thought will be your thought, and you will follow him as if you were following the best things in yourselves.

When I think of an association of Christian young men I wonder that it has not already turned the world upside down. I wonder, not that it has done so much, for it has done a great deal, but that it has done so little; and I can only conjecture that it does not realize its own strength. I can only imagine that it has not yet got its pace. I wish I could believe, and I do believe, that at 70 it is just reaching its majority, and that from this time on a dream greater even than George Williams ever dreamed will be realized in the great accumulating momentum of Christian men throughout the world. For, gentlemen, this is an age in which the principles of men who utter public opinion dominate the world. It makes no difference what is done for the time being. After the struggle is over the jury will sit, and nobody can corrupt that jury.

At one time I tried to write history. I did not know enough to write it, but I knew from experience how hard it was to find an historian out, and I trusted I would not be found out. I used to have this comfortable thought as I saw men struggling in the public

I used to think to myself, "This is all very well and very interesting. You probably assess yourself in such and such a way. Those who are your partisans assess you thus and so. Those who are your opponents urge a different verdict. But it does not make very much. difference, because after you are dead and gone some quiet historian will sit in a secluded room and tell mankind for the rest of time just what to think about you, and his verdict, not the verdict of your partisans and not the verdict of your opponents, will be the verdict of posterity." I say that I used to say that to myself. It very largely was not so. And yet it was true in this sense: If the historian really speaks the judgment of the succeeding generation, then he really speaks the judgment also of the generations that succeed it, and his assessment, made without the passion of the time, made without partisan feeling in the matter-in other circumstances, when the air is cool is the judgment of mankind upon your actions.

Now, is it not very important that we who shall constitute a portion of the jury should get our best judgments to work and base them upon Christian forbearance and Christian principles, upon the idea that it is impossible by sophistication to establish that a thing that is wrong is right? And yet, while we are going to judge with the absolute standard of righteousness, we are going to judge with Christian feeling, being men of a like sort ourselves, suffering the same temptations, having the same weaknesses, knowing the same passions; and while we do not condemn we are going to seek to say and to live the truth. What I am hoping for is that these 70 years have just been a running start, and that now there will be a great rush of Christian

principle upon the strongholds of evil and of wrong in the world. Those strongholds are not as strong as they look. Almost every vicious man is afraid of society, and if you once open the door where he is, he will run. All you have to do is to fight, not with cannon but with light.

May I illustrate it in this way? The Government of the United States has just succeeded in concluding a large number of treaties with the leading nations of the world, the sum and substance of which is this, that whenever any trouble arises the light shall shine on it for a year before anything is done; and my prediction is that after the light has shone on it for a year it will not be necessary to do anything; that after we know what happened, then we will know who was right and who was wrong. I believe that light is the greatest sanitary influence in the world. That, I suppose, is scientific commonplace, because if you want to make a place wholesome the best instrument you can use is the sun; to let his rays in, let him search out all the miasma that may lurk there. So with moral light: It is the most wholesome and rectifying, as well as the most revealing, thing in the world, provided it be genuine moral light; not the light of inquisitiveness, not the light of the man who likes to turn up ugly things, not the light of the man who disturbs what is corrupt for the mere sake of the sensation that he creates by disturbing it, but the moral light, the light of the man who discloses it in order that all the sweet influences of the world may go in and make it better.

That, in my judgment, is what the Young Men's Christian Association can do. It can point out to its members the things that are wrong. It can guide the feet of those who are going astray; and when its members have realized the power of the Christian principle, then they will not be men if they do not unite to see that the rest of the world experiences the same emancipation and reaches the same happiness of release.

I believe in the Young Men's Christian Association because I believe in the progress of moral ideas in the world; and I do not know that I am sure of anything else. When you are after something and have formulated it and have done the very best thing you know how to do, you have got to be sure for the time being that that is the thing. to do. But you are a fool if in the back of your head you do not know it is possible that you are mistaken. All that you can claim is that that is the thing as you see it now and that you can not stand still; that you must push forward the things that are right. It may turn out that you made mistakes, but what you do know is your direction, and you are sure you are moving in that way. I was once a college reformer, until discouraged, and I remember a classmate of mine. saying, "Why, man, can't you let anything alone?" I said, "I let everything alone that you can show me is not itself moving in the

wrong direction, but I am not going to let those things alone that I see are going downhill"; and I borrowed this illustration from an ingenious writer. He says, "If you have a post that is painted white and want to keep it white, you can not let it alone; and if anybody says to you, 'Why don't you let that post alone?' you will say, 'Because I want it to stay white, and therefore I have got to paint it at least every second year.'" There isn't anything in this world that will not change if you absolutely let it alone, and therefore you have constantly to be attending to it to see that it is being taken care of in the right way and that, if it is part of the motive force of the world, it is moving in the right direction.

