If we would appreciate our own morals and religion we are often advised to consider primitive man and his institutions. If we would evaluate marriage or property, we are often directed to study our remote ancestors.... Such considerations as these have diverse effects according to our temperaments. They quite uniformly produce, however, disillusionment and sophistication.... This exaltation of the past, as the ancestral home of all that we are, may make us regret our loss of illusions and our disconcerting enlightenment.... We may break with the past, scorn an inheritance so redolent of blood and lust and superstition, revel in an emancipation unguided by the discipline of centuries, strive to create a new world every day, and imagine that, at last, we have begun to make progress.[1] [Footnote 1: Woodbridge: _The Purpose of History_, p. 72.] The standards of value of the things we have or do or say, the approvals or disapprovals we should logically accord them, are determined not by their history, not by their past, but by their uses in the living present in which we live. An institution may have served the purposes of a bygone generation; it does not follow that it thereby serves our own. The reverse may similarly be true. For us the specific features of our social inheritance depend upon the ends or purposes which we reflectively decide upon and accept. Whether capital punishment is good or evil; whether private property is an adequate or inadequate institution for social welfare; whether marriage is a perfect or an imperfect institution; whether collective bargaining, competitive industry, old age insurance, income taxes, nationalization of railroads are useful or pernicious depends neither on their age nor their novelty. Their value is determined by their relevancy to our own ideals, by the extent to which they hinder or promote the results which we consciously desire. The past may be studied with a view to clarifying present issues. In the first place, we may study past successes and failures in order to guide our actions in present similar situations. A man setting out to organize and administer a newspaper will benefit by the experiences others have had in the same situation. In the same way, we can learn from past history something, at least, bearing on present political and social issues. It is true enough that history has been much misused for the drawing of lessons and guidance. As Professor Robinson says: