become good? Those who ameliorated their social
conditions were the good people. But the individuals who have
benefited by their exertions "live better"; they are not, strictly
speaking, "more meritorious" in the moral sense.

If they were, we should only need to imagine a society in which the
economic problem had been solved, to behold men who have become
"moral" solely in virtue of having been born in a different age. It is
obvious that the moral question is a very different one; it is a
question of life, a question of "nature," and one which cannot be
solved by external eventualities. Men may be more or less fortunate,
they may be born in more or less civilized surroundings, but they will
always be men confronted by a "moral question," which goes down deeper
than fortune or civilization.

It is very easy to be convinced that the so-called "naughtiness" of
children is the expression of a "struggle for spiritual existence";
they want to make the men within them live, and we try to hinder them;
we offer them the poisons of darkness and error. They fight for their
spiritual bread as the poor fight for material bread; and degrade
themselves by falling victims to our seductions just as the poor
degrade themselves by succumbing to the fascination of alcohol; and in
this struggle and this degradation children have revealed themselves
as the "poor" and "needy," neglected and destitute. None has ever
demonstrated more clearly than they that "man does not live by bread
alone," and that the "question of bread" is not the real "question of
man." All the suffering, all the struggles, all the claims of society
in the past with regard to bodily needs are repeated here with amazing
clarity in connection with spiritual needs. Children want to grow, to
perfect themselves, to nourish their intelligence, to develop their
internal energies, to form their characters and to these ends they
need to be liberated from slavery, and to conquer "the means of life."
It is not enough to nourish their bodies: they are hungry for
intellectual food; the clothes which protect their limbs from the cold
are not enough for children: they demand the garments of strength and
the ornaments of grace to protect and adorn the spirit. Why have we
adults stifled these wants till we have almost come to believe that
the economic question is the true solution of the problem of human
life? And why have we never imagined that, even after such a solution,
strife, ang