en often would not bear such telling to-day.
Shakespeare, with all his wonderful genius, needs expurgating if one
would read him aloud comfortably to a mixed audience. And these are
the shining stars. When we drop below them, the literature of their
time becomes nearly impossible to read. Fielding and Smollett and
Stern helped to build up the English novel, but the stories they tell
speak of the grossness of their time in language that is unmistakable.
We are by no means clean to-day. A fair proportion of our novels leave
much to be desired. The stage is the scene of much we could wish to
see cleaner. Above all this grossness there towers a sweetness and
beauty of thought, and an earnestness of purpose, a sincerity of
effort, which makes the present time fuller of moral purpose, fuller
of the desire to be clean and to help others to be clean, than graced
any previous period in the history of either England or America.

Under the change from country to city life man has suffered. Here too
evolution is necessary. City life tells hard on the second generation
and nearly destroys the third; but we have come to understand the
difficulty and are fast remedying it. It is more than possible that
the next generation will see such changes in the life of the worker in
the great center, as shall effectively stop the physical deterioration
that has come to the city dweller. God grant that modern civilization
has had teaching enough and learned its lesson well enough. God grant
further that we may give over slaughtering our most ambitious and
vigorous young men in battle to settle questions which battle can
never settle. God grant that we have come to a turning of the ways
where the life of men, women and children, no matter how humble their
station, shall stand higher in value than the profits of any
commercial venture. God grant that we will soon be firm enough to
declare that a business which can only live by sacrificing the health
and strength of the workers must be counted an unprofitable business,
and be allowed to cease. God grant finally that the American people
may learn from the past to guard against a like fate in the future;
that here may be the people whose strength, intelligence and
uprightness shall lead the world; not for the sake of exceeding the
world, but with the high mission of setting to the world an example of
what can come to a vigorous, free and God-fearing people.

In the early history of the evolution of m