the last thread of attention all its time to commandeer the muscles to that end. Now we say, "Let us go downtown," and the thought of how we are to get there does not so much as once enter out thoughts in the head office, so completely have the details been handed over to the offices be- low. The thought of going, the word of command is enough to start up all the machinery. Schrader illustrated this process when he ab- stracted the hemispheres of a frog's brain and found it could move of its own accord, eat flies and bury itself in the mud. Vulpian found that brainless carp, three days after operation, would make di- rectly for food thrown into the water in front of them, bite at a knotted cord and even show a ten- dency to defend their rights when menaced by other fish. Goltz experimented with dogs, and when he had destroyed both hemispheres, and practically also the corpora striata and thalami, found the dog lived for fifty-one days and was able to stand and walk. The lower centers had taken over the task WHY THEY FAIL 93 which once required the directive action of the brain proper. Experimental interference with the brain hemi- spheres of the lower animals shows that it is the higher functions such as inhibition, resourcefulness, etc., which are eliminated when the brain is re- moved. But the subordinate centers themselves seem to have acquired a certain amount of inhibi- tory control, too. The brain itself has in the highest degree this power of inhibition as one of its grand prerogatives, but when it delegates its powers to lower centers they seem to take over something of the inhibitory functions at the same time. This wonderful and significant phase of our ner- vous activities is beautifully presented to us in Prof. Mark Baldwin's "Hand-Book of Psychology" as follows : "Of these general statements the first concerns what has already been called the integrating func- tion of nerve centers. By this is meant the build- ing up of a center to greater complexity of structure through new stimulations. It takes place by reason of the extreme plasticity of the nervous elements in taking on arrangements suited to more habitual and, at the same time more complex, reactions. The center becomes the theater of multiple and conflicting stimulations; its reaction is the outcome of a warfare of interests, and the pathway of dis- charge is a line of conduction most favorable to future similar outbursts. A center gains by such complex activities in two ways; first its habitual reactions become a rock-bed or layer of elements, so to speak, of fixed function issuing in established paths of least resistance ; and second, the center grows, gaining new and more mobile elements, and responding to more complex and difficult motor in- tentions. For example the center for the move- 94 WHY THEY FAIL ment of the hands is educated from the early, pain- ful lessons of the baby's finger movements to the delicate and rapid touch of the skilled musician. Not only has the center become fixed and auto- matic for movements at first painfully learned, but it has become educated by learning-, so that it acquires new^ combinations more easily. This two- fold growth becomes the basis of the sentient ap- paratus into centers and ganglia. The 'rock-bed' elements, so-called, fall into fixed ganglionic con- nections, and the new and free cells take up the higher function, only in their turn to become 'fixed' by habit and to give place to other and yet more complex combinations. This integrating process is what gives the hierarchal order to the system and throws the law of development into fine relief. . . . This principle of integration covers in its two aspects, the law of growth in liv- ing tissue in general. Exercise tends always both to enlarge and to consolidate an organ. A muscle becomes more ready and exact, as well as larger and more capable with frequent use, and the same application has been made of the principle to mental functions, notably to the memory. The striking peculiarity of the case in regard to nervous activities is the excessively detailed differentiations it works; we have here not only the rise of new centers from old ones, but organic pathways de- veloped between them and a progressive advance secured throughout the system, from the spinal ganglia up to the cerebral cortex. "Each of the segments of the spinal cord has its own reactions apart from its brain connection. In- deed, reflex actions are most perfect and pure when cues in the form of attention are not directed to the movements. These facts tend to throw reflexes rather on the side of the downward growth spoken WHY THEY FAIL 95 of and assimilate them to automatic reactions. The well-known phenomena presented by a brain- less frog illustrates pure reflexes very clearly. ''The downward growth appears in that many of our reflexes are acquired from habit and repetition. Motor processes at first difficult and simple, are welded together in complex masses, and the whole becomes spontaneous and reflex. The case is cited of a musician who was seized with an epileptic at- tack in the midst of an orchestral performance and continued to play the measure quite correctly while in a state of apparently quite complete unconscious- ness. This is only an exaggerated case of common experience in walking, writing, etc. It represents from the standpoint of body, the motor organiza- tion in consciousness already pointed out under the head of 'motor intuition.' Just as a number of single experiences of movement become merged in a single idea of the whole, and the impulse to begin the combination is sufficient to secure the performance of all the details, so single elementary nervous reactions become integrated in a compound reflex. "Negative reaction or inhibition. Under the name of inhibition or arrest, a class of phenomena is in- cluded which are, as far as our knowledge goes, peculiar to nervous activities. Every positive re- action is accompanied by a reverse wave, an arrest, so to speak, of its full effect. It is analogous to a negative force acting to counteract and neutralize the outgoing discharge. It seems to take place in the center. The effective force of a reaction, there- fore, is always less by the amount of the nervous arrest. This neutralizing factor has been measured in certain conditions of nerve reaction. (a) "The kind of reaction showing least arrest is the reflex; and in general the more consolidated 96 WHY. THEY FAIL a nerve tract or center, the less exhibition do we discover of the reverse wave. This would seem to indicate that inhibition is not a phenomenon at- taching to 'paths of least resistance' and does not belong on the side of so-called 'downward' growth. (b) "Inhibition is at its maximum in reactions which involve centers of more complex activity. The phenomena of voluntary control — inhibition by the will — are in evidence here, however we may construe the will. For it should be remem- bered that we must find a mechanical basis for muscular control even though we advocate a di- rective and selective function of the will. (c) "Hence inhibition is a concomitant of insta- bility and complexity of nervous tissue; it belongs on the side of the "upward" growth of the sys- tem. . . . This general view is also sustained by the fact now established that each segmental reflex in the spinal cord is subject to inhibition from the higher segments and in turn inhibits those lower down. The reflexes of a frog's legs immersed in dilute acid are more rapid and violent after the hemispheres have been removed — showing the normal inhibitive function of the cortex; and the reflexes of a lizard's tail have been shown to in- crease in vigor as the segments of the spinal cord are successively removed." And similarly also in the case of lesions of the motor zone of the cortex (central office) in man. Now the essential thing about a reflex action is that something occurs in the nerve center whereby the impulse coming in through the sensory nerve is transformed into an impulse or order going out- ward to gland or muscle. The pivotal transaction which results in such a transformation is called by the specialists a "motor discharge." Mark well the word. For the lack of it in our dictionaries of WHY THEY FAIL 97 religious education, society goes haltingly as did the patriarch Jacob when the Angel touched his sciatic nerve long ago. We may therefore adopt the term and use it as being the essential thing about a reflex so far as this discussion is concerned. So profoundly, so truly at the heart of things lies this great fact of reflex action in relation to the reception of impressions from without that psychologists now affirm "all consciousness leads to action." That is, every thought zve think struggles to break out into a complementary action. And it generally succeeds. If it does not get a right channel of discharge, it will discharge through a wrong one. Its influence will be felt somewhere. We may not be at all conscious of it, yet it is there. Prof. Sanford will put his little instrument on your throat and show you that while you are reading this page silently in your room the muscles of the larynx are moving almost as perceptibly as if you were whispering to 3^our neigh- bor in church. Prof. Mosso, an ingenious Italian physiologist, has demonstrated in his laboratory that we can think no thought, be moved by no feeling, be in- spired by no motive which does not immediately result in a motor discharge which is felt along many different avenues, viz., the pulse rate, the qual- ity of the heart beat, the blood pressure and its distribution in the body, the glandular secretions, the respiration and the muscular tension. This is not supposition; it is a fact shown daily in the psychological laboratories of a hundred well- equipped universities, by means of a score of deli- cate instruments measuring to ten-thousandths of an inch in space and thousandths of a second in time. In this inveterate tendency of every thought to 98 WHY THEY FAIL reproduce itself in a corresponding action we have the sufficient explanation of the miraculous cures wrought by Christian Scientists, notwithstanding its fantastic jumble of phrases in "Science and Health." No wonder Mark Twain said that book reminded him of "a dictionary with the colic." Im- manuel movement, Saint's bones, "absent healers," et id onme genera depend for what success they may have on that great law — a law which, by the way, is like water and air, as free to the atheist as to the believer, as many of the former have proved by their use of it in clinics, regular and otherwise. If you don't believe that the secretions are al- fected by a thought, nor the muscles, shut your eyes and imagine someone is squeezing a lemon into your mouth and see if the parotid and submax- illary glands do not begin work and ''make your mouth water," Ordinarily they are excited to ac- tion only by the presence of food in the mouth. Or ask yourself what would happen if just as you were sitting down to a banquet with the most wolf- ish appetite you ever had, a telegram was handed you announcing the death of your dearest. That thought would reach your stomach via the pneumo- gastric nerve before you had time to reach the sig- nature in your reading. Or, again, stand up, shut your eyes and concentrate your attention on the sensation of falling backward, at the same time let- ting yourself go, and see if a hundred muscles are not constrained to action in a moment in response to that thought. Babies have been poisoned at the breast because their mothers did not know that it is possible for anger to change to poison even the nutritive secretions of the body. "Melancholia" is, etymologically, black bile. Drug healing gets the reflex without the thought WHZ TMEY. FAIL 99 and brings us down as by a slung shot, and the doctor's superiority over the rest of us lies chiefly in that he knows what part of the nervous system this, that, or the other drug will irritate, for these drugs seem to be highly selective. One will fly at the vagus, another at the pneumogastric, another at the vaso-motor nerves, and so on. But old practi- tioners get tired of these bludgeon methods, except in emergency cases, and more and more come to think in pensive moments about what lies behind that bread pill, or that "jag" of water instead of the regulation "eighth" of morphia, that it should induce the blessed oblivion of sleep. Frpsh air, rest, proper food, cleanliness and suggestive therapeutics, the marvellous power of mind over matter; of thoughts to produce internal motor discharges and physiological reflexes — of fear to contract and hope to expand, or anger that poisons in the human body — all this inclines many to beHeve that in fifty, or one hundred years people will have attained such a knowledge of the laws of life as will enable them to do what we would often long to do — "throw physic to the dogs." "We would if we dast, but we dassent." So then every thought from within or impression from without is "handled" promptly in the central oflice — thrown off, as it were, down one line or an- other as promptly as ever pitcher sent the ball to first base in the ninth inning with two out and an even score. From this there is no escape, and the finding or making the right path of discharge is the main thing in education. Says Prof. James, of Harvard, whose monumental work "Psychology" in two large volumes will presently yield us some further light, "The currents once in must find a way out. In getting out they leave their traces in the paths which they take. The only thing they 100 WHY THEY FAIL can do, in short, is to deepen old paths or to make new ones; the whole plasticity of the brain sums itself up in two words when we call it an organ in which currents pouring in from the sense-organs make with extreme facility paths which do not easily disappear." Now it is just at this point of finding the proper channels of discharge that we have shown the in- tellectual "blind spot." We have ignored it almost wholly in our ethical education, not so much in our "secular" education and not at all, one may say, in our practical education. That is, in our religious education as ministered in the home, the Church and the Sunday-school, we have pinned our faith to the first half of this process and let the other slide. We have devoted all our time to creat- ing good impressions in Sunday-school and pulpit and apparently cared not a whit as to what became of them when they were made. We just trusted that somehow Providence would "bless the seed sown" and make it bear fruit in after years, for- getting that we must not only broadcast the seed but harrow it in, then wait for God. Providence does not usually do for us what we can do for our- selves. He may provide a primer but he certainly will not learn the lesson for us ; he may give us a farm but nothing will come of that if we don't get up before breakfast in the morning and work it. Look over the Sunday-schools and congregations of the land. What a wealth of the very noblest in- struction is there. What heartfelt prayers! What lofty and inspiring songs ! Genuine too, whatever the sneering critic on the street may say. The trouble is not there. The Church is God's institu- tion and it still pleases God "by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe." The Sunday- school as an organization, numerically and in the WHY THEY FAIL 101 elaborate and painstaking care with which it is carried on, has no parallel in the world, the Church alone excepted. To think on the multitudes of tired men and women who study to prepare their lessons and then drag their wearied bodies out to the ser- vice of children whom they would never otherwise have known ; and to see them follow those children of other people through the week with prayer and anxious solicitude, without thought of pecuniary remuneration, while parents and their Epicurean detractors steep their senses in slumber or loll dawdling in hammocks slung in the shadiest cor- ner of the veranda, is a sight calculated to help restore one's faith in God and human nature. And their work is, on the whole, very well done too. The weakness is not there. It is not that we need to cease what we have been doing or to blame ourselves for it. Our sin is not one of com- mission, but of omission. What the Sunday-schools and pulpits have been doing is their own proper work ; but it is only a part of it, and we have mis- taken the part of education for the whole, that is all. But this business of creating good impressions con- tinuously and stopping there, is, as it happens, by the constitution of nature, which is the fiat of God, an extremely vicious procedure. It produces a lop- sided brain and it occasions an enormous waste. It is because of these two items that about three- fourths or two-thirds of our teaching and preaching never accomplishes anything — a fact which causes the enemies of the Lord to blaspheme. Those impression cells of emotion and knowledge have grown to their normal capacity in a reasonable average of the cases. People brought up in church and Sunday-school do not fall down ethically be- cause they do not know what is right in dicker 103 WHY THEY FAIL and bargain ; they fall down because knowing, they cannot somehow do it when it comes to the scratch, any more than they can paint a portrait of the mayor, and for the very same reason, because they have never done it, or the like of it. That is, because in their brains there have never taken place the correlative nervous discharges of the emotion into the act that should go with it. Hence it is that we have produced a race of men who are good in a prayer meeting, but bad in a horse trade, and marvels of beneficence with the million they haven't got, but misers with the sou they have. What then has become of the nervous impulses created by those good impressions? Alas, they have been "drained off" into unproductive channels. Nay, worse — they have not only been drained off unproductively, but what is worse, they have made it easy, not to say imperative, that every other simi- lar good impression following shall run into the same unproductive channels. That is why the preacher's sermon, be it never so powerful, produces so little effect on the conduct of the man before him. It seems to have no "clutch." He sheds it as naturally as a duck sheds water, and he is not to blame any more than the duck or the faithful minister who has just spoken. The fault is in the early education we gave him. We have educated him to shed his good impressions or impulses ; we have developed the wrong neurones in his brain, and so there he is. As we made him so we have him. Hear the great psychologist of Cambridge speak- ing to this point. It is the voice of a scientist who yet has the heart of a man, and he is speaking of what he calls "the obstructed will." "Those ideas, objects, considerations, which (in these lethargic states) fail to get to the will, fail WHY THEY FAIL 103 to draw blood, seem, in so far forth, distant and unreal. The connection of the reality of things with their effectiveness as motives is a tale that has never yet been fully told. The moral tragedy of human life comes almost wholly from the fact that the link is ruptured which normally should hold between vision of the truth and action, and that this pungent sense of effective reality will not attach to certain ideas. Men do not dift'er so much in their mere feelings and conceptions. Their notions of possibility and their ideals are not as far apart as might be argued from their differing fates. No class of them have better sentiments or feel more constantly the dift'erence between the higher and the lower path in life, than the hopeless failures, the sentimentalists, the drunkards, the schemers, the "dead-beats" whose life is one long contradiction between knowledge and action, and who, with full command of theory, never get to holding their limp characters erect. No one eats of the fruit of the tree of knowledge as they do ; as far as moral insight goes, in comparison with them the orderly and prosperous Philistines whom they scandalize, are sucking babes. And yet their moral knowledge always there rumbling and grumbling in the back- ground — discerning, commenting, protesting, long- ing, half resolving — never wholly resolves, never gets its voice out of the minor into the major key, or its speech out of the subjunctive mood into the imperative mood, never breaks the spell, never takes the helm into its hands. In such characters as Rousseau and Restif it would seem as if the lower motives had all the impulsive efficacy in their hands. Like trains with the right of way, they retain an ex- clusive possession of the track. The more ideal motives exist alongside of them in profusion, but they never get switched on and the man's conduct 104 WHY THEY FAIL is no more influenced by them than an express train is influenced by a wayfarer standing by the roadside and calling to be taken aboard. They are an inert accompaniment to the end of time; and the con- sciousness of inward hollowness that accrues from habitually seeing the better only to do the worse, is one of the saddest feelings one can bear with him through this vale of tears." In our practical education in its two phases, the intellectual and the manual, we have not dared to despise this great, fundamental, indispensable prin- ciple, reflex action, or expression. Not for a minute. We insist on a motor discharge directly related to the instruction given. We make it our business to furnish the opportunity. In our day-schools, so far as the intellectual training of the children is con- cerned, no teacher could hold her situation a week if she did not find ways for the children to give out what she had just rammed in. She may or may not be able to tell you the psychological reason for it, but she feels and knows that the methods of the average Sunday-school would never get her little charges anywhere. However church-people may slight the word, she feels "in her bones" that Prof. James knows what he is talking about in his "Talks to Teachers on Psychology." At the request of the Corporation of Harvard University, Prof. James a few years ago addressed the teachers of Cambridge on psychology as it re- lates itself to their daily work. In the course of his address on "The Necessity of Reactions" he took occasion to lay down what he considered "the one general aphorism which ought by logical right to dominate the entire conduct of the teacher in the class-room" — "the great maxim which the teacher ought never to forget." And what is this great, fundamental law of the profession which the teacher WHY THEY F'AIL 105 of our day schools must never, under any circum- stances forget, if she would do her work as a teacher? He puts it in italics, that they may not forget. Would that we might have it on the wall of every Sunday-school in letters a yard long, so that no leader could miss it. This is it: "No reception without reaction, no impression with- out correlative expression." Now what does he mean by that? This we take it. He would say something like this. You are a teacher. As you stand there before that class remember that each of those little vulgar fractions 6i humanity is simply a bundle of reactions. The boy's optic nerve is reacting all the time to the stimulus from the sentence on the board, the colors of your dress, the light in your eye, the kindli- ness of your smile or the frown on your brow: his auditory nerve is reacting to the sound of your voice, to the other voices, to the noises on the street, to the buzz of the blue-bottle fly he holds prisoner in his hand ; his olfactory is gladly recog- nizing the scent of a toothsome apple under the desk, or the odors of flowers in a neighboring win- dow; his sensory nerves report a very high reading where he sits near the register ; also the discomfort from the perspiration caused by a motor order to his sweat glands to open up, in the interest of his general well-being, and so on with all his senses. In addition to the other impressions he is listen- ing to your voice. You are trying to impress upon his brain the fact that the United States once be- longed to Great Britain but that they broke away, and why they broke away and how they broke away. Or being desirous of giving him some idea of the location of the republic you have told him about its shape ; of the peoples living on the north and south and of the two oceans east and west. You are not 106 WHY THEY FAIL to think your work as a teacher is done when you have done that, no matter how clearly and simply you have put it and no matter how intently he followed your story. As a matter of fact your work as a teacher is scarcely half done. If you are to develop that boy's brain 3^ou will have to re- member that it is not so much what you do as what he does that counts. You are there mainly to di- rect him in his doing. He must build his own brain under your supervision. If, therefore, you wish him to incorporate into his own make-up what you have just given him you must make him tell you that story of the great struggle, in writing it may be, or verbally, but in his OAvn language, and you must make him draw a map of this country showing its boundaries. As he prints the map on the paper he will automatically print it on his own brain by reflex action. Of course Prof. James did not say that. He did not say it because there was no more need of say- ing it to that audience than there would have been for his showing them how to spell "cat" if he had asked them to write the word. All that, however timely it may be for the average Sunday-school teacher (and it would be timely) is but the alphabet of the teacher's profession. What that prince of psychologists did say to those professionals was this. Would that the words might be written on the sky for all to read. "An impression which simply flows in at the pupil's eyes or ears, and in no way modifies his active life, is an impression gone to waste. It is physiologically incomplete. It leaves no fruits be- hind it in the way of capacity acquired. Even as mere impression it fails to produce its proper ef- fect upon the memory: for, to remain fully among the acquisitions of this latter faculty, it must be WHY THEY FAIL 107 wrought into the whole cycle of our operations. Its motor consequences are what clench it. Some effect due to it in the way of an activity must return to the mind in the form of the sensation of having acted and connect itself with the impression." And again. "Seize the very first possible oppor- tunity to act on every resolution you make, and on every emotional prompting yon may experience in the direction of the habits you aspire to gain." He underlines those words and then goes on. "It is not in the moment of their forming but in the moment of their producing motor effects, that resolves and aspirations communicate the new 'set' to the brain. "No matter how full a reservoir of maxims one may possess, and no matter how good one's senti- ments may be, if one have not taken advantage of every concrete opportunity to act, one's character may remain entirely unaffected for the better. With good intentions hell proverbially is paved. . . . When a resolve or a fine glow of feeling is allowed to evaporate without bearing practical fruit it is worse than a chance lost; it works so as positively to hinder future resolutions and emotions from tak- ing the normal path of discharge. . . . Don't preach too much to your pupils or abound in good talk in the abstract. Lie in wait rather for the practical opportunities, be prompt to seize those as they pass, and thus at one operation get your pupils both to think, to feel, and to do. The strokes of behavior are what give the new set to the character, and work the good habits into its organic tissue. Preaching and talking too soon become an inef- fectual bore." All too soon, dear reader, as most of us can testify from experience. But why is it a bore? Read the foregoing once more — "the strokes of behavior are 108 WHY THEY FAIL what give the new set to the brain and work the good habits into its organic tissue." "It is not in the moment of their forming but in the moment of their producing motor effects that resolves and aspirations communicate the new 'set' to the brain." Nay, more. If the "aspiration," the "resolve," "the fine glow of feeling" is allowed to "evaporate," "it is worse than a chance lost; it zwyrks so as posi- tively to hinder future resolutions and emotions from taking the normal path of discharge." Let Prof. James explain himself even more fully. The quotation is from the chapter on Habit in Volume I of his "Psychology." "The entire ner- vous system is nothing but a system of paths be- tween a sensory terminus a quo and a muscular, glandular or other terminus ad quem. A path once traversed by a nerve current might be expected to follow the law of most of the paths we know, and to be scooped out and made more permeable than be- fore ; and this ought to be repeated with each new passage of the current. Whatever obstructions may have kept it at first from being a path should then, little by little and more and more, be swept out of the way, until at last it might become a natural drainage channel. This is what happens where either solids or liquids pass over a path; there seems no reason why it should not happen where the thing that passes is a mere wave of re- arrangement in matter that does not displace itself, but merely changes chemically, or turns itself round in place, or vibrates across the line. The most plausible views of the nerve current make it out to be the passage of some such wave of rearrange- ment as this." Observe from the foregoing that the mischief of our unilateral system of ethical education is more WHY THEY FAIL 109 than negative. It is not merely that g-ood impres- sions created by preaching and teaching in the Church and out of it, fail to work themselves out into good conduct — the failure to give them a chance results in a positive injury; it produces a malformed brain. That "natural drainage channel" is the Great Leak that has cost humanity so dear, and it is just as really a pathological condition as is the channel which makes it so easy to get drunk, and therefore so hard to keep sober; so easy to gamble and therefore so hard to be honest. It is a case of wrong channels scooped out — with the help of society. Prof. Thorndyke is of the same opinion as Prof. James. In his chapter on "Laws of Brain Action" he says: "These stimuli cannot come to nothing. Their energy must either be transmitted on to other cells and eventually out through the efferent (ac- tion) cells to the muscles or else cause modifica- tions — do work — in cells of the central system. Just as in a storage battery electric charges coming in must sooner or later be discharged out or modify the battery itself, so the stimuli coming