peasants and the rags of our
innumerable poor,--is surprised on reaching the United States, by the
entire absence of the extremes both of opulence and of misery. All
Americans whom we met wore clothes of good material. Their free and
frank and familiar address, equally removed from uncouth discourtesy and
from artificial politeness, betokened men who were proud of their own
rights and respected those of others." But under other conditions its
ethical incentives are often without appeal to the man who lacks
capital, or to the man with so large an assured income that he desires
no more. It can do little for the dregs or the froth of society--those
so oppressed that they cannot rise to its social responsibilities, and
those so lightened that they do not feel them. It looks upon the
so-called backward peoples as markets where it can secure raw materials
needed for its factories--its rubber, ivory, jute,--or engage cheap
labor, and as a profitable dumping-ground for its surplus products. It
has done much for the less developed sections of the race by its
missionaries, educators and physicians; but all their efforts have been
almost offset by the evils of exploiting traders or grasping government
agents, and the exported vices of civilization.

Christianity has a social order of its own--the Kingdom of God. It is
not an economic system, nor a plan of government, but a religious
ideal--society organized under the love of God revealed in Christ. This
ideal it holds up in contrast with the existing social order in any age
as a protest, a program and a promise.

The Kingdom _protests_ against any features in prevailing conditions
that do not disclose Christlike love. It scans the industrial world of
today, and finds three fundamental evils in it: competition as a motive,
arraying man against man, group against group, nation against nation, in
unbrotherly strife; gain-seeking as the stimulus to effort, inducing men
to invest capital, or to labor, primarily for the sake of the returns to
themselves; and selfish ownership as the reward of success, letting men
feel that they can do as they please with their own. Certain callings,
upon which the Christian Spirit has exerted a stronger influence, have
already been raised above the level of the commercial world. It is not
good form professionally for physicians, or ministers, or college
professors to compete with each other and seek to draw away patients,
parishioners or pupils; to ex