! I have been brought up in an environment where there
is no standard higher than the money standard. Not that my father or
husband are dishonest; they are rigidly honest according to their ideas
of honesty. But to say that a man must give actual service for every
dollar he gets or it isn't his--that is a conception of honesty so far
beyond them as to be an absurdity. But I have wanted to ask you how you
are going to enforce this new idealism."

"Idealism is not enforced. We aspire to it; we may not attain to it.
Christianity itself is idealism--the idealism of unselfishness. That
ideal has never been attained by any considerable number of people, and
yet it has drawn all humanity on to somewhat higher levels as surely as
the moon draws the tide. Superficial persons in these days are drawing
pictures of the failure of Christianity, which has failed in part; but
they could find a much more depressing subject by painting a world from
which all Christian idealism had been removed."

"But surely you have some plan for putting your theories to the
test--some plan which will force those to whom idealism appeals in vain.
We do not trust to a man's idealism to keep him from stealing; we put
him in jail."

"All that will come in time, but the question for the seeker after truth
is not 'Will it work?' but 'Is it true?' I fancy I can see the practical
men of Moses' time leaning over his shoulder as he inscribed the Ten
Commandments and remarking 'No use of putting that down, Moses; you can
never enforce it.' But Moses put it down and left the enforcement to
natural law and the growing intelligence of the generations which have
followed him. We are too much disposed to think it possible to evade
a law; to violate it, and escape punishment; but if a law is true,
punishment follows violation as implacably as the stars follow their
courses. And if society has failed to recognize the law that service,
and service only, should be able to command service in return, society
must suffer the penalty. We have only to look about us to see that
society is paying in full for its violations.

"Yes, I have plans, and I think they would work, but the first thing is
the ideal--the new moral sense--that value must not be accepted without
giving equal value in return. Society, of course, will have to set up
the standards of value. That is a matter of detail--a matter for the
practical men who come in the wake of the idealist. But of this I am
cer