into the brain must transform it or be conducted out and cause the muscles to contract. Every stimulus has its result somehow, somewhere." So also Prof. G. E. Muller, as construed by Prof. James. In speaking of the miller's awaking when the mill stops, and of the phenomenon presented by a rustic coming into the city who is first sleep- less because of the roar and presently finds himself indifferent to it, he says : "Impressions which come to us when the thought centers are preoccupied with other matters may thereby be blocked or in- hibited from invading these centers, and may then overflow into lower paths of discharge. And he further suggests that if this process recur often 110 WHY THEY FAIL enough, the side-track thus created will grow so permeable as to be used no matter what may be going on in the centers above. In the acquired inattention mentioned, the constant stimulus always caused disturbances at first, and consciousness of it was extruded successfully only when the brain was strongly excited about other things. Gradually the extrusion became easier and at last automatic." Therefore it is that many beside Tennyson's northern farmer "hear parson abummin' awa," and so also it is that manv a man becomes "gospel hard- ened" under the fervent and faithful preaching of his minister. Had he only allowed that impulse to arise and follow Christ its natural motor response, and kept on doing so, what a vastly different char- acter and destiny he might have achieved ! He did not know that he was in his own brain locking himself out of the Kingdom of Heaven. "How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the Kingdom of Heaven," said Jesus. Why? Because their motor channels are well developed in direc- tions very remote from those of repentance, need, lowliness and altruism. Prof. Hugo Mimsterberg, of Harvard, who has perhaps done more than any other man in America to relate psychology as a science to the practical affairs of life, and to gear it to our every-day needs, goes even further for he finds serious consequences resulting from what he terms a "strangulated emo- tion." The instances he cites are pathological and therefore extreme ; but they may serve neverthe- less to illustrate what goes on when nature doesn't get a chance to find any motor discharge at all for some overpowering emotion. From his clinic (for both himself and Prof. James are doctors of medicine as well as of philosophy, laws and literature) he brings forth cases which WHY THEY FAIL 111 have come to him for treatment. Here is a girl standing" in a public waiting-room which is filled ■with tobacco smoke. She is very fatigued and be- low par nervously. She is engaged to a young man. Presently she hears a girl nearby tell her friend that this young man is in love with another young lady. Instantly there is a powerful emotional dis- turbance within. The natural impulse is to cry out, deny it, or do something else by way of protest. That is the normal path of discharge. But she is in a public place among strangers and that impulse is strangled. Ever after the smell of tobacco smoke, bringing up that scene by association of ideas, up- sets her nervously and makes her ill. Dr. Miinster- berg by hypnotic suggestion opens up the proper channel of discharge and she is freed from her disability. Here is another case from the same author's "Psychotherapy." The case is that of a young woman of twenty-five, a school teacher of pure char- acter and hating the very thought of immorality of any kind. She is obsessed by the idea that at any time she may become a mother. Life is a burden on account of this thought, which she recognizes as foolish yet cannot shake off. She shuns society because of the embarrassment caused by this thought when in company. She had had this thought as long as she could remember, and suffered from it even when among her girl pupils in the private institution in which she taught. Prof. Miinsterberg, shrewdly inferring that there must have been some emotional shock in her past life, obliges her to burrow into the years gone be- fore. Finally she tells him of an experience she had when about thirteen years of age. At that time a beautiful girl whom she admired very much, sud- denly got a baby which died in a few days. At that 113 WHY THEY FAIL time no thought of wrong-doing seems to have en- tered into the news. She was at that time com- pletely naieve. "She received an intense shock at the thought that an unmarried girl might suddenly get a child which might then as suddenly die." Prof. Miinsterberg reckoned that this was the cause of the trouble — "a deep, physiological brain ex- citement which had irradiated toward the ideas of her personality. It had stirred up there associations which kept their psychological character while the primary disturbance had long lost its psychical ac- companiment." So he sets to work to side-track that association by linking it with appropriate as- sociations, thus setting it right in the whole system of her thoughts. Inducing a hypnotic state he asks her to think backward as vividly as she can to that experience of her youth and to fancy meeting that pretty girl once more, and to imagine that she speaks with her. Then he makes her talk with him. She assures him that she sees the scene dis- tinctly. She believes she sees the girl on the street. He suggests that she tell her just what she thinks of her; to tell her that she understands now what she did not understand in her childhood and that she knows she must have lived an immoral life and that no pure girl could ever find herself in such a case. She expresses her disapproval in the strong- est possible terms (this time the natural comple- mentary motor discharge) and likewise expresses her own feeling of happiness that such a thing could never happen to her. She awakes quite ex- hausted from her nervous excitement. The power of the obsessing idea is weakened; in four more treatments it is entirely gone and the young woman goes on her way rejoicing. A new and natural channel of motor discharge has been opened. Other cases Prof. Miisterberg cites, cases of WHY THEY FAIL 113 capable men as well as cases from the ranks of "the weaker sex," in which life was a burden and a nightmare simply because in some moment of physi- cal depletion an idea had become "insistent" be- cause of "a. strangulated emotion." He adds: "Subtle analysis has repeatedly shown that many of the gravest hysteric symptoms result from such a suppression of the emotions at the beginning, and disappear as soon as the primary experience comes to its right motor discharge and gains its normal outlet in action. The whole irritation becomes eliminated, the emotion is relieved from suppression and the source of the cortical uproar is removed forever." So also Freud, of Vienna, Bleuler, Jung, Stekel and others of the Old World. All of these cases were cured when the balance was restored to the brain by opening up the proper path of motor discharge. What need is there to say more? Is it not now, in the light of the foregoing pages, backed as they might be by others from the greatest scientists of Europe, clear as the noonday sun just why we have failed to turn out an ethically sufficient char- acter, notwithstanding all our tireless effort and costly machinery? Is it not clear that it is utterly impossible to produce anything else but an ethically insufficient character if we reject the voice of science, endorsed as it is by the dictates of common sense, and go on as we have been doing, using but one principle of education where the Almighty has or- dained two? The times of this ignorance God may have overlooked, but who will be responsible if the Sunday-school children of to-morrow grow up full of ideas of goodness which they are physically un- able to make effective; and if the more favored of them grow up only to find themselves with a brain 114 WHY THEY F'AIL that sheds its good impressions as inevitably as a duck's back sheds water? Who will be responsible for the abnormally developed "drainage channels" which should never have been so deep, and for the atrophied ethical action cells, the beneficent neu- rones, which should have been enlarged to effective capacity by a long and carefully supervised training in the art of doing the good? Who but we, upon whom the end of the ages is come and in whose hands are the flaming torches of the priests of science? Knowledge brings with it both opportunity and responsibility. Give this particular spark of knowl- edge an ethical application but half as great as it receives in the intellectual and practical affairs of life, and in a generation you will have a race of men who will measure up to Holland's ideal of men: "Strong minds, great hearts, true faith and ready hands. Men whom the lust of office does not kill; Men whom the spoils of office cannot buy; Men who possess opinions and a will ; Men who have honor ; men who will not lie ; Men who can stand before a demagogue And scorn his treacherous flatteries without wink- ing; Tall men, sun-crowned, who live above the fog In public duty and in private thinking." WHY. THEY. FAIL 115 Foreword to Chapter IV "What care I for caste or creed? It is the deed, it is the deed. What for class or what for clan? It is the man, it is the man. Heirs of love and joy and woe, Who is high and who is low? Mountain, valley, sky and sea, All are for humanity." — N. O. Creed. CHAPTER IV: THE REMEDY The rem'edy for what ails us as a Church and as a people stands out very distinctly in the light of Chapter HI. It is this — an ethical manual train- ing department in home and Sunday-school — a de- partment which shall have as its special function the translating of the good impressions now being re- ceived into their correlative good actions. The re- flexes will do the rest. Automatically, silently, ir- resistibly, inevitably as disease, doctor's bills and gravitation, there will be built up in the boy's brain a group of neurones or cells which will give him power to respond effectively to his good impres- sions, and power to respond not only effectively but as easily and as naturally and as pleasurably as he now responds to a call to go in swimming in dog-days. There are no "ifs" nor "buts" about this. It is all as certain as the rising of to-morrow's sun, or the gathering of the wheat and apple crops in the 116 WHY THEY FAIL Fall, for we are dealing with the Law of God. The truth of this will be more apparent perhaps if we look at one or two phases of life in which this law of reflex action in the brain get a chance to show what it can do there. Theoretically at least the law of the land obliges every man to send his children to school from the ages of say six to fifteen. Why? In order that the coming man may know a few things which are necessary to the getting along in the struggle of life. Yes, but that is the shallow conception of education. The deeper conception of our educators has been that he goes to school, not so much to absorb a few facts, how- ever important, as to acquire the ability to think. The ability to think constitutes the chief difference between an Edison and a savage. Now our educa- tionists know there is only one way by which a man Of a boy can acquire the power to think, and that is by thinking; thinking long and hard. When the teacher, therefore, wishes to teach your boy to think she does not regale him with fairy stories ; she asks him how much nine hogs will cost at five dollars a hog. If he doesn't know she shows him how to find out, and then requires him to find out how much all the hogs on the farm are worth, to say nothing of the neighbors' hogs and the hens and ducks. As fast as the power tu do these problems passes into the sphere of the automatic and easy she gives him new and larger ones and he has to keep on thinking hard along those lines every day, till he longs for the time when he will be done with it all; which day proves always a to-morrow, for, thirty years after, if you run across him, he will confide in you that the problems he is working on — state-craft, corporation law, or high finance it may be, are the longest and most twisted problems he ever laid eyes on; but he loves his school so much WHY THEY FAIL 117 now he wouldn't run away from it for all the fish in the sea, to say nothing of the added artful en- ticements of certain beautiful girls the neigh- bors speak of as his wife and his daughters. Meanwhile his old playmate, Billy Bray, who had "jumped" the school after two weeks of "durance vile" and never built up a proper thought-machine, is breaking stones on the road which runs out to his old comrade's suburban palace and ruminating on the wisdom of his friend Pat, who on being asked by a stranger if he wasn't afraid his brains would melt that hot day if he didn't keep his hat on, replied, "Bedad, sor, if I had any brains to melt do yez suppose I'd be wurkin' here?" When the public-school teacher wishes to develop a memory in your boy she leaves the hogs alone and begins to "soar fancy's flights above the pole." She gives him poetry and spelling and history and other things to memorize and then sees that he gives it all out again in due time. And as he memorizes and then tugs and tugs to get it all fished up again for exhibition purposes, somehow, it sticks to him, he knows not how. But his teacher knows that the "effort," the motor discharge does it, and that that is simply another name for the difficulty of plowing a new track through his brain, and that once that track is well made it will surprise him how easily those things, and other more or less related things, will stick and come forth on demand. Or maybe it is the power of observation the teacher wishes to develop in your boy. She knows she might as well "bay the moon," or try to hold a tidal wave as to try to give him that power by any- thing she can say or do. However, what she knows she can do is to stimulate him to observe for him- self. That, dear reader, constitutes her work as a teacher just there, and the more she stimulates him 118 WHY THEY FAIL along that great law of our being which advises us that "all consciousness leads to action," the better teacher she is. So she asks him to tell her how many things he saw along the road as he came to school that day, or how many objects he saw in the store-window as he valked by it at noon without stopping. For she knows that the boy's brain grows by its own activity and in the precise direction in which it is exercised, and if ever a Buffalo Bill or a Kit Carson is to be made out of this lump of human- ity before her, it will be only because he has been taught that seeing he shall see and likewise per- ceive. Most of us, alas, go through life purblind because the teachers of our day did not know how easy and how profitable it is to build up observation neurones in a boy's head. Thus, then, we see that our state schools recognize as fundamental and absolutely essential in education this great law of reflex action in the brain of the pupil — that "the motor limb of the reflex arc" is fully as important as the sensory or impression limb. So also with the parents in the practical education which they all insist on giving their children. Not one of them ignores or neglects it. Not one of them can be found in America to maintain that a boy can be taught to swim without swimming; skate without skating; write without writing; walk without walking; talk without talking, or fiddle without fiddling, much less to learn the printing, weaving, mining, painting, brakeing, stenography, book-keeping or other art, trade or profession, with- out actually and in dead earnest doing it with his own brain and body. The only things that don't re- quire this particular kind of "eddication" are farm- ing, preaching and running a newspaper, and there seems to be some doubt even about them. That is, the motor areas of the brain which con* WHY THEY FAIL 11^ trol hand and foot and eye; reflection, memory and hearing, etc., have to be slowly and carefully, and if need be, painfully, built up through years of patient action, which is just as patiently supervised, but when it comes to making that part of a man which is the highest and noblest and most important of all — yea, the man himself, why then we can do that very well on wind. Just blow him full of good sentiments; tell him what and how and where and when ; inspire him with the vision of the ideal, move him with the story of the heroes gone, and the future will take care of itself. Not so. We shall not travel far if we do not distinguish more sharply than has been our wont between a boy's soul and his intellect. Metaphysi- cal and psychological hair-splitting aside, we know that a boy's soul is not his intellect. We build his intellect even more by the reflexes of impression than we do by impression itself. We do not dream of, we do not dare to, neglect the development of the action neurones in public school or private life. The struggle to survive would soon be over if we did. The cry is rather for more and ever more em- phasis on that line. W'hen Prof. James was asked by certain educational authorities of international standing w^hat reforms he would introduce in courses of study, or in educational organization, or otherwise, if he had a free hand, in order to increase the ethical efficiency of school training, he replied : "I should increase enormously the amount of manual or motor training relatively to the book- work, and not let the latter preponderate until the age of fifteen or sixteen." That statement squares very well with the con- viction he has elsewhere expressed that, "The most colossal improvement which recent years have seen in secondary education lies in the introduction of 120 WHY THEY FAIL the manual training schools ; not because they will give us a people more handy and practical for do- mestic life and better skilled in trades, but because they will give us citizens with an entirely different intellectual fiber." If there is need of a new type of "entirely differ- ent intellectual fiber" what shall be said for the need of a new and "entirely different" type of moral fiber? And if the new and "entirely different" type of intellectual fiber can be developed only by a large use of the principle of reflex action already in evi- dence at every turn, how sore is the need that we should at least make some kind of start ethically in the direction of an initial application of so puissant a principle? The land does not suffer so much from lack of brains as from lack of moral character. "A man may smile and smile and be a villain." College degrees are no guarantee of integrity in a land or stock deal. An eminent professor, himself a gradu- ate of Harvard, stated not so long ago in lecturing before the students of Chicago University, that in his time no form of public iniquity had been found in eastern Massachusetts but had a Harvard gradu- ate at the head of it, and an eminent barrister of Ohio in his plea in a notorious school case, tritely observes, "Why should I be taxed to educate my neighbor's child if the education you give him only makes the little rascal twice as sharp without any additional protection to my throat?" What we want is greater protection for our throats, and our notes, and our grocer's bills, and our pastor's sal- aries, and the internal revenues of our civic, state and federal governments. But how to get it is the question. To get it we must do at least four things. We must (1) Stop the Great Leak. This we may do nega- WHY THEY FAIL 121 lively, as indeed we have been doing, by using" the method of inhibition. The priests of science who roam at will through the sacred temples of the skull, tell us that on the heels of every outgoing or motor impulse there goes an impulse to arrest it. This is very strange but so it is they say. The order is no sooner given than another countermanding it is on the way. It attends the other "like a shadow." By training, by attention, by association, that in- hibitory officer may be reinforced and speeded up so that he can overhaul the first official and deprive him of his power to act, as when for example, in response to a blow or a vile epithet, a man raises his arm to strike and then suddenly remembers and refrains. Or again, Johnny has unlawfully annexed the shilling he found on the sideboard, and subsequently sought refuge in the devious paths of high finance. There ensues a strict maternal investigation in which he is found guilty and duly punished with that ancient and handy, if humble, instrument, the maternal slipper. As the crime of theft has been aggravated by promiscuous and ingenious lying to his best friend, the punishment is so proportionately severe that for two days he dispenses with a chair at meal time, eats off a shelf and evinces but a languid interest in anything that looks like manly sport. A week later another golden, no silver, oppor- tunity to become suddenly rich by predatory means presents itself, and his little palm is about to reach out once more to gather in the spoils, when by the blessed law of association of ideas, memory brings up what happened after his last offence. Then a battle rages within his breast. A vision of all the gum and candy and marbles and tops he could buy with that half dollar rises before him. Were that all, he would have it — but it isn't. The stern, 123 WHY THEY FAIL grieved look of his immediate maternal ancestor comes up before his face. In her hand is the slab of doom ; in the cast of her jaw is the determination that knows no parley and stands no monkeying; in his imagination he feels a tingling gluteus maxi- mus and sees another period of two days without any special interest in life, and, he capitulates. "The native hue of resolution is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought" and he is constrained to "let I dare not wait upon I would." His mother's training has saved him. The wrong motor impulse has been inhibited from behind and above. A new "association complex" in which pain is the dominant note gathers itself about the thought of taking what doesn't belong to him and stops his hand just in time, and so he is saved more than a peck of trouble in later life. Not all in one treat- ment of course. A Hartford woman may have mirac- ulously cured her young hopeful of the tobacco habit by the laying on of hands, but it probably re- quired more than one application. Who, but the recording angel can tell how much of human honesty is of just that kind — a negative kind. We are restrained from evil not by love of the good but by fear of the consequences — what the law says, the neighbors will say, or wife or sweetheart will think. All that is good in so far as it goes and it should in no wise be neglected, as wise old Solo- mon advised when he said something about sparing the child and spoiling the rod — or was it the other way about? Undoubtedly the maternal slipper is one of the very mightiest institutions in the land. If it were not for it Dr. Wiley's pure food law would be a joke, civilization would wane, barbarism recru- desce and every man be for his own hand. Our mother's slipper ! All honor to it ! No small part of all the real honor we've got rests ultimately on it. WHY THEY FAIL 123 But there is a more excellent way, the positive. To "be not overcome of evil" is well; but it is not half so well as to be able "to overcome evil with good." To have the power of inhibition is some- thing. Let us not despise or think of abandoning it. It has its place. Fear is useful sometimes. It is better to be saved by fear that chokes a wrong impulse than not to be saved at all : but it is better far to have opened wide the channel of right action so that friction there is reduced to a minimum and nervous impulses just take naturally to it as the path of least resistance. The way to inhibit a movement is to do the oppo- site. That closes the door quite effectually. You cannot both open and shut so much as your eye at the same time, nor your hand, nor your lips. The true education will seek to be positive rather than negative ; constructive rather than destructive. It will seek to "increase enormously the manual or motor training relatively to the book work." Apropos of this, hear what Professor John Dewey, of the Uni- versity of Chicago, has to say in his "Ethical Principles Underlying Education." "We cannot secure the development of positive force of character unless we are willing to pay the price psychologically required. We cannot smother and repress the child's powers, or gradually abort them (from failure to permit sufficient opportunity for exercise) and then expect to get a character with initiative and constructive industry. I am aware of the importance attaching to inhibition, but mere inhibition is valueless. The only restraint, the only holding-in that is of any worth is that which comes through holding all the powers concentrated in devotion to a positive end. The end cannot be attained excepting as the instinct and impulse are kept from discharging at random and from running 124 WHY THEY FAIL off on side tracks. In keeping the powers at work upon their relevant ends there is sufficient oppor- tunity for genuine inhibition. To say that inhibi- tion is higher than power of direction morally, is like saying that death is worth more than life, nega- tion worth more than affirmation, sacrifice worth more than service. Morally educative inhibition is one of the factors of the power of direction." So then the mere cry of "down ! down !" to our vicious impulses is not enough, no matter how stern and inflexible the command. We must do some- thing more if we are to stop the Great Leak. The water that is dammed up at the crack and the bung hole will overflow at the sides of the reservoir. It is our business both to seal the crack and to find a natural outlet. (2) We must open tip the right channels of dis- charge for ethical emotions and ideas. This is the grand imperative, the conditio sine qua non of suc- cess in ethical education. The diffusive emotional discharges must be conserved and rightly directed. There is enough energy going to waste to save the man so far as his human relationships are con- cerned, if we can but make proper outlets for it. The larger part, the more important part of ethical education consists in finding and making the right channels of discharge. So strongly does Professor James feel on this subject that he delivers himself as follows. The further quotation may be pardoned in view of the importance of the theme, and of the fact that Professor James may be regarded as in some sense the dean of American psychologists and there- fore speaking for them all. "The habit of excessive novel-reading and thea- tre-going will produce true monsters in this line. The weeping of a Russian lady over the fictitious personages in the play while her coachman is freez- WHY THEY FAIL 125 ing to death on his seat outside, is the sort of thing that everywhere happens on a less glaring scale. Even the habit of excessive indulgence in music, for those who are neither performers themselves nor musically gifted enough to take it in a purely intellectual way has probably a relaxing effect upon the character. One becomes filled with emotions which habitually pass without promptings to any deed, and so the inertly sentimental condition is set up. The remedy would be never to have an emotion at a concert without expressing it after- wards in soine active way. Let the expression be the least thing in the world — speaking genially to one's aunt, or giving up one's seat in a horse-car, if nothing more heroic offers — but let it not fail to take place. "These latter cases make us aware that it is not simply particular lines of discharge, but also general forms of discharge, that seem to be grooved out by habit in the brain. Just as, if we let our emotions evaporate, they get into a way of evaporating; so there is reason to suppose that if we often flinch from making an effort, before we know it the effort- making capacity will be gone, and that if we suffer the wandering of our attention, presently it will wander all the time." If we turn aside to see how Dame Nature teaches her human progeny we shall see that this great principle of reflex action is the right arm in her progress. Watch the children at play and ask the biologist why they play and he will tell you that their play is their great school of education wherein their senses and other powers become developed through their own activities. The baby is to all intents and purposes a lump of putty. The new- born babe can neither see nor hear. His main line of communication with the outside world is the 126 WHY. THEY FAIL sense of taste. That is the one most important to him at that time. Gradually, however, as his body- grows the other lines of communication become established. The motor neurones in his brain begin to myelinate, or take on the protecting sheath, and things are got ready for ever enlarging motor responses to the impressions coming to his brain through his sense organs. Says Prof. Carl E. Seashore, of Iowa University, in "The Biblical World" for October, 1910 : "Play is self-expression for the pleasure of ex- pression, . . . The senses develop largely through play with them. Watch the infant discover his ears, investigate his nose, pat-a-cake with his hands, splash in the water, grope, reach, grasp and fumble in all sorts of ways with touch and muscle sense. These semi-random touch plays refine the sense of touch, develop the ability to locate touch, and give meaning and pleasure to these experiences by founding and enriching association. Basking in the sun is a temperature play. . . . Capacity for using tools develops through a hierarchy of plays. Handling is notorious with children. Watch the picking, tearing, lifting, shaking and throwing movements of the baby. See him lead the dog, the bird, the kite, and even his own playmates, thereby enjoying the pleasure of being a cause and feeling an extension of personality." If we are to do our work in moral education we must therefore take a hint from Nature as she seeks to fit your boy for the lower struggle to survive. Let us find some definite activity which will be immediately and directly related to the good im- pulses we have stirred within him in the Sunday- school and in the quiet hour at home. If we do that to the same degree, systematically, intelli- gently and persistently, we shall find as much moral WHY THEY FAIL 127 readiness and moral executive capacity as we find Nature has produced of power and skill in his games and meclianical arts, for we are working by the same law and dealing with exactly the same brain ; and law is no respecter of persons or creeds, theological or psychological. So profound and immeasurably significant is this principle of motor activity in its relation to char- acter-building that one kindergarten teacher, whose school