It is not that I wish to shirk; I am not afraid of facing anything that I ought to know, and I have not the slightest doubt that we are all, in great measure, responsible for our neighbors' sins. But I am not sure that we are taking the wisest way to mend them. It seems to me incontestable that, with the large issues of individual and of national well-being in mind, we are over-doing the exposure, and slighting the incentives to right action; emphasizing the negative at the expense of the positive; and that, with our weakening convictions regarding the things that are right, it is dangerous to go on loudly proclaiming the things that are wrong. We are much in the position of a village improvement society which has pulled down a bridge because it is rotting, and is impotent to build another and a better. We have invested our national all in wrecking machinery, and have nothing left for constructive tools. It is said that in our explosive setting forth of civic and national wrong-doing, we are all too prone to stop with the explosion, as if mere knowledge of these things would set them right. Mere knowledge never yet set anything right; only the ceaselessly active, creative will can fashion a world of law out of chaos.
Of the criticism often made that exposure of wrong should be followed, more closely than is done here, by constructive action, if anything is to be really effected, it is not my task to speak. The aspect of the matter which interests me especially concerns the youth of the land; it is the educational aspect. Not through loud wailing over evil can a nation be built, but through resolute dwelling with high ideals. In certain ugly tendencies of recent years among the young, as, for instance, the unabashed sensuality of much of the modern dancing, may we not detect, perhaps, a cynical assumption that life is at basis corrupt,--a natural result of continued harping on evil things, and of failure to keep before them images of moral beauty? Our magazine writers would be far better employed, if, instead of making our ears constantly resound with reports of civic iniquities, they were, part of the time at least, studying Plato's _Republic_, and filling mind and soul with the hope of the perfect state. Wrong things we dare hope are of small and fleeting consequence as compared with the right; it is not the sin of Judas Iscariot, but the righteousness of his Master, that has brought the human race a gleam of hope and possible redemption. When I was told, not long ago, of a student in one of our great universities who had elected 'Criminology 16,' I could not help reflecting that he might far better have taken Idealistic Philosophy I.