Plato argued that society could never have patriotism in full measure until the family was abolished. A singular notion that any school boy to-day can readily answer, yet here is the curious situation. Family life, among ourselves, in its better aspects, has reached a higher plane than ever before in any people. More marriages are made on the only decent basts of any marriage. This is the woman's land. Children have their rights and privileges, even to their physical, mental and moral detriment. It is here that men most willingly sacrifice for their families, slaving through the hot summer in the cities, to send wife and children to the seashore or the mountains; yet it is just here that men most readily unhinge their consciences when they turn from private to public life. Some cynic has said that there is not an American citizen who would not smuggle to please his wife. Of course the statement is not true, but if you have ever crossed the ocean on a transatlantic liner, and watched the devices to which ordinarily decent men--men who would be ashamed to steal your pocket handkerchief or to lie to you as an individual--will resort, in order to lie to the government or steal from the government, you begin to wonder if the cynic was not right. The law, obviously, may be unjust: if so, protest against it and seek to have it changed, but while it is the law, does it not deserve your respectful obedience, unless you would add to the dangerously growing disrespect for all law? Next to the menace of selfishness is that of ignorance, and this, too, takes confusingly new form. It is not ignorance of scientific fact and law, dangerous as that is, that threatens, but ignorance of what our institutions mean, of what they have cost, of the ideal for which we stand among the nations. The celerity with which, even during the past two decades, the younger generation has abandoned old standards and ideals, is an ominous illustration. It is true: "New occasions teach new duties, time makes ancient goods uncouth; 'They must upward still, and onward, who would keep abreast of Truth." Those words of Lowell's are as fully applicable to the present crisis, as to that for which Lowell wrote them; but to give up the past, without knowing that you are letting go, is surely not the part of wisdom. A third menace shows in that fickleness of temper and false standard of life that cause us to admire the wrong type of leader. Probably one half of all the attacks on men of unusual wealth and success come from other men, who would like to be in the same situation with those they attack, and have failed of their ambition. Part of the attack is sincere, no doubt, but if you assumed that all the abuse heaped upon conspicuous men came from moral conviction, you would utterly misread the situation.