ere was a time when the man who
could wield the heaviest battle-axe was the greatest man; and there are
still circles in which Corbett and Fitzsimmons are regarded as the
greatest men of the present day. But the men who now excite most general
admiration are our "captains of industry," the men who succeed in
getting money and the luxury and power it commands. How shall we elevate
our national ideals?

Selfishness is a mainspring of human action. A like motive, desire for
happiness, sets men to fighting dogs and to founding hospitals. Nero
found pleasure in one way, Marcus Aurelius in another. Charles I. and
Louis XVI. were not bad men; but they were controlled by outgrown
standards. Elizabeth, Napoleon, Peter, and Catherine of Russia sought
their own pleasure in accordance with their personal characters and the
standards of their times. But how much higher and purer pleasure the
devotion of their talents to the service of their fellowmen brought to
Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln, Cobden, Bright and Gladstone--and
John Pounds!

False standards, low ideals, now lead many good men to find their
pleasure, not in cruelty, not in sensuality, but in the accumulation of
wealth, partly for the luxury, chiefly for the power it brings.
"Superfluity comes sooner by white hairs, but competency lives longer."

With the spread of intelligence and thought, and the consequent
elevation of popular ideals, men possessed of millions will not seek to
add to their large legitimate gains by legalized robbery from their
fellow-citizens; and people calling themselves Christians will not
rejoice in the distress and starvation of their fellow-men across the
ocean. Men will still be selfish but their selfishness will at least be
on a higher plane--less intense, less destructive of essential rights.

How shall we most speedily bring about this desired consummation? By
what agency can we most effectively elevate our national ideals? By
extending and improving our system of popular education, by reversing
the usual order and beginning where school curricula now end, by placing
our school-children from their earliest years in close and familiar
contact with the life and thought of the race as expressed in
literature, by exciting in every child admiration and emulation of the
world's true heroes, by feeding the imagination and cultivating the
moral faculties, by putting every child into the way of acquiring a
social and a historic perspective.