are above censure and
who add immeasurably to the wealth of the country and to the prosperity
of every citizen in it? With this constant presentation of depravity,
this incessant harping upon the one string of human dishonesty, what
wonder that our visions should be distorted or that we should exclude
from our horizon almost everything but the sinister features of modern
life. What wonder that the young men and women should look at the career
before them through an all-pervading fog of suspicion or that the days
ahead of them should seem to be filled with the struggle against a
universal dishonesty.

It is from such illusions as this that we must free our ideals if we
would do effective work for the world and for ourselves. There are real
enemies enough without erecting imaginary windmills to tilt against.
Frauds, depravities, tragedies surely await us, now as ever, but
we shall be doubly armed against them if we look upon them as the
exceptions and not the rule and if we draw strength from the great
background of human virtue and honesty. And there is such a background,
unchanging, resistant, resolute, even though the limelight of publicity
be persistently directed upon the few sinister figures on the front of
the stage. We cannot afford to lose our faith in human nature, we cannot
afford to shut out the greater and the best part of life or to gaze so
persistently upon the abnormal that we can no longer see the normal
and the ordinary. Let us cultivate our sense of ethical values and of
ethical perspective rather than to crouch behind a shrub until it looks
like a forest.

We are indebted to our commercialized newspapers and magazines for our
distorted views of human life and for the cynicism that it is the
momentary fashion to affect, but that is always disfiguring to the mind
that harbors it. Certainly we can get no such views and no such cynicism
from our own experience or from personal knowledge of the men and women
who surround us. Honesty is a more familiar sight than dishonesty. All
the common and familiar processes of our daily life are based upon an
expectation of honesty, and if you will stop to consider for a moment
you will see that those processes could not go on without that
expectation. And how seldom is it falsified. Sometimes of course there
comes the jar of disappointment, but the fact that there is a jar shows
that it is the exception and not the rule. However much we may talk of
guarantees and sa