That means that eternal vigilance is the price, not only of liberty, but of a great many other things. It is the price of everything that is good. It is the price of one's own soul. It is the price of the souls of the people you love; and when it comes down to the final reckoning you have a standard that is immutable. What shall a man give in exchange for his own soul? Will he sell that? Will he consent to see another man sell his soul? Will he consent to see the conditions of his community such that men's souls are debauched and trodden under foot in the mire? What shall he give in exchange for his own soul, or any other man's soul? And since the world, the world of affairs, the world of society, is nothing less and nothing more than all of us put together, it is a great enterprise for the salvation of the soul in this world as well as in the next. There is a text in Scripture that has always interested me profoundly. It says godliness is profitable in this life as well as in the life that is to come; and if you do not start it in this life, it will not reach the life that is to come. Your measurements, your directions, your whole momentum, have to be established before you reach the next world. This world is intended as the place in which we shall show that we know how to grow in the stature of manliness and of righteousness.

I have come here to bid Godspeed to the great work of the Young Men's Christian Association. I love to think of the gathering force of such things as this in the generations to come. If a man had to measure the accomplishments of society, the progress of reform, the speed of the world's betterment, by the few little things that happened in his own life, by the trifling things that he can contribute to accomplish, he would indeed feel that the cost was much greater than the result. But no man can look at the past of the history of this world without seeing a vision of the future of the history of this world; and when you think of the accumulated moral forces that have made one age better than another age in the progress of mankind, then you can open your eyes to the vision. You can see that age by age, though with a blind struggle in the dust of the road, though often mistaking the path and losing its way in the mire, mankind is yet―

sometimes with bloody hands and battered knees-nevertheless struggling step after step up the slow stages to the day when he shall live in the full light which shines upon the uplands, where all the light that illumines mankind shines direct from the face of God.

LETTER.

[To Mr. Underwood, Commending the Work of the Second Session of the Sixty-third

Congress.]

THE WHITE HOUSE, Washington, October 17, 1914.

MY DEAR MR. UNDERWOOD:

I can not let this session of Congress close without expressing my warm admiration for the fidelity and intelligence with which the program outlined in April and December of last year has been carried out, and my feeling that the people of the country have been served by the members of this Congress as they have seldom, if ever, been served before. The program was a great one, and it is a matter of deep satisfaction to think of the way in which it has been handled.

It had several distinct parts and many items, but, after all, a single purpose, namely, to destroy private control and set business free. That purpose was manifest enough in the case of the tariff and in the legislation affecting trusts; but, though perhaps less evident upon the surface there, it lay at the very heart of the currency bill, too. May I not add, even though it lies outside the field of legislation, that that, and that chiefly, has been the object of the foreign policy of the Government during the last 18 months?

Private control had shown its sinister face on every hand in America, had shown it for a long time, and sometimes very brazenly, in the trusts and in a virtual domination of credit by small groups of men. The safest hiding place and covert of such control was in the tariff. There it for a long time hid very shrewdly. The tariff was a very complicated matter; none but experts thoroughly understood its schedules. Many of the schedules were framed to afford particular advantages to special groups of manufacturers and investors. That was the soil in which trade combinations and combinations of manufacturers most readily grew, and most rankly. High prices did not spring directly out of the tariff. They sprang out of the suppression of domestic, no less than of foreign, competition by means of combinations and trade. agreements which could be much more easily contrived and maintained. under the protection of a high tariff than without it. The European war came before the withdrawal of this much-coveted opportunity, for monopoly could show its full effects and active competition bring prices. to their normal level again; but it is clear enough already that the reduction of the tariff, the simplification of its schedules so as to cut

away the jungle in which secret agencies had so long lurked, the correction of its inequalities, and its thorough recasting with the single honest object of revenue, were an indispensable first step to reestablishing competition.

The present Congress has taken that step with courage, sincerity, and effectiveness. The lobby by which some of the worst features of the old tariff had been maintained was driven away by the mere pitiless turning on of the light. The principle was adopted that each duty levied was to be tested by the inquiry whether it was put at such a figure and levied in such a manner as to provoke competition. The soil in which combinations had grown was removed lest some of the seeds of monopoly might be found to remain in it. The thing had needed to be done for a long time, but nobody had ventured before to undertake it in systematic fashion.

The panic that the friends of privilege had predicted did not follow. Business has adready adjusted itself to the new conditions with singular ease and elasticity, because the new conditions are in fact more normal than the old. The revenue lost by the import duties was replaced by an income tax which in part shifted the burden of taxation from the shoulders of every consumer in the country, great or small, to shoulders more certainly able to bear it.

We had time to learn from the actual administration of the law that the revenues resulting from the double change would have been abundant had it not been for the breaking out of the present war in Europe, which affects almost every route of trade and every market in the world outside of the United States. Until the war ends, and until its effects upon manufacture and commerce have been corrected we shall have to impose additional taxes to make up for the loss of such part of our import duties as the war cuts off by cutting off the imports themselves-a veritable war tax, though we are not at war; for war, and only war, is the cause of it.

It is fortunate that the reduction of the duties came first. The import duties collected under the old tariff constituted a much larger proportion of the whole revenue of the Government than to the duties under the new. A still larger proportion of the revenue would have been cut off by the war had the old taxes stood, and a larger war tax would have been necessary as a consequence. No miscalculation, no lack of foresight, has created the necessity for the taxes, but only a great catastrophe world-wide in its operation and effects.

With similar purpose and in a like temper the Congress has sought, in the Trade-Commission bill and in the Clayton bill, to make men in a small way of business as free to succeed as men in a big way, and to kill monopoly in the seed. Before these bills were passed the law was already clear enough that monopolies once formed were illegal and could be dissolved by direct process of law and those who had