really deserves a reprimand
quite as severe as the equally reprehensible deed of making the
surroundings of "evil influences" so beguiling. Both are akin to that
state of mind which narrows the entrance into a wider morality to the
eye of a needle, and accounts for the fact that new moral movements have
ever and again been inaugurated by those who have found themselves in
revolt against the conventionalized good.

The success of the reforming politician who insists upon mere purity of
administration and upon the control and suppression of the unruly
elements in the community, may be the easy result of a narrowing and
selfish process. For the painful condition of endeavoring to minister
to genuine social needs, through the political machinery, and at the
same time to remodel that machinery so that it shall be adequate to its
new task, is to encounter the inevitable discomfort of a transition into
a new type of democratic relation. The perplexing experiences of the
actual administration, however, have a genuine value of their own. The
economist who treats the individual cases as mere data, and the social
reformer who labors to make such cases impossible, solely because of the
appeal to his reason, may have to share these perplexities before they
feel themselves within the grasp of a principle of growth, working
outward from within; before they can gain the exhilaration and uplift
which comes when the individual sympathy and intelligence is caught into
the forward intuitive movement of the mass. This general movement is not
without its intellectual aspects, but it has to be transferred from the
region of perception to that of emotion before it is really
apprehended. The mass of men seldom move together without an emotional
incentive. The man who chooses to stand aside, avoids much of the
perplexity, but at the same time he loses contact with a great source of
vitality.

Perhaps the last and greatest difficulty in the paths of those who are
attempting to define and attain a social morality, is that which arises
from the fact that they cannot adequately test the value of their
efforts, cannot indeed be sure of their motives until their efforts are
reduced to action and are presented in some workable form of social
conduct or control. For action is indeed the sole medium of expression
for ethics. We continually forget that the sphere of morals is the
sphere of action, that speculation in regard to morality is but
observati