existed in the slum district of San Francisco as a kind of missionary institution, affirms that only an inappreciably small number of her boys became subject to arrest because of misdemeanors notwithstanding the highly unfavorable environ- ment in which their lives were placed. Evidently manual training does help to produce citizens with an entirely different moral as well as entirely differ- ent intellectual fiber. Higher up on the long spiral of human education we find the same idea efiiorescing. In Harvard Law School they teach young men law by the actual practice of law. They let theory wait on practice. As the young man "does" the law so to speak, he learns it. So also in Plartford School of Religious Pedagogy. Dr. George A. Dawson, of that institution, in speaking of this principle of re- flex action and motor expression observes : "This self-expression is the vitalizing principle of life and mind. According to neurology the brain has been developed largely through the motor re- sponses to sensation. The relatively large motor areas of the latter prove how great has been the influence of expression in developing the organ of the mind, and how important must be this expres- sion daily and hourly determining its blood supply and the resultant nourishment and the elimination of waste. The conclusion is irresistible that the ner- 128 WHY THEY FAIL vous system is fashioned racially and individually according to the types and degrees of self-expres- sion. . . . The individual was not only born a man, he becomes a man by fashioning for himself a brain that can feel the feelings and think the thoughts that are human. This he does, in a large measure, according as he lives or is allowed to live, on the level of most-complete-self-expression. . . . Finally greater emphasis will be laid on motor expression in religious education. That is to say, attention will more and more be directed to the executive function of righteousness. It is all very well to feel righteously and to think right- eously but the final test of both is the deed. Relig- ious educators must, and will, devise some means of helping boys and girls to work out their religious feelings and ideas. The heterogeneous manual ex- ercises over sand maps, the singing in choirs, the taking part in prayer-meetings will not suffice. These activities may be valuable or next to worth- less, according to the spirit and conditions under which they are performed. Motor or executive righteousness must come nearer to life than these activities can possibly come. It must be of a type that affects the life of the doer and that of his fellowman. It must take the form of doing deeds of virtue, honesty, kindness, patriotism and the like. A church or Sunday-school that can make their religious instruction efficient through an organized body of righteous workers, in the home, business, politics, and throughout the social life everywhere, will have realized this ideal." This tendency of our emotions to find some chan- nel of discharge is so marked that a man can't enjoy a chocolate but his whole being is affected ; and on the other hand, the colored man, overcome by sleep, into whose open mouth a wag dropped two grains WHY THEY F'AIL 129 of quinine, had some physiological basis for his hurried and terrified inquiries for a physician on the ground that he had "dun busted his gall." Prof. Lange, the Danish physiologist, tells us that a man's outward arm movements are longer than usual in response to a sweet taste in the mouth, and con- trariwise if one gives the subject a bitter taste or a wretched sensation of any sort, the flexor move- ments will be sensibly increased and the outward movements correspondingly short^ened. Prof. Miinsterberg illustrated this interesting fact by an ingenious device which he attached to the lower part of his vest. After learning to adjust a slide to a nicety automatically, he began a six- months' series of experiments. "My diary," he says, "indicated essentially three fundamental pairs of feeling in the course of time. There was pleasure and displeasure, there was excitement and depres- sion, and there was gravity and hilarity. The fig- ures showed that in the state of excitement both the outward and inward movements became too long, and in the state of depression both became too short; in the state of pleasure the outward movements be- came too long, the inward movements too short; in the state of displeasure the opposite — the outward movements too short and the inward movements too long. In the case of gravity or hilarity no constant change in the lengths of the movements resulted; but the rhythm and rapidity of the movements was influenced by them." One naturally clenches the hands in anger or shouts and throws up his cap in extremes of joy. Whatever strongly awakens a feeling starts mus- cular action toward that particular end. These ac- tions are generally sub-conscious but none the less real for that. Prof. Miinsterberg did not know he was sliding his slide too far in his pleasant moments 130 WHY THEY FAIL or coming short of the mark when he was depressed, till he examined his little instrument. So it is that one may have converse with his subconscious self by means of the ouija board of the spiritualists and be "dead certain" he is not talking to himself. Think of a letter of the alphabet and the registering at- tachment of the plate on which the hand rests, im- mediately flies toward it as by an uncanny agency. The operator is prepared to swear that he did not do it, and so a mes-iage will be spelled out that ap- parently must have come from another world. When scientists make an instrument of that kind, they call it an automatograph, and tell us that if the arm be suspended through a loop it will move with much greater freedom. "And if a witness or a criminal, in front of a row of a dozen men, claims that he does not know any one of them, he will point on the automatograph, nevertheless, toward the man whom he really knows and whose face brings him thus into emotional excitement." Similarly the eyes may be made to betray us by turning while we know nothing about it, or if one will attach a ring or a coin to a string a foot long, and hold it out and then "will" it to move backward and forward or round and round, it will presently begin to obey although there may be absolutely no conscious efifort, nor any visible effort to move it. That is caused by what the physiologists call uncon- scious cerebration. Opening up the right motor channels for our ethical emotions and ideas is desirable still further because, as Prof. Miinsterberg and others tell us, in order that an idea may attain to full "vividness" it is necessary to have a motor discharge, i. e., an action of some sort connected with it. To use Prof. Miinsterberg's own expression — "Full vivid- ness belongs only to those sensations for which the WHY THEY FAIL 131 channels of motor discharge are open." We want our boys to have vivid ideas about the essentials of character; we must therefore see that the higher aspirations find an outlet in such activities as they will feel are not "empty gesture-making," but of that hard quality which their hard-headed fathers and other grown-ups cannot despise. We need some kind of ethical manual training department for the boy because it is only in such a world he can make his ethical ideas have reality to himself. When he finds that ethical ideas may have a vital connection with things in the world of things in which he finds himself, he gets a new respect for them and a new interest in them. What we write, or make, or own, is of much greater interest to us than what other people make or write or own for us. The reflex of an act tends to deepen the interest in that act. If you nurse a sick child or bind up the broken leg of a dog they will never again be to you the objects of indifference they were before you did the kindly deed. It was for this reason that shrewd old Benjamin Franklin used to borrow books of his enemies. He knew that when they had done him a kindness they had largely disarmed them- selves, and could not have the same heart to attack him again. Apropos of this deepening of interest by the re- flex of one's own activities a further paragraph from 'Prof. Baldwin may be of interest. "Purely intellectual interest is therefore tem- porary. It does not attach itself firmly enough to its object to cause the latter to become one of our interests or goods. I am interested in the morning paper, the street sights, my afternoon drive and the debating society; but to-morrow a set of new en- gagements carries my interest, and the engagements of yesterday now past, only furnish one or two 132 WHY THEY FAIL points at which my permanent hfe-interests have been touched. What then constitutes more per- manent interest, over and above the simple interest of the intellectual art of discrimination? Emotional and active interest. So far interest simply repre- sents a tendency to know. Its objects are mere ob- jects that come and go indifferently to us; when we have learned what they are and how they act our curiosity is satisfied. But bring them within the line of our emotional or volitional reactions and everything is changed. Does their being what they are or doing what they do have an effect on me? That is the vital question. The errand boy in an office carries fifty letters a day to his employer, and they have no interest for him ; he knows them to be letters for X, Y and Z, and his curiosity is satis- fied. But let one letter come to himself and then not the words it contains or the love it brings inter- ests him alone ; but the envelope, its sides and cor- ners, the stamp, the address, the very odor of it fairly burn him with their interesting aspects. Anything in short gets interesting which has besides its re- lation to other things and people, a power to make me feel and act. I may know the presence of a thing and not be interested but I cannot feel its presence, and much less can I act upon its presence without coming to think it worth my close attention. . . . Ordinarily we act in reference to a thing because we are interested in it, which means because we are impelled by intellectual or emotional interest. But it is still true that, after acting our interest is greater than before. Any effort expended on a thing makes it more worthful to us." The reflex of an ethical action not only deepens the interest in that act, creates a tendency to do it again, gives vividness to the idea of it, and affords pleasure in the doing of it, but it also builds up by WHY THEY FAIL 133 so much the power of moral discrimination as noth- ing else can. It is painfully illuminating to talk with retail mer- chants and other business men on the conscience of the other fellow. When it comes to business deal- ings the characters of men of the greatest piety seem to be sadly vulnerable. No one can well doubt that they are Christian men, and yet there is the exasperating hiatus between what they are in action and what they ought by their profession to be. Their consciences seem to be blunted and ut- terly oblivious of the fine points of honor in business on which the children of this world, who make honor a religion, pride themselves so highly. This undoubtedly is because they have never had a proper ethical-action training. It is not merely that the ethical action neurones are undeveloped, but that other neurones which have to do with dis- crimination are not developed. And the only way they can be developed is by actually discriminating. As we discriminate in any field of thought a new group of judgment neurones is built up there which enables one to judge ever more accurately. The reflexes do it automatically. But they are the re- sults of so many separate acts of judging. We talk of educating our senses and our fingers, etc., but that is, strictly speaking, wide of the truth. The fact is that no sense can be developed; what is developed is the power of discriminating between the sensations of sound in case of the musician, of taste with the tea sampler, of color with the sales- man. Where there is anything wrong with the nerve of transmission going to the brain there is no cure for the ill by any amount of training. One who has a false ear for musical tones and cannot distinguish "Home, Sweet Home" from the national anthem will never make a Mozart, while, as for 134 WHY THEY FAIL color-blindness, the only way to cure that is by three generations of intermarriage with hawk-eyes. Why do we go to the financier for advice in a business tangle? Because the reflexes of forty years of judging in the counting-room have built a power- ful group of financial judgment neurones, which it is needless to say, were not and could not be produced in any other workshop than that of the counting- house. When we want a judgment on a master- piece of art, we go to another man who has had forty years of judging colors and canvasses. As he mixed his paints and wielded his brush he built the brain that could be judge par excellence of lights and shades and hues of beauty. But when we get ap- pendicitis we don't want either of them. The man who for forty years has been judging symptoms of disease is the man we want, and maybe after him the preacher, the lawyer and the undertaker. Why do we do so many fool things in our "tender teens" and "teachable twenties?" Because we do not know that they are fool things. And why do we not know? Because we have never been over the trail before and have therefore built up no adequate judgment neurones and no power of judging as to what is correct or otherwise in the premises. Moral judgment, or the power of accurate dis- crimination between right and wrong in conduct, like any other judgment, physical, intellectual, aes- thetic or spiritual, can be acquired only by inducing a long series of judgments on the part of the boy. He must be led into situations where he is "hard up against it" and must make choice for himself. In- formation without judgment is useless. Judgment is the art of applying information to life's problems. As his choices make him there must be oversight that he may be encouraged to make the right ones, and whenever he has done otherwise that he may be WHY THEY FAIL 135 encouraged to undo the wrong by making it right in so far as he can, by other right choices. To make the new, right choices is the only possible way of neutralizing the evil effects of the old wrong ones in his soul and in his brain. It will not do to reply just here that conscience which "doth make cowards of us all" is enough if we will but heed it. Conscience, in so far as it de- pends on brain action for effective operation, is sub- ject to the general laws of brain action, and can therefore, like any other faculty, be educated. If there is a sense in which it cannot be educated there is another equally important sense in which it can. The thugs of India who murdered travelers as a pious act; Sicilian bandits who invoke the Virgin's blessing before embarking on a predatory expedi- tion ; Paul, hounding innocent people to dungeons and death, and church members who grind the faces of the poor that they may endow charities and build churches for the worship of a God who hates in- iquity, are cases in point. Heeding our consciences is beyond question ex- ceedingly important; but the conscience must be enlightened by the word of God. This work our Sunday-schools aud churches are doing very well ; but it is advisable also now to find for our boys and girls an arena into which they may be prematurely and deliberately thrown, somewhat as Emerson intended in another sphere when he counselled us to "cast the bantling on the rocks." In that arena, in that stern world of hard, cold business, facts and things, conscience will find some strenuous exercise when it gets mixed up in the tussle with a brood of lusty, red-blooded and rampageous feelings such as My Lord Pride ; My Lord Pleasure ; My Lord Avarice, and others which need not be named. Con- science as we have it, dilettanti, supine, lily-fingered, 136 WHY THEY FAIL delicate, will wake up to consciousness of its own royal state and dignity when it suddenly finds it- self struggling for supremacy in that den of wild- cats. Give us neurones of moral discrimination, and neurones of moral action, and we shall have men of moral power fitted to respond valiantly to any new moral impression which comes to them from with- out. And the way to get those neurones in the amoeba or the man, as that ingenious investigator, Prof. Elmer Gates, has shown, is by reflex action. Immeasurably significant is his experiment with the seven pups. Two were brought up in utter dark- ness ; two were given the ordinary dog-life on the farm, and three were given two hours' training daily in distinguishing colors, by walking over colored copper plates, some of which were electrified and others not. The shock became a stimulus, the color a guide. In a year they could distinguish hundreds of colors and their mind activity was greatly in- creased. Then all were chloroformed for examina- tion of their visual centers. The first two had no more well-developed cells than a pup a day old; the second two averaged eighty-nine well-developed cells per square millimeter, while the third group approxi- mated the human brain with twelve hundred to four- teen hundred per square millimeter of surface. That is, a year of intelligent and systematic training by reflex action did more for the dog than six hundred generations of training without it. How much bet- ter is a boy than a dog! (3) WE MUST DEVELOP MORAL ASSO- CIATION NEURONES connecting the good im- pression and impulse neurones zvith the correlative good action neurones.. In the craniums of the present generation these links seem sadly broken. The great problem of church life which has never yet been solved is how to get the preaching and teaching of WHY TH.EY FAIL 137 the Church on Sunday translated into the life of Monday ; how to get religion out of the cloister and into the market-place. In spite of all that has been said about it, we seem to persist in living in a dual world. We do our religion, and that seems right enough. Then we do our business, and that also is beyond question necessary, but when it comes to doing both together, the thing seems quixotic and even im- possible. The reason for that is that we have never done the two together. If we had often mixed religious ideas and impulses with business, especially in our early years, there would be nothing grotesque or impos- sible, or even unpleasant, about doing so now. If a long series of religious impulses had found motor channels of discharge into those areas of the brain given over to business considerations and actions, they would find them to-day, not only easily but pleasurably, since whatever promotes the progress of an idea into consciousness is pleasurable, and whatever impedes its progress is unpleasant and sometimes painful. Now it is a law of brain action that "when two elementary brain processes have been active to- gether or in immediate succession, one of them on recurring, tends to propagate its excitement into the other." That constitutes what is known as the law of association of ideas ; and habit, recency, vivid- ness and emotional congruity determine what comes next in the ordinary weaving of the mind. Ideas which have entered the mind at the same time, or nearly so, are so linked that they tend to bring one another "into mind" whenever the one or the other is mentioned. If, on going down the street of a strange city you see on the one hand a striking statue and on the other a royal palace, and twenty years later you return, the sight of the statue will 138 WHY THEY FAIL bring before your mind's eye the royal palace. Eb- binghaus has shown by experiments that an idea is associated not merely with the one that follows it, and with the rest through that, but that it is asso- ciated in varying degrees with all the others near it. In nonsense rhymes he found that syllables as far away as the seventh were influenced and there- fore learned more rapidly again than others which had no such associations. Someone hands you a fragrant flower and at the same time tells you that it is called a rose. After- ward when you think of that odor the name comes up of itself, or when you think of the name you can recall the odor. Prof. Miinsterberg very nicely tells us about the "why" of it in his "Psychotherapy," p. 42f. "The excitement of each of these two brain cells, the one in the olfactory center, the other in the audi- tory center, irradiates in all directions through the fine branches of the nerve fibres. Each cell has re- lations to every other cell in the brain, thus there is also one connecting path between those cells which were stimulated at once. Now if the two ends of an anatomical path are excited at the same time, the path itself becomes changed. The connecting way becomes a path of least resistance, and that means that if, in future, one of the two brain cells becomes excited again, the overflow of the nervous excite- ment will not now go on easily in all directions, but only just along that one channel which leads to that other brain cell. A theory like this explains in real explanatory terms, in ways which physics and chemistry can demonstrate as necessary, that any excitement of the odor cell runs into the sound cell and vice versa. ... "The whole theory of physiological associationism works evidently with two factors. First there are WHY THEY FAIL 139 millions of brain cells of which each one may have its particular quality of sensation, and second, each brain cell may work with any degree of energy to which the intensity of the sensation would corre- spond. If I distinguish ten thousand pitches of tone, they would be located in ten thousand different cell groups, each one connected through a special fiber with a special string in the ear. And each of these tones may be loud or faint, corresponding to the amount of excitement in the particular cell group. Every other variation must result from the million- fold connections between the brain cells. Indeed, the brain furnishes all possibilities for such a theory. We know how every cell resolves itself into tree-like branch systems which can take up excitements from all sides, and how it can carry its own excitement through long connecting fibres to distant places, and how the endings of these fibres clasp into the branches of the next cell, allowing the propagation of excitement from cell to cell. We know further how large spheres of the brain are confined to cells of particular function; that for instance cells which serve visual sensations are in the rear part of the brain hemispheres, and so on. Finally we know how millions of connecting fibres represent paths in all directions, allowing very well a co-operation by association between the most distant parts of the brain. The theories found their richest develop- ment when it was recognized that large spheres of our brain centers evidently do not serve at all merely sensory states, but that their cells have as their func- tion only the intermediating between different sens- ory centers. Such so-called association centers are like switchboards between the various mental cen- ters. Their own activity is not accompanied by any mental content, but has only the function of regu- lating transmission of the excitement from the one 140 WHY THEY FAIL to the other. Above all their operation would make it possible that through associative processes the wonderful complexity of our trains of thought may be reached." These association tracts are almost entirely absent at birth, but they develop in the "handling" of the streams of sensation pouring in through the vari- ous senses of the body. As Edinger observes: "They extend everywhere from convolution to con- volution, connecting parts which lie near each other as well as those which are widely separated. They are developed when two different regions of the cor- tex are associated in a common action." The italics are mine for the point is of vital import- ance to us as character builders. In order to de- velop ethical association neurones we simply must, therefore, have action outlets for the myriads of good impressions we are daily creating in youthful minds. We have had the "impressions" in profusion all along; if we can only now get the boy engaged in the correlative action, the association neurones will grow like mushrooms without our bidding. Na- ture takes care of that without our further aid. It is not because our people are misers that the great cause of missions for which the Church ex- ists, has to go halting and begging; it is because our system of education has failed to provide them with the necessary beneficent action association neurones. The very same people have an abund- ance of money for everything else under heaven that comes along, and they have it for the reason that years of opened channels in those other di- rections make it easy to part with their ducats in those ways when called on to do so. We want this man to go down into his jeans to help us out religiously; but how can he when he has never done it before? Take an illustration. There WHY THEY FAIL 141 on a rickety, rural wharf stand two men in ex- cellent health. Presently a tramp steamer crashes into it violently on the crest of an unlooked-for wave. It goes down and both men are precipitated into deep water. The one gurgles and gasps and goes down throwing his arms out wildly; the other shuts ofif his wind automatically, makes a few or- derly strokes and is presently shaking himself like a spaniel on the bank. To explain their differing fates one has to go back into their lives fifteen years. Doing so we find that the first man, as a boy, never went near the water; the second man did, and he did then the "spittin' an' gaggin' " act in the very same way the other man so fatally exemplified it later ; but as he was where he could get his toes on the bottom before his wind was clean cut off, there was no funeral at his father's house next day. Many times this occurred until there was final- ly an association path opened up between the sensory impression of cold-fluid-medium-coming-up- about-the-neck-mouth-and-nose, and, shut-off-wind, and throw-out-legs-and-arms-so. This association after a time became so well established as a reflex, automatic circuit that it was physically impossible to take him off his guard. The cold-medium-sensa- tions coming to the brain from the danger zone, found the motor channel to the superior laryngeal nerve which controls the breathing, and the other motor nerves controlling arms and legs, wide open, and the muscles were savingly commandeered to action in an instant. The other man had all the required nerves and muscles and they were in good working order too, but not having any neurones of connection, the brain could not get its violent dan- ger signals translated into the proper action, and the lack cost him his life. The man who died had every idea the other man had and a lot more. He knew 142 WHY THEY FAIL he was in imminent dang'er just as well as the other, and that he ought to make an effort to save himself, but when it came to action he went down. His brain under impulse of i. greater fear suddenly gen- erated even more energy than the other man's, but unfortunately it "irradiated" into the wrong chan- nels opened by previous movements, which, how- ever desirable they might have been under other circumstances, were not adapted to this particular situation. Failure to co-ordinate his knowledge to action cost him his life. Even so neurones of business, politics, art, letters, and craftsmanship, with their varied connecting neu- rones, are valuable enough, and all but indispensable to the world, but severally or collectively they avail little or nothing when the superintendent of mis- sions faces their owners with his plea for China or the slums of the home city. Another distinct set of association neurones is needed there, and the failure to co-ordinate knowledge and action there costs the lives of many and the happiness of millions every year. A fourth essential feature of this remedy for the relaxed and inefficient moral conditions which pre- vail and must continue to prevail as long as we go on in the same old way is this. (4) The remedy must be applied in youth if it is to be most efEcacioiis. The reason for that also is physiological. It rests in the peculiar nature of the brain tissue and the laws which govern it. In a general way we are all familiar v^^ith the state- ment that "youth is the time for improvement," but it may be well to refresh our minds as to why that is so. To gain a just appreciation of that is to redouble our efforts in behalf of the bo3^s and girls of to-day. The}^, as the men and women of to-morrow, WHZ THEY FAIL 143 will be largely what we make them. The future is, therefore, in our hands, and we being dead must yet go on speaking. How great is our responsibility and how glorious is our opportunity! If you were to follow in the footsteps of the heroes and heroines of the Cross and go into the heart of heathen China with those two dear little children of yours, who are just now preparing to enter a kin- dergarten school, you would find that though you labored diligently with all your full-blown powers for many hours each day on that marvelously crooked and difficult language, that long before you had begun to do anything with it those flaxen-haired pets would be exchanging confidences over their mud pies with their diminutive almond-eyed neigh- bors. And if you stayed there all the rest of your life and devoted yourself assiduously to the study of that tongue, the chances are you would never have as fluent a command of it as would your chil- dren to whom it came like their food and raiment, without worry or toil. Now why is that? The reason is found in the fact that your brain, by the time it got to China, was not only tougher and less impressionable than those of the children, but that it had already gotten a great number of tracks ready-made into which nervous influences easily slipped, according to that law which orders that all forces shall take the path of least resistance. Your brain, by years of training has been built and shaped to receive western sounds and western ideas. As it is thus, from a Chinese lan- guage standpoint not only malformed, but older and tougher, and less responsive to and less retentive of, the new thing whatever it be, the child has naturally a long advantage. Any piano teacher will tell you that he or she would rather have as a pupil a child 144 WHY THEY FAIL which had never seen a piano than to have one vi^ho had been wrongly instructed. It is amazing and mortifying to find how the habits of early childhood cling to us and trip us up in manhood. Years of vigilance and self-control will be undone in some exciting