ey have done their one world-beneficial
action when they get out of bed in the morning. The rest of the day they
will be unselfish--if it suits their purpose. If only grown-up people
practised what they preached to children we should have the millennium
next Monday. If the world is still "wicked," it isn't because there are
not enough moral precepts being flung about all over it. The trouble is
that the people to whom they most apply pass them on. They consider they
don't apply to them at all.

If only children could chastise their parents for telling lies, and being
greedy and selfish, and doing the hundred and one things which they ought
not to have done, ninety-nine per cent. of the mothers and fathers,
spiritual pastors and masters, and "all those who are set in authority
over them"--would not be able to sit down without an "Oo-er!" for weeks.
Happily children are born actors, and can simulate an air of belief, even
in the face of their elders' most bare-faced inconsistency. But--if you
can cast back your memory into long ago--you will remember that one of
the most "shattering" moments or your youth was the time when it first
burst upon your inner vision that all men, and especially grown-up men,
are liars. Certainly, if we really do come "trailing clouds of glory,"
the clouds soon evaporate and we lose the glory, not through listening to
what men tell us, but in watching what men _do_.

Selfishness is surely of the deadly sins the most deadly. Yet
selfishness is what elder people tell youth to avoid most carefully. If
everyone only lived up to half the moral "fineness" which they find so
admirable in the tenets of the Boy Scouts, the world would be worth
living in to-morrow. Think of the hundreds of millions of unselfish acts
which would then take place every day! In a short time there would
surely be hardly any more good to do! As it is, a few kind-hearted,
generous, sympathetic people are kept so busy trying to leaven the
selfishness, the hardness, the all-uncharitableness of those who are out
to live entirely for themselves, that, poor things, they are usually worn
to a shadow long before their time!

The virtues are very badly distributed. Some people have so many, and in
such "chunks," and others possess so few and even seem determined to get
rid of those they have as soon as they can. If only youth had a sense or
humour it would surely die from laughing. But it hasn't. It has only
faith. Be