g as virtue
for virtue's sake. Morality is the one interest that virtually
represents all interests. It is the interest of every man in the
general tests of success and failure, and in the maintenance of the
field or medium of all interests. There is no enterprise which, if
conducted efficiently, is not a verification of moral rules; there is
no enterprise which does not receive and transmit the now of life that
circulates through the moral system at large. To be righteously
indignant is to protest passionately in behalf of the whole good, and
against the clumsy and inadvertent evil. To this morality owes its
universal support, its invincible finality. It need never be
apologetic, because it holds no brief; it advocates no measure except
the carrying through to the end of what is virtually undertaken by all
parties to the adventure of life.

It follows that no man can exempt himself from moral liability. He is
irrevocably committed to life, and can neglect the laws of life only at
his absolute or ultimate peril. What does it profit a man to gain a
bit here and a bit there, if he is foreordained to loss on the whole?
If he squanders his moral patrimony he has no means of {9} recouping
his fortunes; he has wasted his supporting vitality and forfeited his
general livelihood.

And now if this be true it is of more than passing or sentimental
importance. It needs to be vividly realized if morality is to make its
saving appeal. Morality is only discredited through being sanctioned;
its proper merits are more eloquent than its friends and borrowed
auspices. If it can be simply proclaimed as it is, it cannot be
denied. This is one of the things which I undertake to do. But to
understand what morality really is, to recognize its claims, is to
understand also its application, its critical pertinence to art and
religion, to all the great and permanent undertakings of men. Such
application I shall in the later chapters undertake to suggest, partly
as an amplification of the meaning of morality, and partly as a
programme of further reflection looking toward a moral philosophy of
history. I can do no more in the present chapter than broadly present
the structure of morality, leaving the logic of its appeal and its more
important applications for the chapters which follow.

II

The moral affair of men, a prolonged and complicated historical
enterprise, is thrown into historical relief upon the background of a
me