moment by a word that betrays the plebeian origin. The burr will stick in the speech, the gaucherie will come out in some ill-chosen article of dress. "If the period between twenty and thirty is the critical one in the forma- tion of intellectual and professional habits," says an eminent psychologist, "the period below twenty is more important still for the fixing of personal habits, properly so-called, such as vocalization and pronunciation, gesture, motion and address. Hardly ever is a language spoken after twenty spoken with- out a foreign accent ; hardly ever can a youth trans- ferred to the society of his betters unlearn the na- sality and other vices of speech bred in him by the associations of his growing years; hardly ever in- deed, no matter how much money there be in his pocket can he learn to dress like the gentleman born." Leland tells us the like thing regarding other mus- cles. From seven to fourteen years of age, he says, (the most active period of growth of that part of the brain co-ordinating the muscles of the hand) a dexterity is acquired which diminishes with suc- ceeding years. This is the golden age of education. The body is being built and what you v/ant in it in manhood should be built into it then. The child that goes through those years suffering from malnutri- tion will never have the body in adult life which it would have had had it been well fed, no matter how carefully it may be fed and tended in later life. The metabolism of the body is changed. It has an altered set which is not what it should and would WHY THEY FAIL 145 otherwise have been. Nature will do the best pos- sible for us every time, but once she has done the best with the materials we have given her during those tender years of construction, she will never pull down the house to build it again, however she may labor to modify some of its parts. The body receives its shape during the construction period. Dr. Carpenter, the eminent physiologist and anatomist, has given us words of wisdom on this point in his "Mental Physiology," p339f. "It is a matter of universal experience that every kind of training for special aptitudes is both far more effective, and leaves a more permanent im- press, when exerted on the grozving organism than when brought to bear on the adult. The effect of such training is shown in the tendency of the or- ganization to 'grow to' the mode in which it is habitually exercised; as is evidenced by the in- creased size and power of particular muscles, and the extraordinary flexibility of joints, which are ac- quired by such as have been early exercised in gym- nastic performances. There is no part of the organ- ism of man in which the reconstructive activity is so great, during the whole period of life, as it is in the ganglionic substance of the brain. This is in- dicated by the enormous supply of blood which it receives. . . . It is moreover a fact of great significance that the nerve substance is especially distinguished by its reparative power. For while injuries of other tissues (such as the muscular) which are distinguished by the specialty of their structure and endowments, are repaired by sub- stance of a lower or less specialized type, those of nerve svibstance are repaired by a complete repro- duction of the normal tissue ; as is evidenced by the sensibility of the newly-formed skin." After noting that this reconstruction is always 146 WHY THEY FAIL according to a "determinate type" he says: "But this type is pecuHarly liable to modification during the early period of life, in which the functional activity of the nervous system (and particularly of the brain) is extraordinarily great, and the recon- structive process proportionately active. . . . "There is no reason to regard the cerebrum as an exception to the general principle, that, while each part of the organism tends to form itself, in accord- ance with the mode in which it is habitually ever- cised, this tendency will be especially strong in the nervous apparatus, in virtue of that incessant re- generation which is the very condition of its func- tional activity. It scarcely, indeed, admits of doubt that every state of ideational consciousness which is very strong or is habitually repeated leaves an organic impression on the cerebrum ; in virtue of which that same state may be reproduced at any time, in respondence to a suggestion fitted to excite it. . . . The strength of early association is a fact so universally recognized that the expression of it has become proverbial; and this precisely ac- cords with the physiological principle that, during the period of growth and development, the formative activity of the brain will be most amenable to direct- ing influences. It is in this way that what is early learned 'by heart' becomes branded in (as it were) upon the cerebrum ; so that its traces are never lost, even though the conscious memory of it may have faded out. For when the organized modification has been once fixed in the growing brain, it becomes a part of the normal fabric, and is regularly main- tained by nutritive substitution; so that it may en- dure to the end of life like the scar of a wound." It would certainly not be fair to the fact to say that the importance of childhood has been sadly overlooked. This century has been more than once WHY THEY FAIL 147 hailed as belonging to the children so far as edu- cation is concerned ; but all the extra energy born of the shifting emphasis has gone down the same old unprofitable hole. What we need is to hear more about the unbounded opportunities afifordcd us to shape the destinies of to-morrow and then get wiser in shaping the character of its men to-day. For there is absolutely no day like this one. The chances we lose can never be regained. If we fail the failure is most deplorable because no after years can, under any possible circumstances, do so much for the man who must follow us and take up our burdens. The brain receives its "set" while it is growing. There is so much solemn meaning in this fact, such dread significance, that a second quotation from Dr. Car- penter will surely not be out of the way. "From the time that the brain has attained its full maturity, the acquirement of new modes of ac- tion and the discontinuance of those which have become habitual, are alike difficult. Both the in- tellectual and moral character have become in a great degree fixed ; so that although new impres- sions are being constantly received, they have much less power in directly psychical action than they had at an earlier period — that course being hence- forth rather determined by the established uniformi- ties, and by the volitional power of selected atten- tion. The readiness with which new knowledge is now acquired depends much more on the degree in which it "fits in" with those previous habits of thought, which are the expression of the nutritive maintenance of the cerebral mechanism, than it does upon the recording power which expresses a new formation." The confirmation of that paragraph is not far to seek. Recall, if you can, one new idea countering the received ideas of its time which did not have to 148 WHY THEY FAIL fight for its life. And the older we get the harder it is to get a new idea into the warp and woof of our natures — unless of course they "fit in" with our preconceived notions. People are "strangers" to us simply because they have to be "fitted in" to our modes of thought and feeling. To be the friend of a friend is a mighty help toward our acquaintance for that very reason. Apropos of the thought expressed by Dr. Car- penter, a very terse and pungent paragraph from Prof. Starbuck may be made. He is speaking of the importance of youth as the time to get in our work of moral training in the public school. "It is next to impossible to reform an old, ex- perienced sinner, a political traitor, or a social grafter of threescore years. His spinal cord is thor- oughly organized around evil and all the atoms of his being play in tune to unworthy impulses. To make him over into a righteous citizen is about as impossible as to hope to harvest luscious fruit from a gnarled and blasted tree. Nothing short of fire in this world or the next will purge him ; and when the purging is done, there is left no more of good than is to be found in the little child and that with- out promise of a rich and beautiful future. The one great hope of social evolution is in beginning afresh with each new generation of children." And if anything further be needed to prove the unparalleled meaning of youthful years, the reader is referred to the inductive studies of conversion and religious experience as presented by men like Prof. Starbuck, Coe and Lancaster. They will tell you that the cold facts gathered up by them show that all years are not the same when it comes to entering the Kingdom of God. That belongs very largely to the years between ten and twenty-five, with the majority of conversions occurring under sixteen. WHY THEY FAIL 149 From sixteen they decline rapidly to twenty and beyond thirty are rare occurrences. Out of 1784 con- versions, Prof. Coe found the average age of con- version to be 16.4 years. It is at this age, i. e., just before and including sixteen "there takes place a transformation more profound than any other be- tween birth and death." However, this book is concerned with education, not evangelism. Let no one confuse the issue and in haste throw the book down under the impression that the writer has missed the mark entirely and is preaching a gospel of culture instead of a gospel of regeneration by the Spirit of God. It is pre- cisely because he does believe in the great atoning Cross as the only hope of the world that he has been at pains to write these lines. The old system of education has failed, not be- cause it is wrong, but because it is incomplete. In the high places they have discovered this and are seeking to add to their pedagogical arsenal the new weapon of reflex action. Prof. Shailer Matthews, Dean of the Divinity School of Chicago University, urges that seminary students spend less time, say twelve to sixteen hours a week, in the class-room, and most of the balance of the time in practical re- ligious work under a director of practical work — boys' club, settlement work, charity organizations, or other form of social action. What is that but the manual training principle (that we best learn anything by doing it) applied to theological training? In Forman College, India, students are being similarly taught practical Christianity by social ac- tion. In national calamities, such as earthquakes or famines, they are sent out collecting grain or find- ing out who are really most needy. Is it malaria that oppresses the poor? Then they find them out 150 WHY THEY FAIL and administer practical Christianity in the form of quinine. Is it the plague? Then they inoculate the people wholesale, write letters for the sick in the hospital, and when they go home for the vacation, open up a school for the illiterate. Is it any wonder Prof. D. J. Fleming, M.A., of that institution should say, "This experience better than any lecture brought before those students the poverty and suf- fering of the submerged classes and inspired them with a desire to alleviate their social, moral and physical condition." But why, we ask, did that "inspire" them? Be- cause correlated motor discharges give "vividness" to any idea; because action is the normal comple- ment to every impression ; and because pleasure at- tends the natural functioning of any part of our physical nature, being in line with growth and prog- ress. Who can but praise the wisdom of those educators who are thus indeed trying to get their religion out of the cloister and into the market-place, and what man is there but feels in his soul that what they have done is right and bound to produce a bet- ter type of parson than the one whose nose has been screwed down to books throughout his theological covirse ? Even the very penitentiaries are catching a gleam of the coming day and preaching a new gospel of hope — that the criminil be taught to respect him- self, being made worthy of his own self-respect by the mastery of a trade which will give him the means of livelihood when he gets out, and while he is in will enable him to discharge in some measure as a man, those obligations to support his family from which he cannot be absolved by the accident of his incarceration. As Warden McClaughrey, of Fort Leavenworth, Kas., puts it: "The new crimi- nology aims at nothing less than the suppression of WHY THEY F'AIi: 151 evil habits and the replacing of them by their op- posites ; in other words the wearing of paths in the brain which shall ofifer less resistance than the old familiar paths ; the creation of new habits of thought, speech and action, wnth or without the consent of the convict himself. This is a task of tremendous difficulty. It is revolution by means of evolution." Shall seminaries and penitentiaries, belated fol- lowers of all who have taught in practical fields from the days of Tubal Cain to our own, hear the une- quivocal dictum of that Voice which speaks with an authority that no man can gainsay or resist, and our churches and Sunday-schools alone remain deaf as an adder to the cry? We believe not. "The chief end of man is an action not a thought," says Carlyle, and Emerson, his friend, adds, "Ac- tion is education." So it is, and right action is right education. It is our business, if we would truly ed- ucate the young, to map out for them those courses of action which will not only give practical content and value to our precepts, but by their reflex action give power and disposition to do the like when they, have come to man's estate. 152 WHY THEY FAIL Foreword to Chapter V "Every mason in the quarry, every builder on the shore, Every chopper in the palm grove, every raftsman at the oar; Hewing wood or drawing water, splitting stones or cleaving sod, Fill the dusty ranks of labor in the regiment of God ; March together toward his triumph, do the task his hands prepare, Honest toil is holy service, faithful work is praise and prayer." CHAPTER V A CONTRIBUTION It is one thing to recognize a need but quite an- other to see just how that need is to be met. Men in all ages have recognized the fact that to be able to fly would be highly advantageous. Many vain attempts to do so were made by the Darius Greens of invention, but the essential principle of levita- tion escaped them until very recently, and even then, when that principle was discovered, it re- mained a useless bit of information till the Lang- leys, Wrights, Curtisses, and others found tangible means of linking it with human affairs. Mechanical principles are of little use unless we know how to apply them. And so with these principles under discussion. The need has been made manifest, the principles calculated to meet it have been set forth, WHY THEY FAIL 153 but we shall not on that account get any "forrader" unless we find helpful ways of applying the one to the other. Now that is not perhaps so simple as it looks. Years of patient, painstaking toil were spent in per- fecting the first heavier-than-air flying machine after it was discovered that that was the thing to have, and there is still much to be done to it before it becomes dangerous to steam and electric trac- tion dividends. So it may be that the finding of the proper means of expression for the ethical emotions and ideas we have been creating in the home, the church and its subsidiary organizations, particu- larly the Sunday-school, will not be apparent at a glance. That must come by a process of intel- lectual evolution, by a long process of intellectual invention. There must be the usual experience of elimination and a growing scrap-heap. Better methods can be built only on the ruins of the old. Natural selection and survival of the fit will here, as elsewhere, operate to produce ever finer types, so that our best attempts will appear in twenty years or less almost grotesque, and much as a Watt engine looks beside a Corliss. But no one on that account despises the Watt or forgets that it was a long advance on the traction methods of its day. In this chapter the writer presents for what it is worth a small contribution toward that great sec- ondary problem of finding adequate means of trans- lating good impression into correlative good action in order that the brain of the pupil may achieve a balanced ethical development, ethical action and association neurones being built up to correspond in number, variety and power to those ideational and emotional cells we have endeavored so assidu- ously and successfully to create. Can we but ac- complish that we shall find the world immeasurably 154 WHY THEY FAIL the better for our having done it. Our successors in ofifice will find it much easier to be good than we ever found it, and if they be not ungrateful they will bless us accordingly. The new contribution comes in the shape of a new organization. "Mercy on us!" "Heaven help us!" 'The dear saints forgive him!" do we hear you cry? Dear, distracted, overburdened worker, stooping now under the burden of more meetings than you can carry, wait a bit. Do not hang the writer till you have read this chapter through. The case is really nothing like so bad as it looks — mainly be- cause he was a fellow sufferer with you and there- fore was able to sympathize with those who are overburdened. Perhaps it would be correct to say that the new comer is an institution rather than an organization. It has a name, of course, since it couldn't get along very well without one. It is called The Industrial Guild of the Great Commission. That is a pretty big name to be sure ; but then "there are others." For instance, The Baptist Young People's Union of America; The Epworth League of Christian En- deavor; The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals ; The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Distant Parts ; The Independent Order of Good Templars ; The Ancient Order of Free and Accepted Masons, to say nothing of a score of others more or less renowned. In fact, it v^ould seem that a society to make progress at all must spread a good deal of sail to the breeze. The emblem of the Industrial Guild of the Great Commission is the world upon a coin and its motto consists of the two simple and significant words of cur Savior in his last Great Commission, "Go Ye." The Guild is therefore, as its name would imply, a missionary institution. The reason for that is, that, WHY THEY FAIL 155 as its work is mainly educational, it is necessary to give it the proper horizon. Any education which does not embrace the world, is, in this twentieth century, incomplete and insufficient for the needs of the day. The very clerks in the business houses down town must now do their work with one finger on an atlas of the world. Nothing so lifts the soul out of itself as the challenge of a great enterpri . As James ]\Iartineau observes, " A soul occupied with great ideas best performs small duties." If we would raise a race of imperial men we must set be- fore them an imperial horizon. The parish boun- dary will not do. Hence, the world is our domain. I The I. G. G. C. is therefore a missionar} institu- tion. It seeks to give effect to the Savior's parting injunction, "Go ye into all the world, and make dis- ciples of all nations." This it seeks to accomplish in two ways (a) by making some ready money for the purpose, ince that is an imperative need of the hour, and (b) by helping to raise a new race of men and women who shall recognize their world obliga- tions and stand up to them. That is, the I. G. G. C. has two functions, one of which is financial and the other educational. In it we make money for mis- sions it is true, but we make money in order to make men and women in the making of it. The making of the money is, with us, so far as our juniors are concerned, everything; the money itself, if it goes to that, is a mere incidental, though poten- tially by no means a small one. The I. G. G. C. recognizes several great facts such as these as fundamental reasons for its existence ; That the ^Master said, ''Go ye into all the world." That we have not gone. After nineteen centuries he still waits for his wishes to be given effect. That back of that Great Task which he has given us there lies a great Problem, that of finance. That the Task 156 1VHY THEY FAIL will never be done till we first solve that problem of finance. That it is possible to solve that great problem of finance without burdening anybody, and in- deed, without making any one any poorer. And that if this Task is ever to be done, it will be done by a race of men who have been properly trained to the Task, i. e,, by men who not only know what they ought to do but are ethically, and shall we not say physically, able to do it. That the Master told us to go, that we haven't yet gone effectively, and that we cannot go without money needs no discussion, but a word or two may be said about some of the other propositions. For instance, this one, that the problem of missions is chiefly one of finance to-day. Were our Mission- ary Boards able to say, we have fifty millions in our treasury and we want men and women to give their lives to the carrying out of Christ's last command, candidates would come forward in swarms. They would rise up in every hamlet and offer themselves. When Dr. A. B. Simpson, of the Chris- tian and Missionary Alliance, made one of his great appeals for money, and seventy thousand dollars was laid on the altar in one day, he followed it with an appeal for men and women to devote their lives to the Great Task, and one hundred men and ■women in that one congregation rose up saying, "Here am I, send me." And it will not do to say that such mushroom candidates are not fit for the work. Who is, in his raw state when he is first caught? But they could be trained and made fit to serve in some capacity. One of the chief needs of China at the present hour is that of Christian public-school teachers. Another statement which probably requires eluci- dation is that one to the effect that this money could be raised without making anybody the poorer. The WHY THEY FAIL 157 basis of that statement is this: There is enough time and economic opportunity going to waste every year to evangehze the world if we would simply organize our forces sufficiently to put them to economic use. It is that great fund of spare time which the Industrial Guild proposes to tap to profit withal. This for two reasons, first because it ought to be tapped, and secondly because incomes and bank-accounts belong by prior right to the other organizations. That is their legitimate field and it would not be fair to encroach on it. Again, there would be no sense in raising up another organiza- tion to do what is already being done, or what others already in existence are well calculated to do. More- over, the I. G. G. C. would defeat its own ends if it sought to work by their methods. It is only as it sticks religiously to its own field of action and does its work in its own way that it has any meaning at all, or any right to exist. It is not de- signed to take the place of any organization already existing or to interfere with them in any way. It is in no sense a substitute for anything we have and its sphere of action is quite distinct from that of the ordinary church activities. So much might be expected from the nature of the fundamentum, its express purpose of educating not by precept but by action. In its present stage of development the I. G. G. C. is adapted to the rural and semi-rural communities rather than to the urban. No serious attempt has yet been made to apply it to the conditions pre- vailing in our congested centers of population. To meet those highly specialized and difficult condi- tions radical changes would no doubt have to be made in its method of working, if indeed, something entirely difi"erent would not be better. But for rural and semi-rural conditions, the I. G. G. C. seems 158 WHY THEY FAIL peculiarly well fitted. Of course there is a section of the city-church constituency in which it would be possible to operate the Guild, but so far as we are concerned just now the big cities may be left out of count. Perhaps they won't mind being left out of count for once while their rural neighbors for once get a chance. The country church and district have never yet come to their own. Everything good seems to go to the city ai.d the city church, passing through the rural districts just as fast as the ex- press trains can carry them ; and apparently the only reason why they don't go through faster is because the express trains haven't the steam. Of course the reason for that is that more ears can be had in a day in the city than could be reached in a week in the country. The neighbors are close together, and if not, they have means of rapid tran- sit which amounts to the same thing so far as a meeting is concerned. For all that, it is time the rural districts got a chance. The cities and the nation are immeasurably indebted to them. Many of the very finest people on God's green earth live in the country. There are myriads of noble hearts there. The country boy may or may not have burrs in his hair and in his speech, but he is apt to have a heart of gold, and it is much better for humanity that a boy should have burrs in his manners and be golden at heart than to be golden in manners and have a heart full of weeds. The fact is we have never yet sufficiently recog- nized the value of our rural inheritance nor planned adequately for its development. The best that is in our cities has come from the country districts, not from foreign ports, and the biggest balance wheel the nation has is its farmer's vote, whatever WHY, THEY FAIL 159 may be said to "tickle the ears of the groundlings. ' When the Anti-Saloon League set out to down the liquor octopus which has been slowly strangling the nation in her cities, they began in the country. They recognized that the cities were corrupt and controlled by graft, vice and whiskey, and that the only possible source of cleansing the slime was by turning into them the purer waters from the waving cornfields and upland meadows. They recognized the fact that three votes to one are rural in this country after all, notwithstanding the smoke from mighty chimneys darkening the sky, and the masts of our commerce in city ports, and all the uproar of traffic and the great power wielded by city dailies and city-made magazines. The vote is what counts in the last analysis, and the League did a shrewd stroke of business when it began to cinch up the cities with that rural vote. The result of the policy has been felt in too many states to need Turther comment here. Three things the L G. G. C. takes into account in selecting, like the x*\nti-Saloon League, the rural districts and small towns for its chief sphere of action ; the first is that the country has been rela- tively neglected; the second is that it is the chief source of the nation's wealth in manhood, in food- stuffs, in raw material, and also from our stand- point, in economic opportunities ; and the third is that the ethical and spiritual dry rot is extending downward and outward till it invades that last cita- del of the nation's righteousness, the country home. iThe hired man has about quit going to church. It is not an idle thing that President Roosevelt's Rural Commission should, in its finding, tell us that the country school and the country church are the centers from which psychical helpfulness must come to the rural neighborhood. But if the country 160 WHZ THEY FAIL church is to be most helpful she must herself be helped. Some way must be found by which the inspiration of our great gatherings and our great leaders can be brought to bear more directly on the rural neighborhood through the rural church. A colossal task that beyond question, chiefly because of the long hours on the farm and the endless chores. Perhaps in this case "the longest way 'round" may be found "the shortest way home" and the I. G. G. C. policy of saving the man of to-morrow by going after the boy of to-day may be the truest solution of the difficulty. If we can only once get a race of men who will be delivered from the thrall- dom of mere things, everything else will fall into its right place and there will be found time for the higher goods. That is one of the ends the I. G. G. C. has in view so far as the juveniles of our extra-urban com- munities are concerned. And when we speak for extra-urban communities, that is for communities having anywhere up to eight thousand population, we are speaking, according to the United States census of ten years ago, of two-thirds of the popu- lation of the United States. Also, when speaking generally of the I. G. G. C. work it will be under- stood of course that whatever is said of the boy applies, mutatis mutandis, to his sister. Since it is inconvenient to be saying the boy and the girl all the time, we shall let the boy do as his father has had to do in politics, but as he assuredly by the drift of things will not have to do later — let him represent the girl also. In its conception of ethical education the I. G. G. C. recognizes four great qualities as being the cardinal points in the compass of an imperial char- acter. These are manliness, honesty, beneficence WHY THEY FAIL 161 and practicality. There are of course many other shining qualities, such as industry, neatness, accur- acy, punctuality, obedience, regularity, etc. but these points are merely supplementary; they are not the grand essentials. Abe Reuf or a highway- man might and probably does, possess them all. Incidentally they are valuable in life's training but they do not make the man. They adorn him ; they make him more efficient, but they do not constitute his manhood and character. On the other hand, if you get a man in whom manliness, honesty, bene- ficence and practicality are well developed you have a man indeed, a man whom all must respect and even love. Those four qualities are the four corner- stones of an imperial character, speaking from the standpoint of the home and the Sunday-school. Elsewhere it was pointed out that if we are to remedy the moral conditions prevailing, we must distinguish sharply between the boy's soul and his intellect. Intellect surely does count in the make-up of an imperial character; but as that part of the business is being admirably attended to in the vari- ous orders of state school it has not seemed neces- sary to speak of it here particularly — especially since it is not the business of the home and the Sunday-school to do that work. It has been dele- gated to others. Church and Sunday-school may and undoubtedly do aid in the intellectual develop- ment of their youthful charges, but that is not their purpose in life. They exist to help the homes in