Now, all this is not cause for railing accusation but for thoughtful analysis. And the dominant cause is not far to seek. Where effort to translate ideals into realities is met by a barrier of official indifference, it is not strange if men give their time to dreaming rather than actualizing their visions. Where belief and conduct are prescribed and commercialism dominates the moral lives of men, it is easy to see that initiative is crippled at its source. Where a people is divested of responsibility for the final outcome and taught to pay the price and "believe or be damned," it is a rash spirit that will try to do more than dream dreams and write books and project utopias. Without the incentive of encouragement to produce practical results, no real efficiency has ever appeared among any people. There are accusations of moral duplicity among Latin-American peoples. More serious and fundamental than impotent idealism, this defect registers itself in perversion of public trust, in the degradation of public office to the uses of private gain, in deception, graft, and greed. Promises are easy, but performances are delayed until the would-be enterprising citizen gives up in despair. In regard to this two things are to be said. In the first place, our own records as a people will not bear any too close inspection. Aside from race riots and labor disturbances, our Civil War furnishes our only revolution, except the one that produced the original United States. But when it comes to political prostitution of public office and the invention of grafting schemes, large and small, our own history does not give us much ground for boasting. And many a "revolution" has caused less bloodshed than a North American labor row. [Illustration: MANDY DID HER SHARE] Further, so far as there is a difference between the conduct of the North and South, the explanation is not far to seek. Once admit the validity of the principle that it is right to do wrong for a good end, and a whole stream of moral duplicity is turned loose in public and private life. Jesuitism will account for almost any moral lapse in a land where all thinking has come under the spell of a creed in which the end justifies the means. [Illustration: THE CANAL DIGGER] Let this principle be ever so carefully guarded and proscribed, so long as human nature remains what it is, where personal interests are at stake the individual is going to be his own final judge of the value of the end for which the means are devised. And on the basis of every man adapting means to his own ends we have moral chaos.