Moreover, this is not a matter merely of the bad men whom we read about in the newspapers, but one of personal guilt in all of us. It is my observation that the same wrongs which are held up to execration in the magazines are present, under appropriate forms, among teachers, lawyers, ministers, reputable tradesmen, and others who come under my immediate notice. We are all in it: the narrow principles are much the same, the differences being largely in the scale of operations, in being or not being found out, in more or less timidity in taking risks, and so on. A somewhat similar problem is that of energizing indirect service. The groups we serve—the nation, the educational institution, the oppressed class, for instance—have come to be so vast, and often so remote from the eye, that even the ingenuity of the newspaper and magazine press can hardly make them alive for us and draw our hearts and our money in their direction. The “we” does not live in face-to-face contact, and though photo-engravings and stereopticons and exhibitions and vivid writing are a marvelous substitute, they are often inadequate, so that we do not feel the cogency of the common interest so immediately as did the men of the clans. “Civilization,” says Professor Simon Patten, “spares us more and more the sight of anguish, and our imaginations must be correspondingly sharpened to see in the check-book an agent as spiritual and poetic as the grime and blood-stain of ministering hands.”[178] How far this may come to pass it is hard to say: for myself, I do not find it easy to write checks for objects that are not made real to me by some sort of personal contact. No doubt, however, our growing system of voluntary institutions—churches, philanthropic societies, fraternal orders, labor unions and the like—are training us in the habit of expressing ourselves through the check-book and other indirect agents.