the making of men and women, leading them to Christ, the Savior of men, and then helping to fash- ion their characters into His image. "Intellect like ice, is colorless, no one has more of it than the Devil," said Dr. Cunningham Geikie once, and there is profound meaning in the remark. Development of a boy's intellect doesn't necessarily 162 WHY THEY FAIL mean development of good character. A man might have a brilHant intellect cultivated to the nth de- gree and yet be sadly lacking in every one of the four cardinal qualities mentioned above. We must recognize that at any rate three of those qualities belong to the soul of your boy, that is to the boy himself, as distinguished from that functioning of his soul which we call intellect, the boy observing, memorizing, discriminating, etc., etc. ; and the care of the boy's soul, that is himself, God Almighty en- trusts primarily to teachers who hold their certifi- cates not from any college or state board of education, but directly from heaven. That responsi- bility cannot be delegated to others, howsoever the shift may be attempted. Incidentally the public school may help, but the help at present is only incidental for it takes that institution about all its time to load your boy up with certain necessary information, and to sharpen his wits in order that he may live and make his way creditably in his day and generation. The Church and the Sunday-school may help at the task and are anxious to do so. That is what they are there for. In fact it is their main business to help ; but to help to do a thing is not to do it, it is only to help ; and so the burden of the development of the four chief pillars of character in your boy's soul falls back on those whom God has ordained and commissioned to the task — a task which none other may so well do. Let us now consider at close range the I. G. G. C. in its practical working and its educational bear- ing on the problem before us, that of turning out a man who shall be as "A tower of strength That stands four square to every wind that blows." WHZ THEY F'AIL 163 The Industrial Guild of the Great Commission has two functions and two classes of members. Its functions are financial and educational and its mem- bers are seniors and juniors. The juniors range in age from five to sixteen ; the seniors may be any- where from sixteen to one hundred and sixteen. The membership is broken up into small group units of production that we call firms. One or more may constitute a firm. If they are under sixteen we like to see two, three, four or even in exceptional cases five, in a firm. Where they are under sixteen we like to see some adult hooked up with them, and if not, there must be some older one who will have a kindly supervision of what the firm is doing. Judgment is exercised in the organization of these partnerships to let them be insofar as possible, con- genial groups and competent. Care is taken on the one hand to see that the group is not so small as to make the work it undertakes a burden, and on the other to see that the group is not so large that the members feel no sense of individual responsibility and are falling over one another. The firms, like the big firms downtown, go under firm names, such as "James Cook & Co."; "Brown & Brown"; "Hess & Son" ; "The Red Deer Trading Co." ; "Summer- land Supply Co."; and so on. From the merchants' signs in the village or town the children soon catch the idea. Maybe in the talk that goes with the search for a satisfactory firm name they get a grain of commercial education and their first introduction to the business world. As the youngsters are am- bitious to be and do like grown-up folk they absorb the information greedily. Each firm has a goal of endeavor for the year; it sets out to make a sum equal to one cent a day for every working day of the year, that is $3.12. If the members of a firm are over sixteen, that is 164 WHY THEY FAIL the goal for each member of the firm, but where juniors are concerned the burden would generally be too much for one, and hence the requirement of two or more, and preferably three or four, to raise that amount. The reason for this is that our work is primarily and fundamentally educational so far as they are concerned, and we are dealing with a very powerful instrument of education, viz., reflex action. "Action and reaction are equal and opposite," and it would therefore be very bad busi- ness to overwork the boy. If little Billy lifts so hard to-day that he bursts his suspenders the chances are he won't lift at all to-morrow. Action and reaction will be equal and opposite. Therefore we seek to give him just such a task as he will be able to accomplish comfortably and yet feel that he has accomplished something worth while. It is not what he makes that matters but how he makes it and why he makes it, and what he thinks and feels about it while he is making it. There is another reason for introducing the co- operative idea ; it not only strengthens the firm from a commercial standpoint, since the threefold cord is not quickly broken, but it gives play to the social instincts which need developing on that plane. Boys, like all good birds, are gregarious. Buzzards may go alone but boys wont. They crave companionship. This they usually get so far as their play and their studies are concerned, but so far as their commercial instincts are concerned there has been little opportunity to travel together. Yet the day comes when it will be on that plane almost wholly he will be rubbing shoulders with his fellows. The play will have dwindled to an occasional hour in the evening or of a Saturday after- noon ; the books will have become only an indistinct dream, and a bad one at that it may be, and the WHY THEY FAIL 165 man's days and nights will be given up to scheming ways of overreaching his competitors. We all recognize the value of team-play in a boy's life and can readily see how it rubs the corners ofif him. To have the other fellow's elbows in his ribs — especially if, as generally is the case, the other fellow be a bigger boy; and to be "called down" in the remorseless, inconsiderate, and highly un- parliamentary language which characterizes the vo- cabulary of youth in its more savage moments, is a social education which is just as valuable as any other he gets from the teachers his father so cheer- fully supports. It is not of the north wind that at a certain age boys begin to develop the gang spirit. It is nature's way of preparing them for the citizenship of the future. Were we all living in a state of nature we might let it go at that, but in- asmuch as we are not and never shall be, in all probability, but are destined to a future of marvel- ous commercial adjustments and interplay of com- mercial feelings, would it not be well for us to provide some kind of small theater on which those instincts might become operative under a just, liberal and kindly management? The boy who is all the time "swapping" jack-knives will get along well anyhow in this commercial age, if by the term "well" we mean simply the piling up around him of this world's goods ; but there are only a few such born traders in every school-room; the majority have to be made later on. "Woe unto him that is alone when he falleth," and "How can one be v\^arm alone?" So we intro- duce the co-operative principle, introduce the gang spirit, turn work into play, strengthen our combina- tion and prepare our bo)^s by the requirement of justice, foresight, and attention to a business that is real and their very own if small, better to under- 166 WHY THEY FAIL stand and better to carry themselves in the larger but not essentially different affairs of to-morrow into which most of them will certainly be plunged. We say not essentially different, but possibly that requires a word of qualification. It may be that to-morrow we shall see a new kind of commercial co-operation — one based on justice and kindness, not on wolfish repacity — such as Kipling describes when he says : "Now this is the law of the jungle as old and as true as the sky ; And the wolf that shall keep it may prosper, but the wolf that shall break it must die, As the creeper that girdles the tree trunk, the law runneth forward and back; For the strength of the pack is the zvolf, and the strength of the wolf is the pack. Now these are the laws of the jungle, and many and mighty are they; But the head and the hoof of the law and the haunch and the hump is 'Obey!' " There are not wanting signs in the sky that a change is at hand, and our boys may yet see the industrial group selfishness which is built on the ruins of the old individualistic, competitive selfish- ness, give place to co-operative-group industrial ac- tion which will be based on the divine right of every man and every woman to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." As the firms in the Industrial Guild are real firms, they go into real business for the express purpose of making that cent a day to help carry out the last wish and command of our Lord, Jesus Christ. In order that there may be no danger of interfering with the revenues of other missionary organizations it is very clearly understood that what they do in WHY THEY FAIL 167 the ^iiild is not to be made a substitute for any other giving. It is impressed upon them that this is an "extra mile of service" for the Master as a per- sonal love token to Him, or as an effort to help those whom He would help. In fact the enroll- ment card reads as follows: "I promise to endeavor to make one cent a day EXTRA this year toward carrying out the Great Commission of Jesus Christ. By extra, I under- stand new money made for that express purpose, and I further understand that it is not to be a sub- stitute for, or to stand in the way of any other giving." The reasons for this are economic, politic and educational. We take no gifts save time from any- body. Gifts of money are always refused. We say, "Give them to the others; that's their line." As for ourselves we say, "We want money; let us go out and make it. They are making money all around us for everything else ; let us make sortie for this. We can do it in our spare time, and if ex- penses be a first charge against the product then we shall be nothing out of pocket — nothing except a little spare time, which would have been lost any- how." If a man says, "I am doing all I can now," we say, "then the guild is no place for you ; it is only for some of the rest of us who haven't been doing as much as we might and are going to take another turn at it this year." But it is chiefly because our work is educational that we insist most strenuously on this method of procedure. That will be more apparent in a mo- ment or two as the application in concrete cases comes into view. The firms go into all kinds of business, but in every instance before a cent is given to missions the expenses of operation must be taken out and paid back to whoever put up the money. In some lines of business the time element 168 WHY THEY FAIL is very large and raw material costs little or noth- ing; in others the raw material costs quite a little while the time is not so prominent. Activities are very varied in adult membership, and the money is made in a score of different ways; gifts, aptitudes, train- ing and opportunity determining the route taken as in ordinary every-day life. Here is a music teacher who looks up an extra pupil for a quarter's lessons and so makes her money ; here is a book- keeper who keeps an extra set of books on purpose to help extend the Kingdom of God ; here is another doing some tutoring at so much per toot ; and so on with painting, sewing, singing, typewriting, bak- ing, scrubbing, knitting, darning socks for bachelor friends or even playing the angel of mercy and clean- ing up their shacks occasionally. Carpenters look up an extra job fixing fences or making hen coops or bookcases ; and so on with plumbers, painters, printers and other craftsmen and laborers. One man writes that he made his extra contribution by "digging a grave on Sunday." Others of a more sporty turn take to the woods with gun or rod and sell the product, but the simplest, and, so far as our juniors are concerned, the most general and possibly the most ideal lines of business, are those afforded by agriculture and horticulture, though poultry, stock raising, hog raising and such kindred pursuits as the breeding of canaries, pigeons, etc., for market, are almost equally good. Other things being equal, or even tolerable, the most valuable lines of activity for boys and girls are those which not only call them out of doors but which make the strongest appeal to the altruistic in their natures, and which afford the greatest number of reflexes. For this reason whatever may be said of adults it would be a mistake so far as a boy is concerned to put a premium on hunting and trapping rather WHY THEY FAIL 169 than on the other quieter pursuits named; for while the hunting may not be unprofitable, and while it certainly is good for his health, and educative of some of his faculties, such as observation and prac- tical judgment, it may have a tendency to empha- size the destructive and the heartless, which quali- ties in many boys are already so strong as to need no encouragement. A few illustrations drawn from life now will serve to set forth in clear relief our I. G. G. C. education in the school of things as they are. It will be remembered that the problem before us is that of turning out a man who is ethically fit, i. e., one who not only knows the good but finds him- self both able and willing to do it. That is a consummation devoutly to be wished for, and the first step toward the goal will be to do just as we have been trying to do — hold up the ideal before him. Only, as our Sunday-school teachers are tell- ing us, let us have more of it. There is no substitu- tion for that. It is God's first principle of education and it is absolutely indispensable. In the second place, let us get the boy to do the good we would have him do in manhood, and as he does it, silently, unconsciously, he will gain not only the power to do it but also the disposition to do it. And this is the way it works. Let us take those four cardinal qualities of an imperial character, manliness, hon- esty, beneficence and practicality — seriatim, and use the I. G. G. C. intelligently as one means of applying the reflex principle to the building up of those ethical action and association neurones in the boy's brain, without which he must go through life ethically halting — one of those "who with full command of theory never get to holding their limp characters erect," never get beyond the stage of "empty gesture-making." 170 WHY THEY FAIL MANLINESS The problem then is to make a manly man. Well, in the first place preach it, everybody, all the time, just as usual. Secondly get your boy to do the manly deed. And that is precisely what we seek to do in the I. G. G. C. We say "Now boys we are not going around this time with our hats in our hands to ask money for the collection from anybody. We will stand on our feet and do business like men." And so we do, and this is how it works out : Here are three boys let us say, of fourteen, twelve and ten in one home. They are on the Guild books the firm of James Cook & Co. James Cook & Co. are going into the potato business, as a discussion of the local trade conditions, climate, soil, adapta- bility, etc., indicates that that would be more likely to be a profitable line than beans, onions, straw- berries or anything else. The firm decides to plant a bushel of potatoes, nurse them along through the Summer, dig them and sell them in the Fall, and, after deducting all expenses, give the proceeds as a special contribution toward sending someone out to the less-favored places of the earth with the tid- ings of salvation. Should the proceeds, after pay- ing all expenses, amount to more than ^^.12, then the balance belongs to the firm to do with as it pleases. But care should be taken that that balance be not excessive lest the egoistic come to supplant the altruistic and the latter become even irksome. This has happened in actual experience. So little does greed need cultivation. Well, the firm has been organized, the firm style has been adopted, the planting-time has come and the firm proceeds to business. But they no sooner proceed to business than they learn, as their father learned a long time before they made his acquaint- ance, that business won't do itself. Unfortunately WHY THEY FAIL 171 there are difficulties in the way. They have no seed. Where shall they get it? Get it? Why get it from father of course, whv.. they have been getting things all their lives. So off to their father they go. But there they run against a snag. The old gentle- man, who is our coadjutor in this work and recog- nizes that the cost of the potatoes is neither here nor there in this process of education, but that how they are obtained is very important, says very suavely: "Well, now boys, that is fine. I am in hearty sympathy with the purpose your firm has in view, and I would gladly give you the potatoes for such a noble cause, but unfortunately I cannot, because, you see, that institution doesn't take any gifts ex- cept time from anybody. Now what are you going to do about that?"' Then there ensues a palaver with their "guide, philosopher and friend," the upshot of which is they get the potatoes on time with the understanding that they pay for them in the Fall; so the firm hands over its note for the fifty cents or whatever it may be, with interest at six per cent, pater meas- ures out a scripture measure bushel to them (ex- ample being better than precept, especially where we are the beneficiaries) and the boys start ofif with a war-whoop for the garden back of the house in which potatoes have been raised from time imme- morial, and maybe from the time of Adam down, for all they know to the contrary. So far the affair is a perfectly legitimate business transaction, for character is capital, dear reader, down at the bank. A clean man can get an ac- commodation when a crooked man can't, and their clean young lives are good for the necessary capital till their crop comes in in the Fall. But on the way to the potato patch, a road that it has taken an 172 WHY THEY FAIL hour and a half to cover, for perfectly valid reasons known only to boys, they run into their paternal ancestor once more, and he enquires where they are going to plant their potatoes. "In the potato patch, o' course." "Well, boys, does your firm own that land on which you propose to plant them?" Well, no, they can't just say that their firm exactly owns the land, no, but — "Well, now boys, you know the Industrial Guild is a busi- ness institution which accepts no gifts except time, and I'm afraid, therefore, I cannot give you the land, much as I should like to do so, were the case otherwise. Now what are you going to do about it?" So another palaver ensues as a result of which the boys agree to rent the land, at such a figure, be it said entre nous, as will be reasonable from the standpoint of their limited financial vision and re- sources, however nominal it might appear to a rep- resentative of Bradstreet's or Dun Wiman & Co. This point is important though apparently trivial. To rent the land at a price which they feel is purely nominal is to subvert the very end we have in view by putting a premium on trickery in helping them to evade the conditions under which, in join- ing the I, G. G. C., they have agreed to work. We must remember it is not what we think but what they think that counts, and doing is vastly more significant than either hearing or seeing when it comes to character building. By this time the potatoes have been honorably acquired and the rent obligation has been duly as- sumed. Now they are sure that they are out of the woods, so they sit down on the bag to rest once more and talk matters over. Then they suddenly remember that hoes are necessary and set off in a race to the granary to .,^.t them. Armed with these weapons they are marching back to the field when WHY THEY FAIL 173 once more they run into their fi^ther. He wants to know who owns those hoes. This time it doesn't take long to explain just why he asks or what is wanted. The boys are learning fast in that dearest, hardest and best of all the schools in which we acquire information, and they tell him they will settle for that too, when their crop comes in in the Fall. And so at every turn they are obliged to stand on their own feet and do business like men ; and when in the Fall those boys come in with their three or four or five dollars that they have won by the grace of their own right arms, you will see, if you observe them very closely, that their heads are up a little higher in the air, their feet are planted a little more firmly on the floor, and their little bosoms are heav- ing and glowing with a new emotion. They feel like men. And why do they feel like men? Be- cause they have done like men. Every act we ever do, be it good or bad or indififerent, is attended by its own characteristic reflex which builds by so much the cells in the brain that give power to do that particular act next time a little more easily, a little more readily and a little more pleasurably. When a man does a mean act he feels mean inside; when he does a generous act he feels "good" inside ; when he does a manly act he feels himself rightly more of a man, and when he acts like a hound he feels like one and tends to skulk out of the way of his fellows. Thus if you keep your boy not only hearing about standing on his own feet, but actually doing it through the ten most important formative years of his life, you will turn out a manly man as inevitably as you turn out a carpenter by ten years of shoving the saw and plane, and for precisely the same rea- son, viz., that action and association neurones of 174 WHY THEY FAIL whatever kind are built, and can be built, only by the reflexes of our own activity. There is no mys- tery in it when one thinks about it. HONESTY Again, take that second corner-stone of an im- perial character, honesty. "An honest man is the noblest work of God," but apparently a fire-proof honesty is all too hard to find. Were it otherwise we should be willing to trust our ten thousand dol- lars with a greater number of people in the dark. Why do we have locks on our doors, watchmen in our warehouses, and policemen on every other cor- ner if people can be universally trusted? The fact is a great deal of our honesty is of that negative type which merely lacks a perfectly safe oppor- tunit5^ How many people are restrained from petty dishonesty by fear of detection, law, public opinion, reputation generally, who can tell? Of course there are those who would not forget to make good the nickel fare the street railway conductor overlooked, however they might suspect the company had un- righteously annexed one or more of their dollars by those indirect methods best known to corporations and their lawyers. But that is not the point ; the point is that there is not a sufficient number of them and that you want to make sure that boy of yours will be of their sort. How shall that be accomplished? The answer is by getting your boy to actually do the scrupu- lously honest thing through ten or more formative years of his life. If you can do that Nature will take care of the rest. God always does his part when we do ours. Now, in his Industrial Guild operations your boy suddenly finds himself in a world that is vastly different from that of his Sun- day-school. The temptation to put in doubtful po- WHY THEY FAIL 175 tatoes to fill up that bag, putting them well down out of sight of course, (since they wouldn't look well on top) comes to him with something of the compelling force of an electric shock. The fierce, unholy impulses which are native to the human soul, rise up with all the suddenness and fury of a Euroclydon tempest, and all the good things he has heard at his mother's knee and from his Bible- school teacher, and other good people, seem far off and unreal. Brother, were you ever there? If you have not been, don't talk. You have no idea how subtle and how strong is the tug toward gaining an advantage by departing just a little from the straight path of rectitude. It is not that he does not know he would be doing wrong to scamp the measure, or to put those doubtful potatoes in. He does know, for, thank the Lord, he has been to Sunday-school and there he learned the right ; the trouble comes at the point of translating the good teaching into the correlative good action. But it is precisely into that stern school of choice and action we must plunge the boy thus prema- turely that while his brain is forming it may be formed aright, and it is here he needs the kindly oversight of which we spoke. For the principle of which we speak and with which we deal, will work just as powerfully and readily to ruin your boy as it will to make him. Those ten years of crooked dealing will turn out a crook just as surely as the ten years of scrupulously just dealing will turn out an honest man. Therefore, since we are deal- ing with edged tools, we require that some adult shall keep an eye on the doings of that firm of juniors. It is here the boy meets his Waterloo. Whether he shall stand or fall is very apt to depend on whether Blucher comes toward the close of the 176 WHY THEY FAIL day or not. It must be our business to see that he does. In the first experiment of this kind the writer made, Blucher came in this way at marketing time. "Now boys, whatever you do be careful about those potatoes. Remember that we are doing busi- ness for Jesus Christ, and he hates anything that is crooked, or shady or mean. Whatever you do don't put a bad potato into His barrel. He would rather you would throw away two good potatoes ; yes, rather you threw away the whole lot than that you should compromise him by putting one bad one into His barrel. And they didn't. The purchasers afterward ex- pressed their pleasure at receiving such good stock and were open to do business with those firms the next year. Here is another illustration of the modus operandi from the fertile province of Saskatchewan. A mother lets her little girl go into the hen business with a partner. They buy a couple of hens say at fifty cents each, let them lay their own eggs, set them on their eggs when they have laid them, take ofif the heads of the whole lot in the Fall, get back the price of the hens and whatever it cost to feed them, and the rest, up to the one cent a day limit, goes to missions. It so happens that the little girl's hen, much to her chagrin, hatches out only seven chickens while her mother's hatch ten. Immedi- ately she begins to cast covetous eyes on those ten chickens, being naturally ambitious to come out a winner and to make a big showing. Then she worries her mother till the mother, loving not wisely but too well, trades her ten for the child's seven. Now the pater familias allows this little drama of life to work itself out and then he makes it his WHY THEY FAIL 177 business, in a quiet evening hour, to have a Httle chat with Mary about her firm's business, and she tells him all about it. Then he goes over the ground again with her somewhat after this fashion: "Now Mary let's understand this transaction. Your firm bought a hen from your mother for fifty cents." "Yes." "And your hen hatched out only seven chickens while your mother's hatched ten." "Yes." "And then you traded your seven for her ten." "Yes." "Well, were your chickens any bet- ter than your mother's — thoroughbreds, for in- stance?" "Oh, no. They were all the same." "Then you got three chickens for nothing in that deal, didn't you. Alary?" "Well, yes, guess I did." And Mary rather thinks it was smart to have over- reached her mother by so much. "Well now Mary, look here. As I understand things your firm in the Industrial Guild is doing business for Jesus Christ; and you know he doesn't like it if we don't do what is right, and I'm afraid in the I. G. G. C. they couldn't take those three chickens because you see your firm didn't pay for them, and in the Industrial Guild you know they do business and don't take any gifts except time. They can take the seven chickens but not the three. "And Mary, your firm in buying made a bargain ■with your mother for so much, didn't you?" "Yes," "Well, Mary, a bargain is a bargain, isn't it? You know God's idea of an honest man is a man who swears to his own hurt and changes not; that is, one who makes a bad bargain and sticks to it be- cause his word is passed, because his word is him- self, and if his word is no good, he's no good, is he? I guess, Mary, you had better stick to your bar- gain, hadn't you?" You give Mary ten years of that kind of training jn honesty, not hearing about it, or dreaming about 178 WHY THEY FAIL it, but actually doing it to the division of a hair and the fraction of a cent, and depend upon it, when she comes to do business in your store the eleventh year she will do honest business as easily as she writes her name, and for exactly the same reason — because she has been doing it for ten years already. She has the honesty action cells and the honesty association cells so well developed in her brain that it is easy for her to do the right and doubly hard for her to do the wrong. To do the crooked thing now would be about as difficult for her as to write with her left hand. In this incident we see again the imperative need of some kind of gracious oversight of the way in which the firm is doing its business. The reflex of a bad act makes a bad boy if anything more quickly than the reflex of a good act makes a good one, since we seem to have a kind of natural bias toward evil rather than good. This point is so important that the I. G. G. C. generally refuses to have juniors as members unless someone of mature years can be found who will be sponsor for them. A further illustration will perhaps show more clearly the wisdom of this. In a certain town in Manitoba two small boys decided to go into busi- ness in the I. G. G. C. for the good of the world. Their enterprise was quite successful, netting them the sum of five dollars. But the sun of prosperity brought out the weeds in their souls. The actual sight, feel and possession of this amount of real money was too much for them to stand, unaided in the crisis by any stronger, truer hand, and so they annexed the money and bought a dog instead. Manifestly it does not require any occult power to see that that way over the hill the penitentiary lies. Misappropriation of funds people would call it in WHY THEY FAIL 179 the case of their fathers, would they not — with no end of evil reports to the third generation? How much better for those two boys had there been some wise friend or elder brother to help them through that crisis, to help them achieve