,
you begin to wonder if the cynic was not right. The law, obviously, may
be unjust: if so, protest against it and seek to have it changed, but
while it is the law, does it not deserve your respectful obedience,
unless you would add to the dangerously growing disrespect for all law?

Next to the menace of selfishness is that of ignorance, and this, too,
takes confusingly new form. It is not ignorance of scientific fact and
law, dangerous as that is, that threatens, but ignorance of what our
institutions mean, of what they have cost, of the ideal for which we
stand among the nations. The celerity with which, even during the past
two decades, the younger generation has abandoned old standards and
ideals, is an ominous illustration. It is true:

"New occasions teach new duties, time makes ancient goods uncouth; 'They
must upward still, and onward, who would keep abreast of Truth."

Those words of Lowell's are as fully applicable to the present crisis,
as to that for which Lowell wrote them; but to give up the past, without
knowing that you are letting go, is surely not the part of wisdom.

A third menace shows in that fickleness of temper and false standard of
life that cause us to admire the wrong type of leader. Probably one
half of all the attacks on men of unusual wealth and success come from
other men, who would like to be in the same situation with those they
attack, and have failed of their ambition. Part of the attack is
sincere, no doubt, but if you assumed that all the abuse heaped upon
conspicuous men came from moral conviction, you would utterly misread
the situation.

On the other hand, men of moral excellence make us ashamed. Now it
takes a rarely magnanimous spirit to be shamed and not resent it. We
are apt to feel that, if we can pull another down, we raise ourselves.
To realize this, consider the growl of joy that comes from the worse
sort of citizen and newspaper when some public leader is caught in a
private scandal. As if pulling him down, raised us! We are all tarred
with his disgrace. There are, indeed, two ways of stating the ideal of
democracy: you can say, "I am just as good as any one else," which in
the first place, is not true, and, in the second, would be unlovely of
you to express, were it true. You can say, on the contrary, "Every
other human being ought to have just as good a chance as I have," which
is right; and yet you will hear the ideal of democracy phrased a dozen
time