What does?
Here is the real question for society to ask—Adam did not know enough. The age of personal morals is the age of personal punishment. The age of recognized public evils is the age of prevention. This we are beginning to see, beginning to do. After the Iroquois fire we were more stringent in guarding our theatres. After the Slocum disaster the inspection of steamships was more thorough. After the slaughter of the innocents in the burning schoolhouse, many other school buildings were condemned and more were safeguarded.
But this is only a beginning—a feeble, temporary, ineffectual effort. Social morality does not consist in spasmodic attempts to be good, following upon some terrible catastrophe. A mother's duty to a child is not mere passionate protection after it has fallen through the ice; the soldier's duty is not confined to wild efforts to recover the flag after it has been lost. We have a constant definite active duty to society, each one of us; there lies our responsibility and failing therein is our fault.
When men or women fail in full honest efficient performance of their social service, which means their special kind of work, they sin—if we must call it sin—against society. Better drop the very name and thought of "sin" and say merely, "Why are we to-day so inefficient and unreliable in our social duty?" For reason good. We are not taught social duty. For further reason that we are taught much that militates against it. Our social instinct is not yet strong enough to push and pull us into perfect relation with one another without conscious effort. We need to be taught from infancy, which way our duty lies—the most imperative duty of a human creature—to give his life's best service to humanity.
This would call for new standards in the nursery, the school and the shop, as well as the platform, press and pulpit. That is our crying need; a truer standard of duty, and the proper development of it. The School City is a step this way, a long one; as is the George Junior Republic and other specific instances of effort to bring out the social sense.
But it is in our work that we need it most. From babyhood we should be taught that we are here dependent on one another, beautifully specialized that we may serve one another; owing to the State, our great centralized body, the whole service of our lives. What every common soldier knows and most of them practice is surely not too difficult for a common business man. Our public duty is most simple and clear—to do our best work for the service of the world. And our personal sin—the one sin against humanity—is to let that miserable puny outgrown Ego—our exaggerated sense of personality—divert us from that service.
[Untitled]
With God Above—Beneath—Beside—
Without—Within—and Everywhere;
Rising with the resistless tide
Of life, and Sure of Getting There.
Patient with Nature's long delay,
Proud of our conscious upward swing;
Not sorry for a single day,
And Not Afraid of Anything!
With Motherhood at last awake—
With Power to Do and Light to See—
Women may now begin to Make
The People we are Meant to Be!