the right motor discharge instead of the wrong one for the ethical ideas and impulses they had duly received in home and in Sunday-school ! After a few ex- periences it would have been so much easier to do the right that supervision would be reduced to a minimum, and by the time they reached man's estate they would have been strongly entrenched in this cardinal virtue of simple, common, every-day, homely old honesty, so much needed by the world and so sorely needed by the Church. Who can tell how many preachers, Sunday-school officers and teachers, and other Christian workers, have seen their work all undone by the unrighteousness con- cealed in a barrel of potatoes, a tub of butter, a basket of eggs or a bag of wheat coming from some professedly Christian home? And it is not because the people are religious hypocrites either, but all because they have never had this kind of ethical training which alone can build those cells in the brain that give us the power to do what we know and feel we ought to do. As M. J. Bahnsen, the philosopher, tells us : "The actual presence of the practical opportunity alone furnishes the fulcrum upon which the lever can rest by means of which the moral will may multiply its strength and raise itself aloft. He who has no solid ground to press against will never get beyond the stage of empty gesture-making." BENEFICENCE The third corner-stone of an imperial character is beneficence. And by beneficence is not meant 180 WHY THEY FAIL benevolence. There is a world of difference be- tween the two words. Benevolence means to wish well or the good ; beneficence means to do it. The world is full of benevolent people who wish every- thing well ; it is dying for lack of beneficent people who not only know the good but find themselves able to do it. "If wishes were horses beggars might ride," observes Portia, and we may add that if wishes were dollars our Mission Board secretaries would not be l)ing awake nights trying to figure out how to make one dollar do the work of ten on fields at home and abroad. The shame of Christianity is her failure to pro- vide. She boasts her added light beside which, as she tells us, the light of former days was but as twilight or day dawn, and yet our beneficence is as nothing to that of ancient Israel. Among the Jews before Christ, he was no giver who gave but a tenth; they were more likely to give a fifth or even a third. The heathen of southern China give one-fourth to their gods. But among Christian people to-day how few there are who have attained even the minimum of Judaism in that regard ! In 1890 Mr. Robert E. Speer estimated the wealth of the Christian portion of the population of the United States at twenty billion dollars and that perhaps one-fiftieth of what she adds to her wealth each year in addition to that now given, would sup- port a sufficient number of missionaries to evangel- ize the world. How much greater must be her wealth to-day! Mr. G. T. Manley reckons that one hundred thousand workers extra would be the very outside number required to evangelize the world in this generation, and that if one-fourth of the Protestants of Europe and America gave one cent a day it would amount to one hundred million dollars a year. IVHY THEY FAIL 181 Dr. Strong in "Our Country" says there is money enough in the hands of church members to sow every acre of the earth with the seed of truth but it is being misappHed. "Indeed, the world would have been evangelized long ago if Christians had perceived the relation of money to the Kingdom, and had accepted their stewardship." Were the Sunday School children of the world to put up but two cents per capita per week for mis- sions we should have more money than the entire church puts up, including the noble work of The Laymen's Movement. The fact is the church has largely lost the power to give normally. There is here the same delinquency as is evident in the more patent shortcomings of manliness and honesty, and for the very same reason. There has not been a proper motor discharge ; there has been insufficiency of eleemonsynary activity. Of what we did give in our youth the far greater part cost us nothing and therefore achieved nothing of beneficence in us. In- deed, it is quite possible the reflex of our giving was as mischievous as helpful, for what we gained in promotion of the idea of giving was lost in the promotion of a mendicant spirit. Personal and family pride rather than missionary interest probably ac- count for a large fraction of the receipts on Sunday. It follows that if the church is ever to correct this she must find some better way of developing beneficence. The old way has had a fair trial and it has manifestly failed. Let us now try a new plan. Let us add something. Let us induce the children to bring their youthful active powers to bear on the Task. Let us develop in their brains a direct and powerful set of association neurones leading directly from the benevolent impulse to the benefi- cent action cells developed by self-activity, and we shall then have educationally fitted them to go again 182 WHY THEY FAIL with profit to church and Sunday-school and Mis- sionary lecture. The new benevolent impulse cre- ated will then find a natural, healthful and pleasure- able outlet in a response which will be adequate to the stimulus, instead of being, as it is with us, strangled, aborted, drained off ineffectively, to leave behind it a kind of feeling of demerit, of failure, of shame for not having done what we felt somehow we ought to have done. We shall then have the blessed circle of a complete education — good impres- sion — good impulse — correlative action — consequent enlargement as a preparation for the reception and more prompt and effective execution of the next good impulse that comes along. It will be understood of course, that like any other education which has to do with the building of brain cells by reflex action, the business can not be done at one stroke. The public school teacher cannot make your boy a mathematician or a pen- man in an hour, or a day, or a week. It is "the repeated strokes of behavior" which alone, under her guidance can do it. So also we cannot expect the boy to become morally fit by sporadic attempts to translate good impulses into their correlative good actions. There must be some such continuity of training as we see in the day school. He must be inspired to keep at the good work. Then his moral action cells have a chance to grow. It is im- portant not to drop the knitting. Thus Bain ob- serves: "The peculiarity of the moral habits as contra- distinguished from the intellectual acquisitions, is the presence of two hostile powers, one to be grad- ually raised into the ascendant over the other. It is necessary above all things in such a situation never to lose a battle. Every gain on the wrong side un- does the effect of many conquests on the right. The WHY THEY F'AIL 183 essential precaution, therefore, is so to regulate the two opposing powers that one may have a series of uninterrupted successes, until repetition has forti- fied it to such a degree as to enable it to cope with the opposition under any circumstances. This is the theoretically best career of mental progress." Again, if we are to produce a race of men who will adequately appreciate their world wide rela- tions and responsibilities, we must give the boy a world-wide horizon. Herbert Spencer points out that the growth of civilization depends on the widening of the individual's horizon. The savage whose life circles about a very limited territory and the immediate enjoyment of objects, gradually evolves into the half civilized man who thinks of larger territory, larger groups of individuals and longer periods of time. Finally we have the fully civilized man, the sweep of whose political vision is a hundred 3^ears or more, and who builds buildings that endure for generations. But this, he points out, is an achievement conditioned on the enlarge- ment of his mental horizon as much as on any con- ditions outside of himself. A very serious and noble effort is being made along this line by the present missionary educa- tional policy, but to give it full ethical content it must be more directly related to practical activity on the part of the young or it will go the way of the rest of our teaching — only a small proportion of it will come to any adequate fruitage. The In- dustrial Guild of the Great Commission is designed to help at just this point. In this wise: Here is a mother who has a five-year-old son. He is her partner and they are the firm of Mary Cook & Son. She is a very busy woman with her arms full of household cares like other women, but because 184 WHY THEY FAIL she loves that boy she finds time to devote a few minutes occasionally to the development of the high- est thing about him, his soul, which is, indeed, the boy himself. And because she is such a very busy woman she buys a hen and sets her on a dozen eggs, with a view to ultimate profit for the Kingdom, as described on a former page. Her small partner is in the onion business and has a bed of onions which is about two feet square. It is small but it is his own and more important to him than his father's whole farm. During the Summer evenings that mother often holds her little partner on her lap and they talk about what their firm is doing and where their money is going, and she tells him about the black skinned boys and girls out in Africa or India, who don't know who made them and are saying their prayers to snakes and toads. And maybe she tells him of the great party which Jesus is going to have in His beautiful home up there, and how he has sent out an invitation to all the boys and girls, good and bad, to come, but the boys and girls out there haven't yet heard about it. Then they talk about how the invitation is to be got to them ; who will go, how he will get there and where the money is to come from to get his ticket ; and to buy food and clothing while he is there, since he can't farm or run a business and go around with the invitation at the same time ; and how their money is going to help send him there and help keep him at it. And as she talks his dear, unselfish, little heart is aflame with the desire to do something to help. That, dear reader, is impression, the first prin- ciple of education and that is, for the most part, zvhere wc have stopped with our good zvork.. Now, however, there is a change. The little man jumps WHY THEY FAIL 185 down off her knee to run around the house to have another look at that onion bed and to get the sprink- Hng can to sprinkle those onions once more, or maybe to pluck a weed he finds there ; and so the good impression is translated into the correlative good action, which by its reflex automatically builds very silently, by so much, that good action cell in his brain, and at the same time an association track is laid between the two. And all Summer long, eveiy time he looks at that onion bed it preaches to him such a powerful ser- mon about the great world outside himself that needs his help, as neither you nor I can preach, and his little soul is growing outward by its own activ- ity as God ordained that it should grow. And the wise mother sees to it that her partner often relieves her by feeding her chickens, always keeping alive by some more or less direct allusion the connection between what he is doing and the Great Task for which it is done, for she knows the greater number of beneficent reflexes she can induce in that growing brain, the more princely man she shall see coming through her gate by and by. "I think I am in the ministry to-day because my mother gave me a missionary hen," said a gentle- man to the writer one day as he eulogized this scheme. The hen he fed and because he fed her, was the greatest preacher he ever knew. Said an- other, a lady who by her devoted life lifted the moral tone of the whole settlement in which she lived, as the I. G. G. C. idea, then in its infancy, was laid before her: "That is true. If I am anything to-day it is because my mother gave us a missionary tree when we were children." So then you keep that little man not only hearing about the great world outside himself that needs 186 WHY THEY FAIL his help, and dreaming about it, but actually doing something through the ten or more plastic years of his life to help it out, and when by and by the finger of God touches him into life and he comes into the Church, he will know what a Church is for, and he will hold up his end as naturally as he skates and walks, and for precisely the same reason — because he has been doing it for ten years already. Milo of Crotona carried the full-grown bull around the walls of the town only because he grew to the task by carrying it daily, first as a calf and then as it grew. The Laymen's Movement is a fine thing to have, but a finer thing still to have is a new Laymen's Movement that shall begin operations sixteen years before the members record their first electoral vote. Every man's life is dominated in the last analysis by one of four great motives : Power, pleasure, pelf or usefulness. Only as a character is shaped by the last do we have a truly regal man. Tolstoi forsakes his bowers of ease to live on rude fare, in a rude hut among the peasants that he may learn their sorrows and voice their inarticulate cry to the world; the Countess Schermerhorn, intimate friend of the Empress of Germany, forsakes the splendor and admiration of an imperial court that she may minister to the fisher-folk she finds neglected by all, and becomes known as the Mother of the sailors of the world; Dr. Grenfel gives up his brilliant pros- pects in medicine amid cultured surroundings that he may through incredible hardships minister heal- ing to the lonely inhabitants along the inhospitable shores of Labrador; and as they pass before us we bow very low, recognizing that a greater than Car- negie or Rockefeller or Pierrepont Morgan is here, for the greatest thing in the world is not to have but to help. WHY THEY FAIL 187 "They soon grow old that grope for gold In marts where all is bought and sold ; Who live for self, and on some shelf In darkened vaults hoard up their pelf; Cankered and crusted o'er with mold, F'or them their j-outh itself is sold" — if the poet will forgive the prefixing of the letter "s" to the last word of the last line. PRACTICy\LITY The fourth corner-stone of an imperial character is practicality. Practicality is that quality in a man which enables him to see things as they are and to turn them to good account. Strictly speak- ing it is not an ethical but rather an intellectual quality, a characteristic of mind rather than of soul ; but it is so essential to an imperial character that we have to consider it. It bears a very direct relation to the theme before us, for it is conceivable that a boy might be honest, manly and generous, and yet be of that dreamy, visionary type which never sees things as they are and is always slip- ping a cog when it comes to the final test of action. The imperial man is a man who has power to bring things to pass in that sphere in which God has placed him, and practicality is that mental gearing in him which profitably links his will, purpose, knowledge and character to the thing to be done. As some boys have those sections of the brain which give power to draw or remember musical tones, unusually well developed, so others have the practical action cells unusually strong as a native endowment. They are given to dicker and bargain and whether it be alleys, tops, knives or rabbits they "swap" they never have reason to repent at leisure. It is pleasant to see boys of that make-up. It is from their ranks our captains of industry are 188 WHY THEY FAIL recruited and also many of their lesser satellites, whose daily routine of business is so bewildering in its detail it makes us dizzy to merely contem- plate it. But that kind of boy needs the Industrial Guild training in order that he may achieve a bal- anced character. Where any faculty is excessively strong there is a persistent tendency to exercise it for the sheer joy we derive from doing so. Millionaires care very little for the money; it is for the game they care. There is always a joy born of the exercise of power, and power is one of the most intoxicating cups ever poised in human hand. It follows that boys of particularly strong com- mercial instincts will be subject to a peculiar cor- relative temptation — that of over-reaching their fel- lows. The wise father will see at once that such a disposition requires as a corrective, a course in al- truism and honesty. The boy must be given op- portunity to go wrong that he may know himself, and then be brought face to face with his deed and with the right, while there is yet time to reshape his conduct, and before "his spinal cord is thoroughly organized around evil and all the atoms of his being play in tune to unworthy impulses." It may seem hard to thus talk of deliberately exposing the boy to temptation, but life is doing it for him every day, with or without our consent, and a little of the serum by way of moral vaccination will not do him any harm, provided there be reasonable care in the surgery and proper nursing. But where there is one boy of that sort there are a dozen who are not of a sufficiently practical turn. They are fond of books and fond of fun but they don't take to work. And if they do have to do busi- ness the last state of it is apt to be worse than the first. It is only when they have all but ruined their employers and blighted their own reputations WHY THEY FAIL 189 in the commercial world that they attain to a sav- ing degree of that sagacity, which in their success- ful rivals seems to be an instinct. They never get to that point where they can honestly say they love their work, and yet their rivals would rather work than eat. Is it not thus with them because they were caught too late? "It is hard to learn an old dog new tricks," runs a homely old adage. If we had taken the boy in his tender years and given him a little business of his own — an altruistic business lest his soul grow inward and selfish — instead of waiting till he graduated from high school or col- lege, might we not have helped him very materially along the thorny way he had to tread? Now that is precisely what the Industrial Guild of the Great Commission is calculated to do. The boy has his own business which he is obliged, once he undertakes it, to conduct in a thoroughly busi- ness-like way. It may be a very small afifair but the wise father will see that it is run just as if it were a ten thousand dollar concern. The boy early learns by experience about business forms and business honor. He gives and takes receipts, learns what thousands of good church members of twenty years' standing have apparently yet to learn, that the date of maturity of a note is of as much importance to the holder as the date of the signa- ture, and that the evil day cannot with honor be ignored ; that a note must be met or otherwise provided for on maturity; that no man has a right to use another man's money without paying the tax we call interest; that there may be such a thing as deferred payments where there is a reasonable expectation of meeting them, etc., etc. Such a business course covering ten years will make the boy so familiar with ordinary business procedure that the 190 WHY THEY FAIL smoothest green goods agent in the land will find him anything but the fool he looks. Boys who have a business of their very own will learn more about that business in a week by a kind of mental absorption than we could have prodded into them with a sharp stick in a year. They may not be particularly interested in their father's busi- ness or in that of anyone else, but the horse is of another color when it is their own. They have in that a proprietary interest, and so deeply rooted is that instinct in human nature that Prof. James says of it: "It seems essential to mental health that the individual should have something beyond the bare clothes on his back to which he can assert exclusive possession and which he may defend adversely against the world. Even those religious orders which make the most stringent vows of poverty have found it necessary to relax the rule a little in favor of the human heart made unhappy by reduction to too disinterested terms. The monk must have his books; the nun must have her little garden, and the images and pictures in her room." The practical as well as the mental value of our course of training may be made clearer by an illustration. Here is a firm of boys living in a fruit- raising district. They go to their father or their uncle or anyone else, and say: "Our firm would like to buy that apple tree in your orchard. We will pay you so much this year and so much each year for the following five years, interest at six per cent." "All right," he says, and the tree passes over to the boys. What then? Those boys im- mediately develop a marvellous interest in the tree business that they never had before, and their ears are wide open whenever their elders are talking about fruit soil, fruit markets, fruit packing, fruit picking, tree pests and tree fertilizers, etc., and they WHY THEY FAIL 191 begin to absorb information which used to pass by them Hke "the idle wind which we respect not." Give the boy ten or more years of that kind of intelhgent absorption and he will know a whole lot more about his future business than he would have known if he had not begun to take a living interest in it till he was a man full grown. It is of the nature of a healthy, growing boy to be active. There are physiological reasons for this. The heart almost doubles in size and the blood is driven like a roaring Niagara through his veins. Frictional energy of reflex origin is developed in the form of nervous stimuli that pour into the brain incessantly, so that he is driven as by a very demon of restlessness to action of some sort. This is the stage of his existence of which the great philosopher-humorist of America, Dr. Robert J. Burdette, speaks in his famous lecture on "The Rise and Fall of the Moustache" when he tells us that the boy "converses in ordinary confidential moments in a shriek," and "wears his hat more in the air than on his head." His activity may be either vicious or harmless, but action of some sort there will be, and we might just as well get a corner on some of this surplus energy and turn it to good account. In giving this energy a practical turn we are doing much to sharpen the boy's wits for the grim struggle later on. The careful conduct of his own business will not only awaken dormant powers which other- wise might have atrophied, but it will by a kind of assimilative reflex action develop the power to ab- sorb and apply the worldly wisdom which he is destined to pick up in various w^ays later on in life. An illustration from Prof. Judd's laboratory work may serve to make clear what is meant by this. In the "Educational Review" of 1908, writing on "Special 193 WHY THEY FAIL Training and General Intelligence" he describes an experiment made to determine the value of theory as related to practice. Two groups of boys were required to hit a target under twelve inches of water with a dart. One group was given theoretical in- struction regarding the difficulty of hitting a target under water because of the deflection caused by refraction of the light rays. The other group was left in ignorance of refraction. In the first series of trials the first group had no advantage over ^he others who were uninstructed. "All the boys had to learn to use the dart and theory proved to be no substitute for practice. At this point the conditions were changed. The twelve inches were reduced to four. The difference be- tween the two groups of boys now came out very strikingly. The boys without theory were very much confused. The practice gained with twelve inches of water did not help them with four inches. Their errors were large and persistent. On the other hand the boys who had the theory fitted them- selves to four inches very rapidly. Their theory evidently helped them to see why they must not apply the twelve-inch habit to four inches of water. Note that the theory was not of value till it was backed by practice ; but when practice and theory were both present the best adjustment was rapidly worked out. Such experiences as this," Prof. Judd adds, "make it clear that every experience has in it the possibilities of generalization." "It is not a pound of theory to an ounce of prac- tice that is wanted," says Prof. Legge, Director of Education in Liverpool, England, "but rather a pound of practice to an ounce of theory; and so in the Reformatory and Industrial Schools, the in- dustrial training will generally be found to con- sist of one severe theoretical session a week, fol- WHY. THEY F'AIL 193 lowed by four or five sessions of constructive work in the actual workshop." It frequently occurs that firms fail because of circumstances over which they have no control. The like thing is not unknown among more import- ant firms downtown. This may be anything but a calamity to one who thinks more of his boy than he does of a few paltry dollars. Defeat is often more valuable than success. It affords the opportunity to pluck a crown from the spear. Some boys are naturally so buoyant that they are no sooner keeled over than they are right-side up again. That is a blessed disposition to have, and the boy who is so fortunate as to be built that way, provided he has the necessary balance of other required char- acteristics, is starred for success. Unfortunately many boys are not so constructed. When they get knocked down they are disposed to lie there or to sit up and cry. Under proper guidance firm failure may be the best possible thing that could happen to a boy like that. He must be led to see that such things as that are merely incidental in our progress through life ; that they happen repeatedly to grown folk, who do not therefore throw up the sponge and weep uselessly over their losses. Farmers lose their crops through frost, hail or drought, but they plant them again next year just as usual; firms fail in business but they start up again ; others see their homes, representing the savings of years, go up in smoke, but they don't go to the poor-house on that account; they set out to retrieve their fallen for- tunes and build another one. To do less is the only shameful failure, and hence the firms must stay with it till they "make good," carrying over their expenses and charging them up against next year's operations. Prof. Titchener in his "Experimental Psychology," 194 WHY THEY FAIL a work given up chiefly to laboratory methods, talks to the students as follows : "Do not call upon the instructor at every hitch; try to overcome the difficulties for yourself. If, however, after you have completed an experiment, you find that you have passed over some essential point of method, or neglected some source of error, consult with the instructor before repeating it. The record of the experiment as performed, with em- phatic statement of mistakes, may be considered by him as more valuable to you than the same ex- periment correctly performed at a double expense of time." It has been said that the Industrial Guild has two classes of members, seniors and juniors. If, so far as the juniors are concerned, its primary function is educational and its secondary function is finance, the case is just the reverse so far as the seniors are involved. It has educational value to them also, though on account of the in- creased induration of the brain tissues it is not so striking as in the case of the others. Yet it is very considerable too, for an adult no sooner begins action in this way than he becomes conscious of a new glow within him. He finds the new doctrine of motor discharges is revolutionary, changing en- tirely the polarity of his life on that small scale in which he is active. All his life he has been making money for himself and giving some of it to the Lord; in this he turns that right about and makes money for the Lord while he keeps some of it for himself, i. e., the expenses which come back to him. He realizes on a small scale the ideal of stewardship, and whereas all his life it has been self first and the Kingdom of God second, it is now the Kingdom of God first and self second, and so he swings into line with the Sermon on the Mount WHY THEY FAIL 195 and with the angels and with all Heaven. The reflex of it is to let a ray of Heaven's glory into his soul. He is apt to feel that somehow this is the sweetest money he ever gave. And why? Because he has given more than money; he has given himself in the getting of it. Out on the prairies of the fertile Province of Manitoba the writer dined one day in a certain home. In the course of the hour these principles came up for discussion, and afterward, while "hitch- ing up" in the yard, a young woman, a domestic in the home, who had heard the conversation, came out and offered him a dollar. "Well, now, the Lord bless your good heart," I replied, "but I'm afraid I can't take it." She looked up in astonishment and wanted to know why. It was probably something new to find a preacher refusing money for missions, "Now, my dear girl, you made that money for yourself, didn't you?" She said, "Yes." "Well," I said, "the only money we take is new money, made on purpose to extend the Kingdom of God. We are all working at the task the Master has left us to do, and if you want to join us you will have to work at it, too." So she went away, but in a few moments she re- turned saying, "You may take my name. I'll work a month for the Lord Jesus this year." Do you not think that month v/ould be a blessed month to her? That service would be a sacrament to her soul. She would have real fellowship with Jesus Christ all the time. She was really working for Him and with Him, working in a way which cannot be discounted in this world or any other. Talk may be cheap but actions are the gold coins of God's realm, and that girl was as really a missionary as any man who has gone to heathendom. He uses his gifts and his training and she uses hers, but both 196 WHY THEY FAIL are working at the same task, and what the King- dom of God needs to-day more than it needs any- thing else is an army of men and women bearing the name of Christ, who will quit talking and address themselves to the Task along the lines of their own gifts, training and opportunity, in such homely prac- tical ways. The world would speedily be evangelized if we could get every Christian in America to do as many of our firms in the Industrial Guild have already done — make one cent a day extra to give effect to the Great Commission. Most of the adult members could easily do it. It is largely a matter of organiz- ing and getting them at it. And were it done we should have about four