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And yet we ought solemnly to consider that no public movement is possible, based on a principle of ethics either much higher or far lower than the average moral standard of the citizen. Such is the intricacy of society that not only is it difficult to trace chains of cause and effect, but even the single link is often inscrutable. The lack of high principle in individuals undoubtedly lies at the foundation of immoral public action, but on the other hand popular movements powerfully influence private judgment. Hence remedies for both evils are essential, and with every suggestion for the organization of agitations there must be an appeal to the pure standard of personal morality which John Bright hoped might be the measure of state action. Here, therefore, is the great opportunity of the church. For one, I believe in political preaching, not to advocate partisan measures but to bring to every listener the most difficult lesson that emotional, intellectual, and practical morality are one and the same thing. The counting house, the polling booth, and the church have not different morals nor different theories. The history of progress has been a history of the separation of organs. The early king was legislative, judiciary, and executive all in one. Now we have a hundred thousand men to carry on all the nice divisions and subdivisions into which each of these functions is cut up. So also with the occupations of men. A single pioneer builds a whole house, is architect, carpenter, mason, plasterer, and what-not. In high civilization each man of the forty trades calledinto requisition by house-building can do but one small thing, and his capacities in every other direction suffer atrophy. And so in the intricacy of our modern lives we are often scrupulously moral on one side, but find it, alas! most difficult to be moral all around; in our relations to the State as well as in our relations to persons like ourselves; in the fervor of religious emotion and in the reaction of commonplace trade or profession; in the quiet of well regulated private life and in the mad tumult of public business. Morality without the sanction of religion is, I believe, of doubtful possibility, but too often the charge is brought that what passes for religion is common enough without morality. If this reproach were taken home by the church, and the remedy found, the pension grab would find its place under the rubric of the moral law where it belongs. We would hear less said about law-abiding citizens like pensioners under a disability or service statute, and more about good men; less of legality and more of duty, less of economic socialism and more of personal exertion for ourselves and others.

Nothing which has been said above is intended to destroy the sentiment of gratitude for the soldier, or the moral obligation of any individual in this great nation, expressed in the immortal words of Lincoln's second inaugural.

With malice toward none, with charity for all; with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

But the words are: "who shall have borne the battle." The honor of such is magnified in the receipt of the country's ungrudged gifts, the honest pensioner is the stimulus to patriotism of the generations which grow up about his knees. Reverence and love are his due, for his example calls for imitation; and the assurance of ease in his declining years is the guarantee of similar self-sacrifice when danger again appears. Heroism and patience mark the loftiest type of character. Let those whose welfare has been secured by his suffering praise him in the gate and shower their benefactions upon him as far as may be consistent with his manhood. The nation has nothing but the tenderest interest in such as these. It is for the sake of his honor, to preserve unfading his hard-earned laurels that we protest against the shame of legislation which in his name depletes our purse in the interest of pension brokers, and against the undiscriminating lavishness which draws no distinction between suffering heroes and those who should be content with the honor, which pales before no other, of having saved their country in the hour of her greatest need.

Wm. M. Sloane.