truth, there are frequent circumstances under which they positively
esteem a man who thus sacrifices his honour, or even their own honour.
The man of _dis_honour may actually take on the character of a public
hero. Thus, in 1903, when the late Major General Roosevelt, then
President, tore up the treaty of 1846, whereby the United States
guaranteed the sovereignty of Columbia in the Isthmus of Panama, the
great masses of the American plain people not only at once condoned this
grave breach of honour, but actually applauded Dr. Roosevelt because his
act furthered the great moral enterprise of digging the canal.

These distinctions, of course, are familiar to all men who devote
themselves to the study of the human psyche; that morals and honour are
not one and the same thing, but two very distinct and even antithetical
things, is surely no news to the judicious. But what is thus merely an
axiom of ethics, politics or psychology is often kept strangely secret
in the United States. We have acquired the habit of evading all the
facts of life save those that are most superficial; by long disuse we
have almost lost the capacity for thinking analytically and accurately.
A thing may be universally known among us, and yet never get itself so
much as mentioned. Around scores of elementary platitudes there hangs a
shuddering silence as complete as that which hedges in the sacred name
of a Polynesian chief. At every election time, in our large cities, most
of the fundamental issues are concealed, particularly when they happen
to take on a theological colour, which is very often. It is, for
example, the timorous public theory, born of this fear of the forthright
fact, that when a man sets up as a candidate for, say, a judgeship, the
question of his private religious faith is of no practical
importance--that it makes no difference whether he is a Catholic or a
Methodist. The truth is, of course, that his faith is often of the very
first importance--that it will colour his conduct of the forensic
combats before him even more than his politics, his capacity to digest
proteids or the social aspirations of his wife. One constantly notes, in
American jurisprudence, the effects of theological prejudices on the
bench; there are at least a dozen controlling decisions, covering
especially the new moral legislation, which might almost be mistaken by
a layman for sermons by the Rev. Dr. Billy Sunday. The Prohibitionists,
during their long and ver