times more money for mis- sions than the whole Church with all her subsidiary organizations, including the Laymen's Movement, has put up, and no one in doing it would be a cent out of pocket. What is more, the reflex of the activ- ity on the life of the Church in other ways would be incalculable. It would immensely deepen the heart interest in sermons and other religious exercises, and it would very appreciably enlarge the giving through the regular channels. The service may be humble, hard, amusing, or even ridiculous at times, but there is this about it — the most sneering skeptic cannot deny its reality. To see that mechanic or that farmer or that laborer, out there toiling in the sweat of his face that the Kingdom of One un- seen may be extended, is to see a new and valid testimony to the reality of Christianity. The laugh is on the surface ; behind it there is a new respect for the sincerity of this man, who, to that extent at any rate, is living his religion and not giving the lie to his professed beliefs. Why should not our forces be organized along this line? There are swarms of warm-hearted believers WHY THEY FAIL 197 who are dying because they do not know just what to do. Here is something they can all do, or mostly all. They can't all be teachers and officers, and they get weary of the ordinary routine. Not that that routine is worthless ; far from it. It is exceedingly valuable, but it is incomplete and there- fore insufficient. The motor discharges are not ade- quate in number, variety or direction, and it is pre- cisely something like this which is required to give balance and new life to our Leagues, Endeavors and young peoples' societies generally. There is another strong reason why we should have an adult membership thus putting to the high- est use economically some of their spare time. It is not only because of the potential millions involved but because of the incalculable reflex of their un- conscious influence, particularly in the lives of the children. The faculty of imitation is one of the most persistent and powerful of all the forces that mold human society, and it fairly fills the sky in a child's life. Social customs, manners, dress, etc., show us how we bow our own necks to the yoke. If you don't believe that just heave a capacious yawn and see how many of the company will be able, without conscious eflfort, to keep from follow- ing you. The fact is that the acts of other people furnish most powerful stimuli to action on our part. If we find half a dozen people gazing in at a store window we must stop and have a look too. Ex- ample is ever so much better than precept, and therefore if the father and mother really love their children (big brothers and sisters also) they will go into the I. G. G. C. if for no other reason than that their influence may tell in the right direction on the dear ones coming after. That this is no theory but a cold fact, Prof. Miin- 198 WHY THEY FAIL sterberg shows us in his laboratory. The extract is from his "Psychology and Crime," p. 248. "We said that crime involves an impulse to action which is normally to be checked. The checking will be the more difficult the stronger the impulse. The psychologist therefore asks: What influences have the power to reinforce the impulse? Has, for instance, imitation such an influence? Mere specu- lation cannot answer such a question, and even so- called practical experience may lead to very mis- taken conclusions But the laboratory experiment can tell the story in distinct figures. I ask my sub- jects, for instance, to make rhythmical finger move- ments by which a weight is lifted, and the apparatus in which the arm rests records exactly the amount of every contraction. After a while the energy seems exhausted; my idea has no longer the power to lift the weight more than a few millimetres ; the re- corded curve sinks nearly to zero. I try with en- couraging words or harsh command ; the motor en- ergies of these word stimuli are not effective ; the curve shows a slight upward movement but again it sinks rapidly. And then I make the same rhythmi- cal movement myself before the eyes of my subject; he sees it and at once the curve ascends with unex- pected strength. The movements have now simply to imitate the watched ones, and this consciousness of imitation has reinforced the energy of the impulse beyond any point which his own will could have reached. It is as if the imitation of the suggestive sight suddenly brings to work all the stored-up powers. The psychologist can vary the experiment in a hundred forms ; always the same result, that the impressive demonstration of an action gives to the impulse of the imitating mind the maximum of force — it must then be the one condition under which it is the most difficult to inhibit the impulse." WHY THEY FAIL 199 Physiologists tell us that growth is not a uniform process. There will be a period of rapid extension followed by a period in which there is little or nothing doing in that line. The physical energies seem to be given up to assimilation and consolida- tion of what has been acquired. So also in mental work, such for example as the acquisition of a new tongue. Psychologists comment on the ease with which the first few lessons are absorbed and then the period of more limited progress followed by another spurt. This caprice of nature leads Prof. James to say in his own striking way that we "learn to swim in Winter and to skate in Summer." Hence in our Industrial Guild work we do not crowd our juniors all the time. The Winter's rest gives them a new zest for work in the Spring and so they are happy all the time. It is of the utmost importance at all times not to push the boy beyond a natural gait. As in walking so in other things we have a natural pace — a limit within which we can do comfortably, and any labor imposed beyond that is labor indeed, and apt to react unfavorably on us, especially if long continued. A word as to the history and the management of the Industrial Guild may fittingly conclude this chapter. It represents so far as the writer is con- cerned an educational experiment in applied Chris- tianity which has had three phases. The first was that in connection with the local church. At Mount View, N. B., a rural district subsidiary to the church of which the writer was at the time pastor, the institution was born in the Spring of 1903. It had thirty members and a constitution of its own with the usual frills — but few meetings. The meetings were left to the others. It met four times, three times at the close of other meetings. We consid- ered it our business not to talk but to work. Th§ 200 WHY THEY FAIL returns in the Fall showed $36.64. Not a large sum it is true, but so astonishingly large in com- parison with what had been done there for missions, . that it was written up and given to the Methodist, Baptist and Presbyterian denominational papers of the maritime provinces, as well as to several repre- sentative journals across the line, of which one, the "Church Economist," of New York, later amalgamated with the "Record of Christian Work," published it with favorable comment. $36.64 may not impress the world very much in itself, but it seemed signifi- cant as an index of possibilities when we learned that, so far as church records gave light on the subject, the community produced less than four dollars for missions the previous year. Moreover, the money was obtained so easily they didn't know how it was done. They did not feel any poorer — at any rate not till they began to think it over. Which thing is symptomatic, as the medical gentlemen say, and in itself the strongest argument which could be adduced for the existence of the I. G. G. C. It was precisely that condition which gave rise to the idea — only as a remedial measure affecting the Church of to-morrow — a prophylactic affecting the boy of to-day. The second experiment was worked out on a larger scale in the Canadian Northwest in 1905. This time an attempt was made at organization on a larger scale. Unless the Spring months, which meant a year, were to be lost, action had to be taken somewhat irregularly. The general delib- erative assembly of the denomination did not meet until mid-Summer. The executive did not feel free to initiate the movement, considering it ultra vires to do so, but they were willing to give their un- official blessing, the more especially as the repre- sentatives of their churches in the Province of Al- WHY THEY FAIL 201 berta, assembled in annual convocation had unani- mously passed, on motion of Rev. C. W. Corey, and after two hours' discussion, the following resolu- tion: "We have heard with great pleasure the presenta- tion of the work of the Industrial Guild of the Great Commission by our brother. A, T. Robinson, and, believing the principle of the Guild to be sound and practical, we would commend it and Brother Robin- son's presentation of it to our churches as a means fraught with great possibilities both in character development and in funds for the extension of the Kingdom. We believe the work of the Guild to be such that we would call the attention of the Execu- tive Board of the Northwest Convention to the same, asking that they might give consideration to it with a view to having organization along this line effected at an early date." This the Executive Board did not feel free to do, avowing that it was an executive, not a legislative, body. It became necessary therefore, if a year's time was to be saved, that action should be taken somewhat irregularly, trusting to the event to justify the move. It seemed to be one of those un- usual occasions which are bound to arise, when unusual measures have to be adopted if the thing is not to be sacrificed to the form, the substance to the shadow, the end to the means. Believing that all church machinery is only a means to an end, useful only in so far as it promotes that end, which end is the extension of the Kingdom of God, the ultra zires plea of the Executive Board did not seem very weighty, in view of the fact that the members were willing, without a dissentient voice, to say that "unofficially and as men" they could see no objection to the thing itself. With an editorial statement to that effect in the 203 WHY THEY FAIL denominational organ, added to the above resolu- tion and a sheaf of favorable opinions from men of standing, a brief campaign of organization was in- augurated. The new education was discussed with the sovereign people and approved by them and the pastors generally. In a few weeks forty-tWo organi- zations had been effected numbering somewhere between eight hundred and one thousand members. At the annual convention, following a presentation of the Guild, it was moved by Rev. W. J. McCor- mick, seconded by Mr. W. S. Grover and carried as follows : "Resolved, that we adopt the Industrial Guild of the Great Commission and that it be re- ferred to the Executive Board to work out the de- tails." At a convention of Guild delegates which met just before this, a constitution revised to meet the en- larged demands of the new day, and to gear the new society properly into the convention machinery, was submitted and passed. It provided for a state commissioner and an advisory council of five, all to be appointed by the Executive Board of the con- vention. The Board appointed these officers, but would assume no financial responsibility in connec- tion with the thing, notwithstanding the foregoing warrant. The Guild had its own treasurer, but handed over its funds when collected to the various denomina- tional treasurers for detail distribution, as that is a matter which requires a highly specialized knowledge of conditions, and as the other Boards were the ones charged with the responsibilities of administration. In the Fall the returns coming in showed a gross output of $1,770.35, of which $294.80 did not appear on Guild books, as it had been diverted into other channels in the local churches. That fact in itself is eloquent as to the need of the Industrial Guild WHY, THEY F'AIL 203 training. How much better would we all be if we had had it! Meanwhile a silent opposition developed among certain members of the Executive Board. This was regarded as a hopeful sign, since the Guild could hardly be regarded as in line of the true order of succession of great and useful institutions if it got on without opposition. The China Inland Mission, the Sunday-school, the Young Alen's Christian As- sociation, the great missionary societies, and the very Church itself have all come, not without the pangs of parturition, and why should this expect to do so? The only reason assigned was that the Guild was producing so much for missions on some fields that the contributions through the regular channels were being reduced. Were this the case there certainly would have been need of regulative action, but when pressed for specific instances but two fields were adduced, on one of which it trans- pired that the offerings through the regular channels were larger than ever before, and in the other case, the field put up more than ever before, only instead of giving to missions the money went into a church building which they had undertaken to erect. One member who had given five hundred dollars the year before to missions felt that he should this year give it to the building fund, and of course other smaller givers felt as he did in the matter and acted accordingly, so that any deficiency could hardly be charged in fairness wholly to the new institution. In fact, the newcomer was so useful that they seized on its method as a means of raising money for the furnishing of the church the next year. On the other hand, elsewhere the reflex was found most helpful from the standpoint of missionary of- ferings. One pastor wrote that the effect was to treble the offerings through the regular channels, 204 WHY THEY FAIL as actually doing the little made them sensible of what they had not been doing and ought to do. At the convention in Winnipeg the following year the state commissioner in his report outlined two policies, a smaller or Mission Band policy, by which some settled pastor in the field should devote what time he could spare to the enterprise, and the other, a larger or business man's policy, according to which the state commissioner should devote all his time to the work, developing especially the Isolate Corps, a company of scattered units sprinkled over a thousand miles of territory, and related directly to his office as his own especial charge, till it should be strong enough to bear all the expenses of the organization, helpfully exercising them, linking them to the denominational life and work, and leav- ing all the local societies made to go to missions. In case this policy were adopted he was authorized to state that a group of prominent business men would be prepared to take care of the state com- missioner's salary, or, in any event, of that part of it which remained after taking out of the Guild pro- ceeds for the purpose that proportion which corres- ponded to the amount of the receipts of the other organizations going to pay other official salaries. They would have cared for it all if necessary, but it was deemed better from a business and educational standpoint to have the Guild bear at least a part of the burden. The discussion which followed the report was both lively and favorable. One of the keenest and most prominent members of the convention, a gen- tleman of international standing in the educational world, forgetting in the interest of the moment the rules of orthodox procedure, jumped up and turning to the house said, "The question is this: 'Is this thing worth while?' All in favor say, 'Yes,' con- WHY THEY FAIL 205 trary, 'No.' " There were only five adverse votes. But great is politics. In the closing moments of the hour, when no time was left for discussion, a member of the convention executive rose up and read the following resolution, which was typewrit- ten: "Whereas the convention which met in Brandon one year ago endorsed the idea of the Industrial Guild of the Great Commission and referred the matter to the consideration of this board. And, whereas during the year a number of such Guilds have been in successful operation within the con- vention field: Therefore, resolved (1) that this con- vention commend the idea of the Guild to the favor- able consideration of the churches of this conven- tion field. (2) That the convention instruct its Exec- utive Board to appoint a secretary of Guilds whose duty it shall be to supervise the operations of such Guilds as are already organized, or shall be organ- ized, in connection with the churches of this con- vention, such appointee to be (a) a pastor settled within the bounds of the convention (b) allowed a period not exceeding two months each year for or- ganization work, if necessary in the judgment of the Executive Board: (c) Remunerated from the general treasury at a rate not to exceed two hundred dollars per annum and traveling expenses. (3) That this convention further instruct its Executive Board to name an executive council of five members to co-operate with the secretary of Guilds. (4) That this convention request that all moneys devoted to mission objects by the Guilds be sent to the regular treasurer of this convention to be credited by him to the Guilds remitting." This sudden, arbitrary and unannounced inter- ference with an autonomous, working organization, and the refusal to allow it to work out its destiny, 206 WHY THEY FAIL even when means were provided from outside sources, meant inharmonious relations. The rest is soon told. The state commissioner retired from the field to work out the experiment once more under conditions which would afford less chance of interruption. No successor was appointed, as might have been expected, and as might be ex- pected, the people soon quit work and that was the last of it. Nothing goes of itself except evil. No church, no Sunday-school, no lodge runs itself, and while it was claimed for the Guild that it ran with less expenditure of energy than anything else we have, because the burden lay on all shoulders instead of on the few, it never claimed to be wholly self- acting. The third experiment was worked out on an inde- pendent and inter-denominational basis from Sum- merland, B. C, in 1910. In this the local organiza- tion in connection with the local church was dropped and the Isolate Corps feature became the institution. Every firm was related directly to the central office. Parents or other interested adults co-operated in oversight of juvenile members. A line of communication with them was opened up by means of a monthly message and a quarterly publi- cation named "The Missionary Arena," which was devoted to the work. Mr. Robert Pollock, of Sum- merland, a splendid young Scotchman of long com- mercial training, acted as treasurer. The manager of the Bank of Montreal nominated Mr. I. B. Fulton, an experienced accountant, as auditor, and thus the new machinery was made ready for business. Through the courtesy and candor of Rev. C. A. Meyers, pastor of the McDougall Avenue Presby- terian Church in Edmonton, a gentleman of tireless energy, intense devotion and marked executive abil- ity, the way was opened to lay the new education WHY THEY FAIL 207 before the Edmonton-Strathcona Ministerial Asso- ciation. It received kind treatment at their hands, and after a general discussion the following reso- lution was passed unanimously, "Resolved, that we, the Ministerial Association of Edmonton and Strathcona, having listened to Mr. Robinson's splendid address explaining the methods and working of the I. G. G. C., show our hearty appreciation and endorsation of this scheme by commending it to the sympathy and co-operation of pastors, parents and all Christian workers." This kindness did much to open the doors for a presentation of the work in other towns. Union meetings were held, usually in the largest churches obtainable. Once again there was the same result. The people heard gladly the exposition of the prin- ciples involved in this discussion, and assented cor- dially. Throughout that tour no voice, so far as the writer is aware, was raised in depreciation of the enterprise. Indeed, from the beginning no valid objection has ever been raised against the Guild. Its principles commend themselves at once to the common-sense of mankind, and in practice there is found after all, a desire in many hearts to do a little more for Christ and humanity, to say nothing of the family, when only \hcy know what to do and have good company on the way. The very brightest people we met saw great possibilities in this ethical application of the reflex in education. One member of Parliament said, "That address of yours on 'Practicality' last night was worth two hundred dollars to the people of this town, and it will bear fruit after you are gone." Another busi- ness man said, "I would give five dollars to have those principles pounded out in book-form." Here's his opportunity. Both went into the Guild with 208 WHY THEY FAIL their boys, as also scores of other business and pro- fessional men. This third experiment was marked by another change. In order that there might be no ground for objection the goal of endeavor was limited to one cent for each working-day of the year, and, as the enrollment card indicates, it was made very clear that our work represented an extra effort, and must not be in any way made an excuse for shirk- ing obligations in other directions. This policy also gives definiteress and uniformity of aim. Mem- bers can do ther work in a short time and be done with it where that is an object to them. Education- ally, however, as has been said, it would be a great mistake to choose a form of action for the juveniles which would be too swiftly remunerative. The oftener within reason they do a turn for what one little fair-haired, five-year-old called "the desperate women and children," the better. Unfortunately this experiment was unexpectedly interrupted by domestic requirements. A physician's imperative orders to remove at once to Santa ]\Ionica, Cal., in order to preserve the health of a member of the writer's household, naturally disturbed the confidence in the future of the Guild institution and afforded plausible reasons why the money made should be diverted into the known and regularly ordained church channels, as illustrated previously in the case of the second experiment. The western business men believed 18.91 per cent of the people to be unblenchingly upright and 23.01 per cent of the English-speaking male population to be manly men. In this case twenty-one per cent of the firms stood up to their pledges and played the game to a finish while seventy-nine per cent of them failed to report to the treasurer's office. Our returns show 52.3 cents per capita for the WHY THEY FAIL 209 714 members h'lg and little, as compared with the following denominational returns for foreign mis- sions furnished by Mr. I. W. Baker, of the Laymen's Missionary Movement, as quoted in the "Missionary Review of the World" for July, 1911: Baptist, 61c.; Methodist Episcopal (South) 46c.; Disciples of Christ, 40c. ;United Evangelical, 38c. ; Lutheran General Synod, 36c. ; Reformed Church in United States, 36c.; United Brethren, 35c.; Luth- eran (General Council) 12c. That basis of comparison seems hopeful when we reflect that the institution was crippled and only half-worked. The 102 firms reporting (the firm is the unit of production) averaged $3.65 per firm, and put up $373.08 in all. Only fifteen of the firms reporting fell below the cent a day standard. Were the churches to take the matter up seriously and bring a general, organized pressure to bear on the sub- ject, the growth and results would be amazing. Something further should be done by way of knit- ting the L G. G. C. to the Sunday-school. That is where it properly belongs. Not that it should be at once absorbed by the Sunday-school. The genius and work of the Sunday-school are quite different ; but it should, while maintaining a separate and in- dividualistic existence, as in this last experiment, in order to save confusion and keep clear the sense of individual responsibility in the homes, be yet so linked to the Sunday-school that the teachers may tighten up things by keeping a contributory eye on the work their boys and girls are doing. It is really a part of their work to do this as it is part of the work of a day-school teacher to find and super- vise the means of motor discharge in the intellectual development of her pupils. Because it is so vitally related to the work of the 210 WHY THEY FAIL Sunday-school, being in fact the complementary re- quirement of the work they are doing, it would seem the ultimate destiny of the I. G. G. C. to come under the aegis of its shield. At the present time, however, because of the wider appeal, because of the necessity of getting parents interested, and be- cause of the homely, tangible and practical nature pf the work in the field as contrasted with the ideal, idyllic and indoor nature of the work of the Sunday- school as we have it, it would seem advisable to let the amalgamation come about gradually by a process of evolution. This field of action, except in its ethical bearings, is strange to the genius of the Sunday-school as it has always been conducted. It would take some time to accommodate itself to a thing so_ foreign to its wonted usages. But should it see this wild creature of the fields running beside it and doing no harm, it would little by little get accustomed to the sight, examine it more closely and say, "That is the very colt I have been looking for to help me pull this load." Although manual training is, as Prof. James says, "The most colossal advance in education in recent years," and the teach- ing profession is a very wide-awake and progressive body, it is probable that a good many more techni- cal and manual training schools will have to be built before that twin sister of ours realizes that manual training will give us "an entirely different type of citizen," and succeeds in taking over and installing everywhere the manual work. Under any possible scheme of existence which might be devised for it, it is evident the I. G. G. C. could not live without the other organizations. It is utterly dependent on them. They keep steam in its boilers. Every sermon, Sunday-school lesson or insipring Endeavor address is an inspiration to go out and do more for the Master and His needy WHY THEY FAIL 211 world. The Guild has no devotional or hortatory ambitions. It is the homely duckling of the family, and like most of that kind it seeks to be useful. It is the foe of none, the handmaiden of all — its highest glory to give practical expression to those lofty and ennobling sentiments which the others know so much better how to declare. Surely some- where in the great household of Faith there must be a small corner for it. 212 WHY. THEY FAIL Foreword to Chapter VI "We think our Sabbath services, our prayers, our Bible-reading are our reHgion. It is not so. We do these things to help us to be religious in other things. These are the mere meals and a workman gets no wages for his meals. It is for the work he does." — Prof. Henry Drummond. CHAPTER VI CONCLUSION It is quite possible that objection will be taken to this book on at least two grounds, the first that it ignores, or at least in effect minimizes, the need of what is known as conversion and is practically a plea for salvation by culture. In view of what has been said in the early part of the book no thoughtful reader will reach such a conclusion, but for the beuefit of those who have read hastily or perhaps skipped altogether the few lines devoted to that point, it may be as well to reaffirm that this discussion is not directly concerned with evan- gelism as such. As a matter of fact no one be- lieves more firmly in the necessity of the new birth — regeneration by the Spirit of God, as the great fundamental in the doctrines of Christianity than does the writer. Cut that out and all we have left is but a painted picture, beautiful, but lifeless and powerless so far as weary, sin-sick, sin bur- dened humanity is concerned. The essence of Chris- WHY THEY F'AIL 213 tianity is a Life not a creed; it is Christ not culture — • "Christ in you the hope of glory." If culture could have saved the world it would have been saved long before Christ came ; but the beautiful moral pre- cepts of Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, Buddha, Con- fucius and others w^ere but straws when it came to stemming the turgid, roaring passions of the human heart. Let us not forget that those so-called re- ligions of our own day which claim so much and appear so fair and so effective, are so simply be- cause they stand in the reflected glory of that divine institution against which the gates of the grave, which swallows everything else, shall not prevail. They are running on the momentum of a tide, the origin of which they deride, and were the)'' placed beyond the pale of its influence their salvation-by- culture doctrine would soon appear at its true worth ; it would soon show itself the broken reed it is. When they have tried it successfully on the fierce cannibal of the South Sea Islands, the de- graded Hottentot of South Africa and the stranded wrecks of humanity on the Bowery — when they have tried it on them and produced the changes which the simple gospel of the love of God in Jesus Christ has produced, and is daily producing, we shall be more disposed to give credence to their claims. Till then we may well be excused if we say the gospel of the great atoning Cross is good enough for us. It proves its divine origin by its works. It is the greatest thing in the world. At the same time evangelism is not all ; the teaching, the building up is hardly less important, since otherwise the converts must remain babes and each new genera- tion be of cripples. "Train up a child in the way he should go," says the Guide Book, "and when he is old he will not depart therefrom" — and "going" means action, does it not? It is because we have 214 WHY THEY F/ilL been reading that, "Train up the child in the way he should think" that our troubles have come upon us as they have. The second objection will be raised in the minds of the more thoughtful. It is this : "Is not this new doctrine too materialistic?" In reply to that it may be said that in the first place the prior question is, "Are these things so?" We are dealing with alleged facts. "Facts are the fingers of God." God is not at war with Himself, and if these things be so it is our business not to try to fit the facts to our theories but to fit our theories to the facts. Chris- tianity is never afraid of the facts, for so far, the facts have not yet discredited Christianity. Men have erred in interpreting the facts of nature on