second. Briefly stated, the labor movement in Great Britain is little else than the idealism of Carlyle and Ruskin, translated into the language of workingclass organization and protest; and what the workingclass movement now most definitely needs in all lands is a more comprehensive knowledge of facts, and a saner wisdom of leadership. How to know enough to be of real use; how to see enough to be a real leader; how to be good enough to be good for something that is the new problem of social service, which gives to academic training its new importance in the moral education of the human race.

A NEW RELIGIOUS CONSECRATION

Nor can one stop even here in this estimate of education in its relation to the social conscience. It is not only true that the appeal of the social conscience is expanding and moralizing the sphere of the academic life, but it is still further true that there may be discerned in the university, emerging from this new moral enthusiasm, a new type of religious consecration appropriate to a new world. What is the call of the time to educated youth which summons them to social service? What are these motives of self-effacing usefulness, this dissatisfaction with the self-centered life, this summons to find life in losing it, if they are not a reiteration of the appeal which in all the ages of faith have turned men from self-seeking to self-sacrifice, and sanctified them for others' sake? There are many channels through which the life of man is led toward the life of God; sometimes through the convictions of the reason, sometimes through the exaltation of the emotions; but it is not impossible that the present age is drawing men toward the eternal through the dedication of the will to human service. The new humanism

may utter itself in language unfamiliar to the traditions of religion; it may seem to many religious people remote or even alien from the practices of the church; but it is at bottom a new spiritual movement of human solidarity and obligation, and it may be the first premonition of a coming renaissance of religious responsibility and consecration. So large a movement of moral education is not likely to fulfill itself without expanding into a new type of religious education. The emergence of the social conscience indicates a new path for religious teaching and religious experience. The call of the social question is not only a call to man, but not less a call from God.

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE PRESENT MORAL
AWAKENING IN THE NATION

REV. LYMAN ABBOTT, D. D., LL. D.
EDITOR, THE OUTLOOK, NEW YORK

If you have ever heard a symphony concert you have been filled with wonder at seeing one man playing upon one hundred men as though they were instruments; and you have wondered how that man could so play upon a hundred men that they should interpret together one of the great masters. That is autocracy in music; one man with a feeling of the beauty and a hundred answering to his touch. I once attended a concert in which five men seemed to interpret in perfect unison the theme of the composer. was puzzled to know which of the five was leader. At the conclusion of the concert I asked one of the five who led. "No one," was the answer. "Then," said I, "you must have practised many times together in order to be able to render it so effectively." "Only. once," he said. "How, then, could you interpret it

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so perfectly?" I asked. "Because," he said, "we all felt it together." That is democracy: Feeling, thinking, willing together; with one thought, one emotion, one purpose. This is what democracy must do if it would be democracy. The seventy millions of people constituting the population of these United States of America must learn how to feel, to think, and to plan together. They may be guided, but not controlled. There must be a corporate judgment, a corporate feeling, a corporate purpose, a corporate conscience; and when this corporate judgment is formed, this corporate feeling aroused, this corporate purpose settled, leaders become followers and must go where democracy demands they should go.

During two years of the Civil War the radicals waited impatiently for the Emancipation Proclamation; and Lincoln waited. For, in the judgment of the President, the time had not arrived to strike an effective blow at the labor system of the South. It was his desire that slavery should be abolished but, with his characteristic caution, he deemed it wise to wait until the sentiment for abolition became more pronounced.

Not till after two years' education did the people engaged in the Civil War learn that slavery was the cause of the war. They had their conscience aroused against slavery. Then it was that Abraham Lincoln issued the "Emancipation Proclamation." It was then the proclamation not of the President only, but of the people.

During one hundred years this nation has been learning certain great moral lessons concerning the rights of property. How may property be honestly acquired? What are the rights of property when it is acquired? What limitations may be justly regarded as belonging to these rights? Seventy millions of

people have been learning the answer to these questions during the years that have passed. One hundred years ago, not more, the American people believed that one man might own another man. It was claimed by some that a man might own his fellow man and carry him where he might; by some that they might own a man in the state; by some that no man, under any circumstances, could have a right to own other men. After fifty years' education, the nation has learned that no man has the right to own his fellow man. There is not to be found to-day any defender of the system of slavery.

In the midst of that Civil War, in 1862, the American Congress passed the Homestead Law, by which they declared that any man might have for the asking one hundred and sixty acres of government land if he would build upon, then occupy them. They passed another law to give millions of acres to a few men provided they would build a railroad across the continent. Whether this was wise or not I am not here to discuss. But as a result of this doctrine of private ownership of the public domain, the forests passed into the hands of a small body of men; the gold and the silver to another small body; the coal and the oil to another small body. And in consequence of this policy, in the lifetime of two generations our forests were so despoiled that it looks as though shortly we should have no more timber-lands. In 1879 Henry George issued his book on "Progress and Poverty," and put clearly before the people the question whether the air, water, light, land, and its contents are a proper subject of property. His position was logical; that land is not a proper subject of private ownership. You can not own the sunlight God owns it; nor the ocean it belongs to all God's children. The Supreme Court of the United States has practically

said that no man or body of men can own or control a navigable river; and, therefore, it would seem that they can no more own a millstream. Why the right to own forests and coal-fields, if no right to own the river? Why the soil, if not the water? The American people are coming to have this view: that the right of man to own land is an artificial right; and we are coming to believe that land ought not to be made subjects of property by artificial arrangement, except with careful qualifications and limitations. And in spite of some strong pecuniary and property interests, we are coming to this conclusion, that we will give away no more forest grants, no more great mining properties; that we will only give land in small quantities to men who will occupy it. We are even beginning to propose to buy back some of the lands given away. The great treasures of forest, mine, and coal are the gifts of God to His children, and we are trying to find out how the children who have given away their belongings can get back their belongings without dishonesty, or without doing injustice to those who have been allowed to become property-owners. That is our land problem.

Within the memory of our fathers lotteries and gambling operations were sanctioned by law and used for the endowment of educational, philanthropic, and religious institutions. Now they are not considered quite the thing - unless they are carried on under the auspices of a church! The gambling spirit has grown with the growth of the nation. In gambling the winner gets the property of his neighbor without giving anything for it except a chance to some one else to get his property without paying anything for it. Gambling grows out of a desire to get something for nothing, and this is always a vicious desire. So long as two gamblers engage in the operation on equal