is greatly imperiled in recent times. The family, the home, and the natural rights of parents are injured by legislation, actual or proposed, that ignores the fundamental rule of American democracy, namely, that the State has no right to restrict the liberty of the individual beyond the limits necessary for its own protection and preservation.

Nor will it do to say that new times and conditions, industry and commerce, inventions and discoveries, have created a new order of life in which the American individualism of our golden age can no longer be tolerated. In this personal freedom, for which he defied kings and aristocracies, the American citizen has ever recognized the primal irreducible element of his political life. Pride in it, and exercise of it, have colored our national life, so to speak, in every decade, and wherever the American citizen set foot on his vast patrimony.

ASSUMPTION OF INDIVIDUAL RESPONSIBILITY FOR EDUCATION MUST BE ENCOURAGED.

This vast freedom of initiative made and makes the American citizen of the original type a natural enemy of all monopoly, whether in business or in politics, and the same general temper is to be observed in his attitude toward religion. We can not therefore imagine him inclined to a State monopoly of education, for which reason our American life has until recently been spared any serious endeavors to change the fiber of our traditions in this respect.

We may also believe that, as he looked about in the United States and observed the incredible development of education, owing to private initiative and religious zeal, the immense and costly equipment, the personal toil and sacrifice, the rare idealism of the teachers, the secular benefits conferred upon poor and struggling communities, the healthy mutual rivalry, the facile Americanization of multitudes otherwise destined to become politically drift and refuse of their time; as he observed their happy insistence on the highest morality anchored in religious belief, and thereby secured the joyful acceptance of civil loyalty; as he made note of their alacrity and ardor in responding to the call of the American State whenever the hour of its supreme peril was at hand, and in offering their lives for its safety and welfare, he would cordially agree with the educational principles set forth in the following brief paragraph from the recent pastoral letter of our American Catholic bishops, read in all their churches, and accepted by all their people:

The State has a right to insist that its citizens shall be educated. It should encourage among the people such a love of learning that they will take the initiative and without constraint provide for the education of their children.

Should they through negligence or lack of means fail to do so, the State has the right to establish schools and take every other legitimate means to safeguard its vital interests against the dangers that result from ignorance. In particular, it has both the right and the duty to exclude the teaching of doctrines which aim at the subversion of law and order and therefore at the destruction of the State itself.

The State is competent to do these things because its essential function is to promote the general welfare. But on the same principle it is bound to respect and protect the rights of the citizen, and especially of the parent. So long as these rights are properly exercised, to encroach upon them is not to further the general welfare, but to put it in peril. If the function of the citizen, and if the aim of education is to prepare the individual for the rational use of his liberty, the State can not rightfully or consistently make education a pretext for interfering with rights and liberties which the Creator, not the State, has conferred. Any advantage that might accrue even from a perfect system of State education would be more than offset by the wrong which the violation of parental rights would involve.

PRINCIPLES OF CHRISTIAN MORALITY DOMINANT IN AMERICAN SOCIETY.

The chief burden of American citizenship is the maintenance of law and order, the very framework of our society, without which it must decay or collapse. Now, all law and all compliance with law, where they do not rest upon force, must rest upon certain convictions as to what is good or bad, true or false, just or unjust. In other words, if we would have social peace and progress, there must be some code of morality, some fixed principles of conduct, which shall bind all citizens in their innermost conscience, and by their rock-like truth compel the voluntary adhesion of all to the action of rightly constituted authority. Our American society has hitherto accepted, broadly speaking, principles of Christian morality, as exemplified in the Gospel, the Ten Commandments, the best Christian example, and the immemorial teachings of Christian ethics. On the whole, our legislation has presupposed and confirmed the obligatory force of Christian principles and temper, both as to private conduct and public life. Our people have not yet written definitely into their lives, their laws, and their institutions any other ethical standard or spirit, pagan, agnostic, or opportunist. In this sense, we may yet be described as a Christian state, and Christian morality may yet be said to be the inner sustaining force of American life, in theory at least, in lingering admiration for its civilizing power, and its incomparable grip on men's souls, and in sheer incomprehension of any order of life which would prescind from it or reject it, logically and generally, as for example the Bolshevist régime in Russia or the recent communist fiascoes in Europe.

We may take it for granted then, that American citizenship can not be maintained at the high level of the past unless the education which produces it and sustains it be itself ensouled with the morality

of the Gospel and of the best Christian thought, example, and teaching. This seems a truism in view of the prevalent world conditions described by Pope Benedict: Lack of mutual good-will, contempt for authority, class conflict, pursuit of the perishable goods of this world, and utter disregard of the higher and nobler things of life.

After all, the best security for American education and thereby for American citizenship is religious training. For this we have the authority of George Washington in his farewell address:

Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness-these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens. The mere politician, equally with the pious man, ought to respect them. A volume could not trace all their connections with public and private felicity. Let it simply be asked: Where is the security for prosperity, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths which are the instruments of investigation in courts of justice? And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious teaching.

RELIGIOUS FAITH THE ULTIMATE GUIDE.