the one hand quite as fully as they have erred in inter- preting the Word of God on the other, and from these two astigmatisms of science and theology all the mischief has come. If the principles on which this discussion is based are false, then certainly this book has no value and it should receive short shrift; but if on the other they be true, then we should recognize them and order our conduct in harmony, leaving the results to God. Theories are being ex- ploded every day, but "Facts are chiels wha winna ding An' daur na be disputit." We need not be alarmed about the foundations so long as there is so much disagreement among our adversaries. The tendencies of science are now more and more toward the spiritual as the ultimate explanation of all that is. They have swung from the "fortuitous concourse of atoms" theory to the supreme and ever-acting Will as the more probable hypothesis in accounting for this universe. Pure WHY THEY FAIL 215 evolution has given place largely to the "mixed" school and God is given a chance to put in a word in His own way. "Nothing in evolution can ac- count for the soul of man," says Alfred Russel Wallace, a president of the British Association of Science, perhaps the highest scientific body in the world, "the difference between man and the other animals is unabridgeable." Psychologists are also far from agreeing that all there is of us is finely organized matter. Many of the most distinguished of them recognize the diffi- culties attending such a hypothesis, and are there- fore content to say that there is a psycho-physical parallelism. A thought is something which is heavens-wide apart from any conceivable molecular changes in the gray matter of the skull ; but the brain may be, and without doubt is, the organ on which that invisible entity, the soul of man, makes its music in this sphere of existence in which we now are. And just as the finest musician in the world cannot play the masterpieces of Beethoven, Wagner and Mozart on an organ which has only three octaves, or has not the required stops, so the immortal soul is conditioned by the instrument on which it plays. Who can say that education is not wholly a brain process? The world would never have known a Paderewsky or a Paganini if all the instrument they possessed was a jewsharp. The brains of idiots are always deficient. If the soul of a Bonaparte or a Caesar were encased in the skull of an idiot what could he do? He would be to us an idiot, producing the jewsharp music because all he had to play on was a jewsharp. We talk of ed- ucating the soul of the boy, but whether we can ed- ucate his soul at all or not, who can tell us? What we do know is that unless we efifect certain changes in his brain there will be nothing of what we call ed- 216 WHY THEY FAIL ucation in his life. If the neurones in his brain never myeHnate he remains an infant in understand- ing. All the education in the world is as though it were not unless it makes brain tracks. It is educa- tion only as it does make brain tracks, and the more adaptive, or purposive and extended those tracks are, the more potent is the education. The kind of ed- ucation is always determined by the kind of tracks. Auditory stimuli never by any chance produce acro- bats, nor olfactory stimuli musicians. There is no use quarrelling with the facts. At the same time the tracks do not account for everything. A thought, a feeling, a volition, the play of fancy, the Sermon on the Mount, Shakespeare's plays and "Paradise Lost" represent something more than chemical and electrical changes. Mere matter won't account for the inte- grating process, the building up according to certain definite, wise and beneficent ends. The force of the teleological in the human body is inescapable. Nothing we know of matter will sufificiently account for the forming, breaking and modifying of connec- tions in the brain to good ends, as when the burnt child dreads the fire and flees from it. In his Psychology Vol. 1, page 137, Professor James, viewing the gulf between mind and matter, between consciousness or feeling and motion says: "If this is so, then, common sense, though the intimate nature of causality and of the connection of things in the universe lies beyond her pitifully bounded horizon, has the root and gist of the truth in her hands when she obstinately holds to it that feelings and ideas are causes. However inadequate our ideas of causal efficacy may be, we are less wide of the mark when we say that our ideas and feelings have it, than the Automatists are when they say they haven't it. As in the night all cats are gray, so in the darkness of metaphysical criticism all WHY THEY FAIL 217 causes are obscure. But one has no right to pull the pall over the psychic half of the subject only as the Automatists do, and to say that that causation is unintelligible whilst in the same breath one dogma- tizes about material causation as if Hume, Kant and Lotze had never been born. One cannot thus blow hot and cold. One must be impartially naif or impartially critical. li the latter the reconstruc- tion must be thoroughgoing or 'metaphysical' and will probably preserve the common-sense view that ideas are forces, in some translated form. But psy- chology is a mere natural science, accepting certain terms uncritically as her data and stopping short of metaphysical reconstruction. Like physics she must be naicz'C ; and if she finds that in her very peculiar field of study ideas seem to be causes, she had better continue to talk of them as such. She gains absolutely nothing by a breach with common sense in this matter, and she loses to say the least, all naturalness of speech. If feelings are causes, of course their effects must be furtherances and check- ings of internal cerebral motions, of which in them- selves we are entirely without knowledge. It is probable that for years to come we shall have to infer what happens in the brain either from our feelings or from motor effects which we observe. The organ wmII be for us a sort of vat in which feel- ings and motions somehow go on stewing together, and in which innumerable things happen of which we catch but the statistical results. Why, under these circumstances we should be asked to for- swear the language of our childhood I cannot well imagine, especially as it is perfectly compatible with the language of physiology. The feelings can pro- duce nothing new, they can only reinforce and in- hibit reflex currents which already exist, and the original organization of these by physiological 218 WHY THEY FAIL forces must always be the groundwork of the psy- chological scheme. "My conclusion is that to urge the Automaton" theory upon us, as it is now urged, on purely a priori and gwa^i-metaphysical grounds is an un- warrantable impertinence in the present state of psy- chology." This, Professor James goes on to substantiate by pointing out that consciousness, whether in the low- est sphere of sense or the highest sphere of intellec- tion, is always a selecting agency. Consciousness is a result, say the materialists ; where the nervous organism is low it is low and vice versa. But Pflii- ger, Lewes and James say. Yes, but consciousness works downward. Determinateness goes with pre- cision of action ; instability with indeterminateness. If it were all determinate there would be no choice; the instability of cerebral action (illustrated by the adaptation of conduct to the minutest change of environment, or action determined not by the stimu- lus of the nearer good) permits choice. And that choice is aht/ays in favor of the subject's interests. Consciousness inhibits what is not in the line of its own interests or the interests it creates. "Survival can enter into a purely physiological discussion only as an hypothesis made by an onlooker about the future." 1. The phenomena of vicarious function. "A brain with part of it scooped out is virtually a new machine and during the first days after the operation functions in a thoroughly abnormal manner. As a matter of fact, however, its performances become from day to day more normal, until at last a prac- ticed eye may be needed to suspect anything wrong." 2. Consciousness is most vivid where nerve proc- esses are hesitant, e.g., before a leap; "in rapid, WHY THEY FAIL 219 automatic action consciousness sinks to a minimum. Nothing could be more fitting than this, if con- sciousness have the teleological function we sup- pose; nothing more meaningless if not." Why? 3. "Pleasures are generally associated with benefi- cent, pains with detrimental processes." Why not the other way about? Why should burning not give "thrills?" De Sarlo, a leading representative of the school of Wundt, father of our experimental psychology, says there can be no science of psychology at all "unless a real subject exists," and calls attention to the fact that if psychology postulates mind, every other sci- ence has progressed in a similar way, as when for instance, life is postuated in biology, the atom in chemistry and motion in mechanics. Thus it will be seen that there is no need of alarm on our part while the apple of discord still rolls along in the ranks of the Philistines. Christian Science may tell us that consciousness is a lie and there is no such thing as matter and an objective world; materialism may tell us that consciousness lies suavely when it tells us that we are free ; but here are other voices equally prominent crying out to us to hold fast to our "common-sense" which tells us both are wrong, for universal consciousness tells no lie, and that there is both matter and mind, choice and responsibility, an indestructible entity perduring through all change, as well as the "bundle of sensations" which David Hume believed to be all there is of us. Some sensitive readers will be asking how this re- flex action teaching squares with the Word of God. The reply is, admirably. The Bible is full of it. The IMaster taught it when He said in His Great Com- mission, which is the charter of every New Testa- ment church, "Go ye . . . and lo, I am with 220 WHY THEY FAIL you" — i. e., when you go. He did not say anything about motor discharges, it is true, because his hear- ers knew as little about that as they did about the differential calculus, and if he had His words would have been without interest and soon forgotten. The Bible is full of good psychology, but it is expressed in terms of the concrete that it might be of use among all peoples. The end is everything, the means unimportant as long as they are not vicious. Indeed, it may be questioned whether vicious means can attain an ultimately good end. So the incite- ments are over and over again to right courses of conduct. The Sermon on the Mount is a disserta- tion on how to behave as a Christian. The Pauline writings are full of hortatory applications which go far toward giving color to the doctrine of pragma- tism, that Christianity like everything else must have its value determined by its works. The New Testament is full of precepts that mean so many motor discharges in the brain when heeded. These precepts are very beautiful, but as a general thing they do not grip the life. Christian people do not pretend to follow them as they follow their other guidebooks when going on a journey. The ethical action and association neurones, you see, have never been developed, so that all they can do is to make a stagger at it, beginning late to develop brain tracks and finding the process one which is both long and difficult. This is under ordinary conditions. There are ex- traordinary circumstances when, under a special ef- fusion of the divine Spirit, miracles of grace are performed. The emotional excitement is so great as to produce such overflows of nervous energy as in- hibit freely the old impulses and vastly hasten the development of new brain tracks. This is the re- vival condition previously referred to. It would be WHY THEY FAIL 221 very nice to be able to live under such conditions all the time. Maybe we should ; but the history of the church thus far does not show that it has been done by any considerable body of men and women over long periods of time, especially where a ground- work has not been laid for it by a careful training in childhood. It is a proverb with us that good men come from good homes, and if you investigated the training in those homes you would probably find that no small part of it had to do with the actions of the boy. He was taught to rise up when his elders entered the room, to lift his cap to the ladies, to be kind to the dog and the cat, and to help his little sister put on her coat without at the same time pulling her hair. And when we say that he was taught to do so we mean to say that somebody stood over him and saw that he did these things. It was the doing rather than the telling that made the man, and a man who has had such a training as that in his tender years, though he sink to the abyss of the social world, will never quite get away from it. There will always be something more of the gentleman about him than there is about the sot beside him who never knew such influences. And when perchance the Spirit of God creates within him a new life, that life will find the old channels all Igouged out and needing but a little renovation, which is a vastly different thing from having to make them de novo. He will be ready for a career of usefulness, and a larger career of usefulness at that, far earlier than his friend, the sot beside him, who was converted at the same time. Prodigies of physical strength and endurance have been performed by men and women under the stress of a burning house or some other imminent peril ; so in things spiritual ; but in both cases the phe- nomena are abnormal, and it is our business to pro- 222 WHY THEY FAIL vide for the normal. If we do that the abnormal will take care of itself when it comes, and do so to far better advantage than it could otherwise have done. We may not shirk our plain duty to the young by trying to foist it all on the revival, God will be able to work all the better for our having done our part. It is of the utmost importance that the Church make some adequate provision for correlative motor discharges because in doing so she will find a mighty reflex that will lift her into new, varied and vigorous manifestations of life. When the Wes- leys and Whitfield broke the spell of the formalism of the established church in the latter half of the eighteenth century and issued their call to the masses, it was a call to action — to go out into the highways and byways with the good tidings, and to give expression in songs, and pious ejaculations to their religious feelings. A vast wave of religious emotion swept over England and on its refluent cur- rent came a new life that manifested itself in various ways. The great missionary societies in England and America were born. Howard and Elizabeth Fry were moved to examine the festering sores of the prison pens of England and Europe. Wilber- force was stirred up to plead "trumpet tongued" for the abolition of the slave, and the masses were stirred up to demand the liberties accorded in the Reform Bill of 1832. In our own day we have seen something anal- ogous. When the Christian Endeavor Society was born it swept over the land and around the world like a prairie fire, in one form or another. Why? Because it formed the channel of expression for those good impressions stored up in young lives and so long pressing for a natural channel of ex- pression. June is June and January is January, and WHY THEY FAIL 223 the two do not travel well together. Youth felt naturally under some constraint in the presence of its elders. A deference for age inhibited in the so- cial meetings; but when the cleavage came the young people took on new life and became active in many helpful ways. The movement was opposed at first of course, but it could not be stopped, and now no one wants to stop it. Coming closer yet to our own day we shall find another illustration of the hunger of young life for motor expression in that blessed institution known as the Boy Scouts. Under Mr. Ernest Thompson-Seton in America and General Sir Baden-Powell in England, the move- ment has broken all records, enrolling half a million in a year or two. This is not because the order calls for an out-of-door life, has a military twist and the romance of a camp-fire attaching to it, but because it finds a natural channel of expression for the swelling energies of youth. The camp-fire means action to us all, and much more does it mean de- lightful action to the boys. So far as their leaders are concerned it means the putting into operation of the principles underlying the Industr'al Guild of the Great Commission in another field and for some- what different though valuable ends. They pro- pose to develop manliness, hardiness, observation, physique, practicality and other desirable qualities by the actual doing of those deeds which alone will produce them. It is another training in the school of things as they are. Books are at a dis- count. It is the deed that counts every time — the topographical maps and observations made in ac- tual scouting in strange territory ; the endurance in the swimming contest ; the actual joints "wiped" in plumbing; and machines made in mechanics, that determine the awards of merit and the standing in the juvenile army. 224: WHY THEY FAIL No wonder the organization has grown. It will do immeasurable good in its own way, as the George Jr. RepubHc is doing for another class, in another way that is at bottom similar. Books are good, important, necessary, but the world is tired of the futility of books and precepts alone. They create an unreal world and educate away from the hard world of actual experience when they do not have with them the corrective of a training with things that can be measured and handled. The boy's conception may be that twelve inches are so long — , but when in the manual training school he is required to make a foot rule he finds that eleven and three-quarter inches will not, by any kind of juggling, make a foot. "The development of the manual act carries with it a noble promise," says Professor Holmes of Swarthmore College, "yet with a sinking heart I see my little folk gradually turning as they have been turning in the few years of their school lives, from things to books. My friends, there is peril in the printed page. Who shall know this if not we, who are students and teachers, who have to fight daily to keep our souls alive in the world of things from which the world of books invites us." There is in genetic psychology what is known as the law of transitoriness of instincts ; that is, that the active powers, like the flowers of the field, do not ripen all at once but in a certain orderly suc- cession. About the first of these we see is the sucking instinct. Everything the infant gets goes into his mouth ; if the assay be favorable it is ap- propriated, if not it is eliminated. A little later he is seized with a desire to creep ; later still he is seized with an overmastering impulse to stand up and to walk, and the leg of the table, a chair, a sofa, anything which is taller than himself will do, and WHY THEY FAIL 235 is forthwith commandeered for the attempt. When he has mastered that art and explored all the little world about the house, a process which may take him a year or two, the social impulse becomes dom- inant; he sighs for other worlds to conquer and it requires two policemen and a nurse-girl to keep him within bounds. Imagination becomes rampant and he sees the thousand cats under the barn, which on strict analysis turn out to be "something that looked like a cat, anyway." Then memory takes the center of the stage and nobody knows how, when or where he ever learns his lessons. They seem to come to him in his sleep. And slowly on the heels of memory judgment enters, halting but sure and stately, the last and greatest of his powers, save :will, to mature. Somewhere along the shining pathway of those early morning years he will enter the gloomy for- est aisles of romance. He will be hungry for the strange, the grotesque, the unknown. Since go seek- ing it he must, he will go armed to the teeth with bow and arrow, cutlass and pistol, or Winchester and the automatic that rains bullets, a thousand a minute. That is the time to catch him and load him up with information about the strange man- ners, dress and customs of the queer peoples our missionaries know of. He thinks of going among, them as a bandit or a pirate, but that is only be- cause he thinks (as we are all for ourselves apt to think), that every man's hand is against him, till proof to the contrary is forthcoming, and he had therefore better be prepared for the worst. To give him the true account is to disarm his fears and it may be to enlist his sympathy, especially if it be his active co-operation that is called for. For, after all, what he pines for is knowledge and action; not action without knowledge, nor yet knowledge with- 226 WHZ THEY FAIL out action, but both together, and if we can only furnish him with the two in the proper doses, at- tractively put up, he will swallow them cheerfully and the rest will take care of itself. This law of the transitoriness of instincts tells us that it is at the time that these instincts are flowering that we should be most active in our teaching capacity if we would attain the best re- sults. Just as a boy will drink greedily when he is very thirsty and absorb much more fluid than he will at any other time, so mentally he will absorb most freely and most effectively a particular kind of training, if we give it to him at the psychological moment when the instinct is efflorescing. And if the information the boy receives about the blacks in Borneo be directly related to some prac- tical activity on his part which has to do with them in a real way, the reflex of the act will be to keep him in living touch with the reality of that very real world ; and he will have a consciousness of its reality which he could not otherwise have had. He will not then find "the peril in the printed page," of which Professor Holmes speaks, and he will not have "to fight daily to keep his soul alive in the world of things from which the world of books in- vites us," for he has kept a channel of communica- tion with it open all the time. Finally, what are we going to do about all this? If it be true that we have in our Church work largely failed to turn out a man who is ethically fit as tested in the market place; if the failure be due to an oversight — the failure to provide for the proper expression of ethical emotions and ideas in the young; if it be possible to provide such chan- nels of expression ; if the Industrial Guild of the Great Commission be one such channel, admirably adapted to the requirements of about two-thirds of WHY THEY FAIL 237 the population concerned ; if there be financial pos- sibilities in that institution far beyond its own re- quirements; and if the imperative need of the hour be larger means for the "unprecedented advance" through the open doors set before us in every land, what, we ask again, are we going to do about all this? That question the writer leaves with the Church and society at large. He feels that he has thus far done his little part and discharged his moral obligations to the world as a man in connection with what has seemed, to him at any rate, a matter of the very deepest concern to the life of the Church and the world. This has not been done without sacrifice, but that is neither here nor there. The es- sential thing for every man is to find out what seems the right thing for him to do and then do it. H'e should not be afraid to stand by the arbitrament of his own judgment, once a verdict has been care- fully reached. Having done that the results be- long to God. He has cleared himself before him- self, which, next to the judgment seat of the Most High, is the highest tribunal any man has to face. If what he has to say be true it will find its re- sponse in the heart of humanity sooner or later, and if it be not worth hearing it should fall to the ground and be allowed to die. But whether this or that, so long as business men think they can trust only twenty-five per cent or less of our Sunday-scool graduates with their $10,000 in the dark, and would call only about the same number of men out of the lot, manly men ; and so long as so-called Christian America is ac- cused of spending $60,000,000 on laces, $15,000,000 on ostrich plumes, $25,000,000 on chewing gum, $78,000,000 on candy, $320,000,000 on soda water, and but $11,000,000 on the task for which Christ 228 WHY THEY FAIL died and for which we are supposed to be alive, it would seem that any kind of proposition which looks Hke a possible solution of the difficulty should receive a fair hearing, a careful scrutiny, and, if it bears the examination well, a public discussion and proper adjudication in every court of competent jurisdiction. Certainly this book would ask foi; nothing more. IThe EnC, BROADWAY PUBLISHING GO'S NEWEST BOOKS All Bound in Silk Cloth and Gilt. Many Illustrated Fiction The Eyes at the Window (beautifully bound, with embossed jacket) — Olivia Smith Cornelius. . . J Next- Night Stories — C. J. Messer Arthur St. Clair of Old Fort Recovery— S. A. D. Whipple Barnegat Yams — F. A. Lucas Jean Carroll, with six illustrations — John H. Case As a Soldier Would — Abner Pickering The Nut-Cracker, and Other Human Ape Fables — C. E. Blanchard, M.D Moon-Madness, and Other Fantasies — Aira^e Crocker Gouraud (5th ed.) , Sadie, or Happy at Last — May Shepherd Tweed, a Story of the Old South— S. M. Swales. . The White Rose of the Miami— Mrs. E. W. Ammerman The Centaurians — Biagi The Reconstruction of Elinore Wood — Florenz S. Merrow A Nest of Vipers — Morgan D. Jones 50 25 50 00 50 50 00 00 50 50 50 50 50 50 Religious Works The Disintegrating Church — Frederick William Atkinson i . 00 Evolution of Belief — J. W. Gordon i . 50 Down Hill and Up Hill — Rev. J. G. Anderson. . 2.00 A Certain Samaritan — Rev. John Richelsen i . 00 The Reunion of Christendom — Francis Goodman i . 50 What the Church Is and What It Should Be— Lafayette Swindle i . 50 A Harp of the Heart. (Poems) — Rev. Chas. Coke Woods i .00 The Gospel Parables in Verse — Rev. Christopher Smith 75 Who? Whence? Where? An Essay by Pedro Batista i . 00 Compendium of Scriptural Truths — Marshall Smith 1.25 The Passion Play at Ober Ammergau — Esse Esto Maplestone i . 00 Israel Lo Ammi — Ida M. Nimgasser i .00 The Eternal Evangel — Solomon S. Hilscher f i .50 A New Philosophy of Life — J. C. Coggins ... i .00 Romance of the Universe — B. T. Stauber i .50 In the Early Days — Adelaide Hickox i . 50 The New Theology — By a Methodist Layman — Hamilton White 1 .00 Miscellaneous Anvil Sparks — Radical Rhymes and Caustic Comments, by Wilby Heard 75 The Medical Expert and Other Papers — Louis J. Rosenberg 50 The Little Sufferers (dealing with the Abuses of the Children's Societies) — G. Martin 1 .50 Eureka, a Prose Poem — S. H. Newberry i .00 Rust (a play in four acts) — Algernon Tassin (of Columbia University) 1 . 00 Poems by Charles Guinness 1 . 00 Prohibition and Anti-Prohibition — Rommel, Ziegler & Herz i . 00 Gay,Gods and Merry Mortals — Verse by Robert J. Shores i . 00 The Rubaiyat of the College Student — Ned Nafe .50 The Deluge of England, and Other Poems — James Francis Thierry 1 . 00 The Dragon's Teeth — a Philosophical and Eco- nomic Work — T. M. Sample 1 .00 Achsah, the Sister of Jairus — Mabel Cronise Jones 1 .00 The Marriage Bargain Counter — Daisy Deane . . i . 50 Building a New Empire — Nathaniel M. Ayers. . 1.50 Marriage and Divorce — Jeanette Laurance 1 . 00 The Clothespin Brigade — Clara L. Smiley 75 "Forget It"— Ida Von Claussen i .50 The Last Word: a Philosophical Essay — James and Mary Baldwin 1 .00 Travel Eight Lands in Eight Weeks (illustrated by 90 drawings) — Marcia P. Snyder 1 .25 Eliza and Etheldreda in Mexico — Patty Guthrie (illustrated) 1 .25 The attention of clergymen is directed to our Religious List, one of the largest of any house in America. Write for free copy of our magazine, BOOK CHAT. BROADWAY PUBLISHING CO., 835 BROADWAY, N. Y. Branch Offices: ATLANTA BALTIMORE INDIANAPOLIS NORFOLK WASHINGTON DES MOINES, IOWA Why They Fail The Argument The argument in "W/iy They Fail" runs thus: There exists a widespread moral delinquency. This be- comes evident on the most cursory examination of our social life. It is seen in politics, commerce, sports and the courts, and even in connection with the church itself, which has for the most part developed a type that is "good in a prayer meeting but bad in a horse trade," the man on the street being the judge. This is not because the church has lacked earnestness in her great work but because she and the rest of us have overlooked in our educational work the Ethical application of the second and perhaps more powerful principle of all education, viz., reflex action. The result of this fatal oversight is that we turn out a boy "but half made up." He has a lop-sided brain. He knows well what is right but he falls down when it comes to doing it. Our system of educa- tion has built up moral knowledge cells but the correlative moral action cells, which alone give the power to do the right he knows, have never been developed in his brain. He knows the good but finds it so hard to do it, just as he knows about chop-sticks but finds it so difficult to use them, and for exactly the same reason, viz., that the group of cells which alone gives power to do the act has never, by the reflexes of his own previous similar acts, been built up in his brain. Men fail, chiefly not because our present system of education is wrong, but because it is like a one-legged man, woefully incomplete. We do not dream of ignoring this reflex principle in the de- velopment of the boy's intellect, or in practical life: it is only in the education of the soul of the boy we presume to do without it, and then marvel that in manhood he should so lamentably fail. The majority must continue to be fore- doomed to come short ethically as long as the ethical appli- cation of this reflex principle is ignored. The leading psycholog- ists and neurologists of the world are cited in support of the author's main contention Chapter V gives his contribution to the task of working out the application. This is known as the Industrial Guild of the Great Commission, an institution which is specially adapted to rural conditions, or about 60 per cent of the population. UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY Los Angeles This book is DUE on the last date stamped below. APR 2 8 1950 Form L9-42m-8,'49(B5573)444 THE LIBRARY UNIVHRSITY OF CALTFORNli. LOS ANGELES BJ Robinson - 1251 '^^W they fail. R56w ,nn o b iQCn BJ 1251 ..,ro'^'Dzn\^M^\ I IRRARY FACILITY AA 000 505 632 m ii\it»itim»*ui»\U}iMi'