what with this and that, they have almost come to the conclusion that
there is no right and wrong. Man, so they have decided, is a frail and
tender being completely at the mercy of the traits he has inherited from
his ancestors and those he has acquired from his neighbors. What he does
is simply the result of the combination of circumstances that have made
him what he is. There is some truth in it, of course, but what there is
is no bigger than a mustard seed, and all the volumes that have been
written about it, all the sermons that have been preached upon it, and
all the miles of space that have been devoted to it in the newspapers
and magazines have not served to increase it. Most of us never give any
one else credit for our achievements and there is no more reason for
giving them blame for our failures. A gentleman is "lord of his own
actions." He balances his own account, and whether there is a debit or a
credit is a matter squarely up to him.

The pivot upon which all right-thinking conduct involving relations with
other people turns is the Golden Rule, "Whatsoever ye would that men
should do to you, do ye even so to them." It is to the moral what the
sun is to the physical world, and just as we have never made full use of
the heat and light which we derive from the sun but could not live
without that which we do use, so we have never realized more than a
small part of the possibilities of the Golden Rule, but at the same time
could not get along together in the world without the meagre part of it
that we do make use of. The principle is older than the Christian Era,
older than the sequoias of California, older than the Pyramids, older
than Chinese civilization. It is the most precious abstract truth that
man has yet discovered. It contains the germ of all that has been said
and written about human brotherhood and all that has been done toward
making it an accomplished fact. And if to-morrow it were to vanish from
the earth we should miss it almost, if not quite, as much as we should
the sun if it were to go hurtling off into space so far away that we
could neither see nor feel it. In the one case there would be no life
at all on earth, in the other there would be none worth living.

The Golden Rule amounts to no more than putting yourself into another
person's place. It is not always easy to do. Half of the people in the
United States have very little idea of what the lives of the other half
are like and have no