THE VOLUME VI, Number I STANDARD JULY, 1919 T A LUSTRAL NUMBER HE STANDARD published this midsummer number for two reasons. The first is to bring the attention of its readers more closely to the summer activities of the Societies. Because our Sunday exercises are suspended from May to October, it does not mean that our ethical convictions are in a state of suspended animation, or that we aestivate, as bruin hibernates, to come forth for the next winter's moral drive. There is no break on the second Sunday in May in our concern for the increase of every good cause which we have advocated since the second Sunday in October. We need go to no farther remote teacher than that very indifferent pedagogue St. Tammany to learn that eternal alertness is the price of triumph. Besides emphasizing the continuity of our ethical program, this number has the further purpose of celebrating the completion of the fifth year of THE STANDARD. It is already a truism (but a truism whose tremendous truth will grow on each succeeding generation) that the fiveyear period since the outbreak of the War of the Nations has been the most momentous period in the history of mankind. In the extent, the depth, and the rapidity of the changes which it has brought it ( ) makes such epochal movements as the French Revolution look local, superficial, and slow. Men stand aghast at the havoc and wreck of the world they knew but yesterday: the political world with its empires shattered, its kings in exile, its crowns and scepters in the ash heap, and new states rising phoenix-like from the ashes; the economic world with its paralyzed industries facing demoralized markets, its transportation systems crippled, its labor uncertain whether to wreck the pillars of society or to work for mounting wages to build their foundations anewhalting between Catiline and Gompers; the financial world with its debts in some parts approaching fifty per cent of its wealth, and its currency and prices so inflated that neither bears any assignable relation to values. All these problems, which our age, at least, considers the major concern of men, are challenging the skill of the experts of reconstruction. And we can but wish them all success in their mighty task. But deep down below the "practical" measures of the statesman and the economist, and, we believe, in the long run conditioning their success, is the ethical question of the spirit in which men face. this crisis and this task. How shall punishment be made healing and peace go hand in hand with her sister righteousness? How shall mercy temper justice, and hate be rebuked in the counsels of peace as it was condemned in the conduct of war? The short-sighted clamor for vengeance only; the wise will desire reconciliation through justice. The peoples of antiquity performed 274095 many lustral, or purifying, ceremonies with water and fire, sacrifices, incantations, processions, and mysteries. Three occasions especially called for those rites : contact with the elemental facts of death and life in touching a corpse or bearing a child; awe in the face of an overwhelming disaster like defeat in arms or the raging of a plague; and preparation for a great undertaking, like the dispatch of a military expedition or the foundation of a great public work. Every fifth year, when the census (lustrum) was taken, the Romans purified the entire city by the lustral procession of the sacrificial pig, sheep, and bull about the walls. This is the world's lustral year. During the quinquennial period just past, its hands have touched many awful forms of death, it has seen its cities and fields. mercilessly devastated, and now comes the blessing of the banners of its crusade for recovery-a sorer task perchance than even the battles in Flanders and France. It shall be our lustral year, too, as we labor to purify our hearts and minds of all that poisons justice and corrodes righteousness; as we gird our loins to serve this crying age by speech or silence, by act or patience. No one man or nation shall redeem the world. As of old the least of the people brought their stone of offering to build the cathedral of the community, so to-day it will be through the sum of countless contributions of men of good will that the edifice of a fairer temple of humanity shall rise. Whether our contribution be small or great the gods, not we, decide; but small or great, if it is our best, it is indispensable. D. S. M. MUCH AMERICAN JUNKERS AND BOLSHEVISTS* BY JOHN L. ELLIOTT UCH of the intense excitement that centered around the contending armies seems to have transferred itself to the struggle now going on between opposing ideas. These ideas find their representatives and adherents not in different nations but in groups that are in the same nation. Class consciousness as well as na tional consciousness has been greatly intensified by the war. In Russia the class struggle seems to have actually become war. In Germany, the Socialists are in control. In England trade unions have formed themselves into what promises to be the most potent influence not only in determining the political but also the economic policy of the nation. In America, while no one is far seeing enough to hazard a prediction, nearly everyone is expecting a period of unrest and of struggle. *An address delivered before the Ethical Societies of New York and St. Louis. Between classes, as recently between nations, the greatest misunderstanding exists. It is not only national boundaries and national consciousness that keep men from understanding each other's purposes. Dangerous misunderstandings can exist between people of different groups in the same nation and the same city-between groups having ideas which, if carried to their logical conclusion, are bound to lead to strife. I have called the opposing groups in this country American Junkers and Bolshevists. I have only used these terms as the newspapers use themin a loose way-but I do nevertheless believe that in America there classes contending for privilege and classes contending for radical and fundamental changes, that may fairly be described by these terms. are To understand how these extreme groups think we have to try to under stand how any group comes to think as it does. Have you ever found yourself in a company of physicians and felt yourself to be an outsider with respect to their essential thought and life? Is it not true that whether they will admit it or not there is a sort of tacit understanding among them that their aims and purposes are really the most important in the world? They are of course courteous as to the opinions and aims of others but it seems as if there were an understanding among them that in the last analysis everything must be secondary to their work. Is it not so with the other groups, the lawyers, the engineers? This may seem like a trivial matter but practically it is not trivial. For the past six or seven years I have been associated with a large group of printers and while we get on amicably enough it has been repeatedly made manifest to me that I never can be really one of the fraternity because I cannot set type. I am not of the trade. And is this not true of each of us? Do we not belong to some company, usually some group of workers who have read the same books, who have the same purposes, whose vital interests are the same; and although it may never be expressed, perhaps would never be admitted, is it not true that there is is the groundwork of common belief that our work is the most important in the world? Each aggregation of human beings, especially if it is intensified by organization, is likely to regard itself. as the leading and probably the dominating group by virtue of something very much like divine right. Or, if not by divine right, then by a sort of natural right. In America it has been the great captains of industry who, on the whole, have been the dominating and controlling factor in our recent history, and it seems to me natural enough that they should come to believe that they are the proper persons to control national affairs. America has succeeded not by virtue of anything so much as by the power of her great executives. I do not mean to say that all business men in this country are Junkers or reactionaries. I know well enough that this is not true. But I do mean to say that it is from the class of business and political executives that our Junker group is recruited, just as it is from the laborers that our extreme radicals or, as the papers call them, our Bolshevists, are recruited. And each of these groups has the feeling that it is supremely in the right and that its purposes ought to become universal. It is unfortunately easy in this country, perhaps in others, for some one class or set to capture the machinery of government and conduct it for its own interests—at least in the interests of its own ideals. We have just had a demonstration of this sort in the methods by which prohibition has been foisted on the country. For many years I have believed in prohibition.-believed in it entirely, as I still do, but I find myself bitterly opposed to the methods that have been used by a small but effective organization to browbeat legislatures into submission. If prohibitionists can command so great an influence it is not difficult to understand how other and more important interests can do it. The representatives of great business interests, for instance, being exceedingly capable men, and believing themselves the only proper custodians. of national destiny have, for many years, been able to influence legislatures and federal departments in exactly the same way. It is true toc that organized labor has, more particularly during the war, exerted the same kind of authority and influence. Whenever either one of these groups gets into control it unfortunately gives, by its extreme action, a certain degree of confidence to its opponents. It is the extreme reactionaries who foster the extreme radicals and it is the extreme radicals who give a raison d'être to the reactionaries. Of course when anything is done in this country it is always done in the name of freedom, democracy and law, but in reality it is very likely to be done in the interest of some small group in the community. We grow very tired of this false terminology, approaching sometimes very close to hyprocrisy. The pirate Hawkins was no less a pirate because he gave some |