Are we then murderers, all of us? Perhaps a distinction may be drawn between acts which in themselves are hostile to the life of fellowmen, like overtaxing the worker, and acts which tend positively to maintain the higher values of life,—such as the providing of decent shelter, support and education, for the members of one’s family. It is true that, as Tolstoy warns us, we easily slip into indefensible luxury under the pretence of maintaining the higher values. But this does not affect the validity of the distinction itself. And yet the distinction does not relieve us of what may be called our share of the social or collective guilt. The exploiter is chargeable with individual guilt. I who am trying to keep up the standard of civilized living within my little sphere am nevertheless conscious of participating in the social guilt, the guilt of a society that has permitted and still permits such misery to exist. Well, it does exist, and I can do but a very little to change it. Can I then endure the contrast between my own lot and that of the greater number. Is it not true after all that if I give up the comforts, or let me say the helps to the maintenance of the higher values, I should be saving the lives of many children? Those children are dying because I am not dividing my possessions among the poor. Can I stand up and look at that fact, at those deaths? The only answer which it is possible to give at the point we have thus far reached in our exposition is: push on, perfect civilization, a way will eventually be found to uplift the masses and make them partakers of the future civilization. The other alternative, that of Tolstoy, is stagnation. Yet I cannot disguise from myself the fact that in the meanwhile, while we are trying to push on, millions are perishing. This is the true “burden of world pain,” not the sentimental world pain due to the fact that one is not having oneself the best kind of a time in the world, but the pain caused by the fact that while we are reaching forward to help the suffering masses, those masses, though composed of individuals morally as worth while as ourselves, and many of them doubtless better, if we only knew it, are perishing before our very eyes, and that we stand by and cannot save them. I have said that in the meanwhile while we are trying to push on, millions are perishing. The actual moral problem so often overlooked is underlined in the words “in the meanwhile.” There is one pathetic consolation. Envy is not the widespread vice which it is sometimes represented to be. Those who are in trouble take the will very largely for the deed. People in the worst conditions are grateful to anyone who shows a real desire to help, even if his actual performance does not go very far. And there is a still finer trait in ordinary human nature, namely, the tendency to find a certain vicarious relief in the joy of the few, provided that their joy be pure.