2--Respectability measures conduct in terms of the average performance, the average praise and blame, or the average acquiescent silence, of a limited society, instead of directly evaluating the consequences of an act for all the persons concerned. Conventional standards are not useless, of course, but they lack full ethical objectivity, and for this reason they can conceal as well as reveal. I can be “honest” in a transaction that is cruel; I can obey all the ten commandments and yet lack the one essential thing. Because the standards of respectability are not derived from the consequences of conduct to all persons concerned, but only some, it comes about that, without losing self-respect or forfeiting caste, respectable men as a fact do share in acts that result in nearly every form of inhumanity. 3--Respectability, fixing an artificial horizon-line for social fellowship, prevents us from knowing either ourselves or human nature in the large. We cannot know ourselves or others by merely noting how we respond to one another in a club or clique. Many a hitherto conventional individual has found liberation and enlargement by fishing with an illiterate guide, riding with a cow-puncher, attending a meeting of radicals, doing social work in the slums, or getting acquainted with criminals or harlots. Between Jesus and such persons there was no barrier of respectability, as, on the opposite side, he had no prejudice towards persons of wealth, power, or culture. When church membership connotes respectability, let the church beware! Its Master did not belong to the respectable classes. The deep danger here is retardation of spiritual growth followed by fixation, self-complacency, and the use of one’s power against the influences that make for a broader, more humane life. 4--Coordinate with this encysting of our ethical capacities is the habit, almost universal in respectable circles, of shunting the blame for the evils of the world to other classes of society. Even in America, where we have made so large a beginning of trust in the common man, it has been customary to assume that the main danger to the republic inheres in the “lower classes,” which term denotes now the uneducated, now the unpropertied, now the hand-workers, now the immigrants, now the discontented. The fact is that every major peril that we have encountered has had its seat “above” the “lower classes.” Sectionalism, slavery, political partizanship, corrupt politics, a depraved civil service, dominance of government by the money power--these do not spring from the less privileged classes, however much these classes may have been used by leaders. If, as common opinion has it, civil government reaches its lowest level in our cities, the reason is found, not in the character of the masses of city dwellers, but in the forces that organize them, use them, and exploit them for profit or for the advancement of a political party and the financial interests back of it.