which permits them fellowship without rebuke for their sins, there have arisen whole classes of vice-caterers. These men and women make their living by tempting others to sin; the allurements which they set before the young constitute a great check to moral advance, and even threaten continually a serious moral degeneration. The keepers of gamblinghouses and brothels, the venders of habit-forming drugs, vile pictures, and salacious reading matter, the proprietors of indecent dance-halls and theaters, of the "shows" of all sorts that flourish chiefly through their offering of sexual stimulation these are the worst sinners of our times, for they cause thousands of others to sin, and deliberately undermine the moral structure so laboriously reared, and at such heavy cost. Conspicuous in commercialized vicecatering is the Casino of Monte Carlo, where thousands of lives have been ruined. The business of seducing and kidnapping girls-the "white-slave trade"-flourishes secretly in our great cities. Associations of liquor dealers are in many countries powerful social and political forces. One of the greatest problems before the race is how to exterminate these human beasts of prey that live at the expense of the moral deterioration and often utter ruin of their victims.

(5) While the older racial and national barriers between peoples are breaking down, so that the possibilities of human brotherhood and coöperation are laterally increasing, and the wretched fratricidal wars between peoples coming toward an end,1 other barriers, between upper and lower classes, are thickening, new antagonisms and antipathies, that threaten yet much friction and unhappiness and a retardation of moral progress. Rich are becoming farther and farther

1 In view of the Great War and the ensuing crop of lesser wars this may sound like irony. And no one can be sure that worse may not follow. Nevertheless we may be pretty confident, for several reasons, that the age of international wars is approaching its end.

separated from poor, class-consciousness is on the increase, class-wars in the form of strikes, riots, and sabotage, are ominous symptoms. Masses of the laboring class believe that a great class-war is not only inevitable but desirable. Such conflicts, however, besides their material losses, engender hatred, cruelty, lust, greed, and all sorts of other forms of immorality. No one can predict how far such struggles may go in the future toward undoing the socializing process which at best has so many obstacles to meet and moves so slowly.

Many forces are at work, however, for moral uplift. The spread of education, teaching men to think, to discern evils, and to comprehend the reasons for right conduct, the increasing influence of public opinion through newspapers and magazines, the growing number of organizations working to eradicate evils, the gradual increase of wise legislation, the reviving moral pressure of the Christian Church — such signs of the times should give us courage as well as show us where we can take hold to help. Morality is not static, a cut-and-dried system to be obeyed or neglected, but a set of experiments, being gradually worked out by mankind, a dynamic, progressive instrument which we can help ourselves to forge. There is room yet for moral genius; we are yet in the early and formative stage of human morality. We should not be content with past achievement, with the contemporary standards of our fellows. If we give our keenest thought and our earnest effort, there is no knowing what noble heights of morality we may be helping the future to attain.

Dewey and Tufts, Ethics, chap. IV. Hobhouse, op. cit., pt. II, chaps. II, VIII. Westermarck, op. cit., chap. VII. Sutherland, ор. cit., vol. II., chaps. XIX-XXI. W. G. Sumner, Folkways, chaps. I, II, XI. Sir H. Maine, Village Communities. C. Darwin, Descent of Man,

pt. 1, chap. v. J. G. Schurman, Ethical Import of Darwinism. W. I. Thomas, Source Book for Social Origins, pt. vII. C. Read, Natural and Social Morals, chap. vi. I. King, Development of Religion, chap. XI.

On the question of moral progress: Dewey and Tufts, Ethics, pp. 187-92. W. Bagehot, Physics and Politics, chap. vi. H. G. Wells, New Worlds for Old, chap. 1, secs. 2-4. J. Bryce, in the Atlantic Monthly, vol. 100, p. 145. E. Root, The Citizen's Part in Government, pp. 96–123. J. S. Mackenzie, Manual of Ethics (2d ed.), chap. xv. A. R. Wallace, Social Environment and Moral Progress. W. M. F. Petrie, The Revolutions of Civilization. W. H. Hamilton, Current Economic Problems, pp. 76–83. Henry Van Dyke, Essays in Application, chap. 1. J. Dewey, in International Journal of Ethics, vol. 26, p. 311. F. Younghusband, Mutual Influence, chap. vI. E. B. McGilvary, in Hibbert Journal, vol. 14, p. 43. Also Hibbert Journal, vol. 10, pp. 179, 273, 472, 599, 925. H. N. Chittenden, in Atlantic Monthly, vol. 109, p. 777.

CHAPTER IV

INWARD DEVELOPMENT - CONSCIENCE

What are the stages in the history of moral guidance? THERE may be said to be five stages in the history of moral guidance: guidance by instinct, by custom, by law and precept, by conscience, and by insight. No one of these guides is discarded with the development of the others; we rely to-day upon all of them in varying degree. Their evolu tion overlaps; the alteration of instinct still goes on, changing laws and customs still bring their pressure to bear from without upon the individual; while our conscience and our insight have their roots far back in the past. Yet the prominence of each of these factors in turn marks a successive stage in the evolution of moral control. Inherited instinct, and then custom, unconsciously passed on by imitation and to some extent taught with a dimly conscious purpose, shape the crude morality of the animals — though the other means of guidance are not wholly absent even in them. Among savages legal codes, unwritten and perhaps not even clearly formulated, yet exacting and strictly enforced by penalties, come to form an important supplement to instinct, custom, and proverbial wisdom. But quite as important is the gradual development of an inward guide—those very various secondary impulses and inhibitions which we lump together because of their common function and call the moral sense or conscience. We shall now consider briefly the origin of this internal steering-apparatus. The latest and most mature guide of all, reflective insight, arises in marked degree only when men become accustomed to

abstraction and analysis. There is no problem connected with its origin except the general problems of the development of human reason. How moral insight may be trained and brought to bear upon conduct will, it is hoped, be clear to the student who patiently studies this volume.

Out of what has conscience developed?

The "conscience" of our moralizing and religious literature figures as a sharply defined and easily recognizable "faculty," like "will" or "reason." But this classification, though useful, is misleading by its simplicity. If we observe by introspection what goes on in our minds when we "will" or "reason" or "listen to conscience," we shall find all sorts of emotions, ideas, impulses, surging back and forth, altering from moment to moment, never twice the same. At another period of our lives, or in another man's mind, the psychological stuff pigeonholed under these names may be almost entirely different. A great many diverse mental elements have at one time or other taken the rôle of, or formed an ingredient in, the function we label "conscience." We will enumerate the more important:

(1) Experience quickly teaches her pupils that certain acts to which they feel a strong impulse will lead to an aftermath of pain or weariness, or will stand in the way of other goods which they more lastingly desire or more deeply need. The memory of these consequences of acts remains as a guide for future conduct, not so often in the form of a clearly recognized memory as in a dim realization that the dangerous act must be avoided, a vague pressure against the pull of momentary inclination, or an uncomprehended feeling of impulsion toward the less inviting path. This residuum of the moral experience of the individual is one ingredient in what we call his conscience.

(2) But there is much more than this. The individual is