"Neither education nor philanthropy nor science nor progress can ever take the place of religion," says a certain good man. These merely intellectual agencies are no substitute for a supernatural faith that is a distinct light and guide from that of human reason. Something higher and nobler than flesh and blood, something eternal and immortal, broods over this world for the regeneration of man unto a destiny with God that the human mind within its own natural limitations can neither grasp nor comprehend. The man who knows the world as God's own work and every way related to a divine purpose escapes the hard pessimism of our modern life and its cold intellectual culture, in whose unhealthy light hope and ardor soon wither on the ashes of faith and love. Training in religion offers the highest motives for conduct and exhibits the best examples of a good life and in the holiness and justice of God presents the highest sources and sanctions of respect for authority and obedience to the laws. "Only too well," said Pope Benedict recently, "does experience show that when religion is banished human authority totters to its fall * * *. Likewise, when the rulers of the people disdain the authority of God, the people in turn despise the authority of man. There remains, it is true, the usual expedient of suppression by force; but to what effect? Force subdues the bodies of men, not their souls."

But what considerations can equal the example of Bolshevist Russia? Here is the largest and richest of the great western States a prey to every form of wrong and oppression that the imagination can conceive. Property, personal freedom, life, all rights and obligations, are trampled under foot, while a new, insane order of life is offered to the world. And the main idea of this revolution, the most ominous in history, is war against God and against every form of religion. Its blasphemous philosophy threatens us every hour, and its active world-wide propaganda ought to cause every sane patriotic mind to weigh well the true reasons and the real conditions of its growth and its power. It is the triumphant antithesis of the Christian order of life, and in its entirety the movement lives and thrives on hostility to religion. Could there be a better commentary on the sentiments of George Washington as to the close relations between the Christian religion and the public and private welfare of our people?

American citizenship, both at home and abroad, is henceforth charged with a heavy burden, the burden of development on all the true inner lines of our wonderful history, and the burden of the overseas world that has fallen down upon its duties, its opportunities, and its golden hopes. In regard to the domestic burden, may we not say, with Shakespeare:

To thine own self be true,

And it must follow as the day the night
Thou canst not then be false to any man.

PRESERVATION OF AMERICAN IDEALS.

We must conserve and perfect our American concept of virtue, private and political; a divine gift, it is true, but developed amid the immensities of nature and apart from the diseased social conditions of the Old World. We must gather in, unite, and assimilate the human elements forever attracted by the lodestar of our freedom and our prosperity, but let us atone for past neglect by wisdom, regularity, and humanity of our new philosophy in respect to the immigrant. We must imbue the mind of American youth with abundant reliable knowledge, elementary, technical, professional, liberal, in due proportion, and with due respect to conditions and circumstances, avoiding the pitfalls of the doctrinaire and the shallows of sciolism. We must recognize and enforce the great basic truth that the American man liveth not by bread alone nor for material ends only, but that he is a child of God, endowed with duties and rights which he must deal with morally, self-reliantly, indeed, but in all conscience as before his Maker and Judge.

As to the world burden imposed upon our American citizenship, we shall best meet its demands by the development of those national traits which distinguished us amid the scenes of conflict. The American citizen will be ever unselfish and self-sacrificing in face of the urgent needs of suffering humanity, but he will not be lacking in prudence, good sense, and moderation. He will not substitute himself for those who can and ought to work out their own salvation, nor become the common carrier of the sorrows and woes of all mankind. In the coming years, as the new political order of Europe develops, he will need to walk warily to avoid entanglements in a world habituated to them, and wont to free itself by ways and means that are not congenial to American citizenship. That citizenship must hold its own in the world by its traditional spirit and principles, concerned first with its own security and identity, and watchful ever lest its fiber be changed and a pure humanitarian service and temper take the place of our national consciousness, self-respect, and domestic obligations.

EDUCATION FOR HUMAN CULTURE.

ENOCH A. BRYAN,

State Commissioner of Education, Boise, Idaho.

We have discussed during the past few days educational obstacles, objectives, and ways and means.

Education has come to have a large place in the activities of the civilized races. Elaborate machinery has been designed, a multitude of men and women enlisted in the cause, and a great financial budget has been provided. Sundry ends to be attained have been pointed out and emphasized during this season, but, after all, it must not be forgotten that the great ulterior end is human culture.

It is well, before we separate, to emphasize the fact that a more complete manhood, a more perfect womanhood, a greater humanity, includes and is paramount to all other ends. We are apt to forget this when we fix our eye too steadily on near-by objectives.

We are a practical people. Man must have food, clothes, shelter. We will prepare him to secure these. He must till farms, build houses, build cities, traverse the land and the sea, dig out for use the precious and useful metals and minerals, span the floods, tunnel the mountains, fetch and carry about the earth his commodities; he must fly in the air, dive into the sea, print the news; communicate by wire and without wire with his fellow man; he must turn and overturn, and in doing so must create armies and navies and slay his fellow men by the millions. And that he may do all these things we will equip him with the knowledge and give him the occupational