ing that the train
be wrecked and the rich men burned to death in the ruin. The beasts
can feel no pity, no sympathy, no regret, for nature gave them no
conscience. But man differs from all creation because he has a moral
sense, he has a conscience. My conscience has been a very present thing
with me through all my life. I am a praying man. I never take a doubtful
step until I have prayed for guidance.

"You'll never get anywhere, Jim," fellows have said to me, "as long as
your conscience is so darn active. To win in this world you have got to
be slick. What a man earns will keep him poor. It's what he gains that
makes him rich." If this is so, the nation with the lowest morals will
have the most wealth. But the truth is just the opposite. The richest
nations are those that have the highest moral sense.

But this was a great problem for a young uneducated man. To be told by
some of my fellows that dishonesty was the only road to wealth, and to
be shown in communist documents that the capitalists of America were
stealing everything from the workers, put a mighty problem up to me. And
that's what made me pray for guidance. I pray because I want an answer,
and when it comes I recognize in it my own conscience. Praying banishes
all selfish thoughts from mind, and gives the voice of conscience a
chance to be heard. I pray for a higher moral sense, that which lifts
man above beasts, and when my answer comes and I feel morally right,
then all hell can't make me knuckle under. For civilization is built on
man's morals not on brute force (as Germany learned to her sorrow), and
I fight for the moral law as long as there is any fight left in me.

Nature planned that when the cat ate the mother robin, the young robins
in the nest must starve. Nature had other robins that would escape the
enemy. But among men it is wrong for the little ones to suffer when the
hand that feeds them is destroyed. For man has sympathy, which beasts
have not. Sympathy is the iron fiber in man that welds him to his
fellows. Envy is the sulphur that pollutes these bonds and makes them
brittle. Suppose some master puddler of humanity could gather thousands
of men into a melting-pot, a fraternity whose purpose was to boil out
the envy, greed and malice as much as possible, and purify the good
metal of human sympathy. How much greater the social value of these men
would be. Bound together by good fellowship and human sympathy these men
could pool their char