the same nation. The really high civilizations
must themselves supply the antidote to the self-indulgence and love
of ease which they tend to produce.

Every modern civilized nation has many and terrible problems to solve
within its own borders, problems that arise not merely from
juxtaposition of poverty and riches, but especially from the
self-consciousness of both poverty and riches. Each nation must deal
with these matters in its own fashion, and yet the spirit in which the
problem is approached must ever be fundamentally the same. It must be
a spirit of broad humanity; of brotherly kindness; of acceptance of
responsibility, one for each and each for all; and at the same time a
spirit as remote as the poles from every form of weakness and
sentimentality. As in war to pardon the coward is to do cruel wrong to
the brave man whose life his cowardice jeopardizes, so in civil
affairs it is revolting to every principle of justice to give to the
lazy, the vicious, or even the feeble or dull-witted, a reward which
is really the robbery of what braver, wiser, abler men have earned.
The only effective way to help any man is to help him to help himself;
and the worst lesson to teach him is that he can be permanently helped
at the expense of some one else. True liberty shows itself to best
advantage in protecting the rights of others, and especially of
minorities. Privilege should not be tolerated because it is to the
advantage of a minority; nor yet because it is to the advantage of a
majority. No doctrinaire theories of vested rights or freedom of
contract can stand in the way of our cutting out abuses from the body
politic. Just as little can we afford to follow the doctrinaires of an
impossible--and incidentally of a highly undesirable--social
revolution, which in destroying individual rights--including property
rights--and the family, would destroy the two chief agents in the
advance of mankind, and the two chief reasons why either the advance
or the preservation of mankind is worth while. It is an evil and a
dreadful thing to be callous to sorrow and suffering and blind to our
duty to do all things possible for the betterment of social
conditions. But it is an unspeakably foolish thing to strive for this
betterment by means so destructive that they would leave no social
conditions to better. In dealing with all these social problems, with
the intimate relations of the family, with wealth in private use and
business use,