others of the race is simple sanity.

And yet from lack of preaching we do not unite for action because we
are not stirred to act at all, and protective legislation in America
is shamefully inadequate. Because it is always difficult to put the
championship of the oppressed above the counsels of prudence, we say
in despair sometimes that we are a people who hold such varied creeds
that there are not enough of one religious faith to secure anything,
but the truth is that it is easy to unite for action people whose
hearts have once been filled by the fervor of that willing devotion
which may easily be generated in the youthful breast. It is
comparatively easy to enlarge a moral concept, but extremely difficult
to give it to an adult for the first time. And yet when we attempt to
appeal to the old sanctions for disinterested conduct, the conclusion
is often forced upon us that they have not been engrained into
character, that they cannot be relied upon when they are brought into
contact with the arguments of industrialism, that the colors of the
flag flying over the fort of our spiritual resources wash out and
disappear when the storm actually breaks. It is because the ardor of
youth has not been attracted to the long effort to modify the
ruthlessness of industry by humane enactments, that we sadly miss
their resourceful enthusiasm and that at the same time groups of young
people who hunger and thirst after social righteousness are breaking
their hearts because the social reform is so long delayed and an
unsympathetic and hardhearted society frustrates all their hopes. And
yet these ardent young people who obscure the issue by their crying
and striving and looking in the wrong place, might be of inestimable
value if so-called political leaders were in any sense social
philosophers. To permit these young people to separate themselves from
the contemporaneous efforts of ameliorating society and to turn their
vague hopes solely toward an ideal commonwealth of the future, is to
withdraw from an experimental self-government founded in enthusiasm,
the very stores of enthusiasm which are needed to sustain it. The
championship of the oppressed came to be a spiritual passion with the
Hebrew prophets. They saw the promises of religion, not for
individuals but in the broad reaches of national affairs and in the
establishment of social justice. It is quite possible that such a
spiritual passion is again to be found among the ardent you