Laws will not of themselves exterminate the least of the social evils, save as they correspond to a previous clear recognition of their wisdom and justice in the free minds of citizens. If graft and privilege express the habitual manner of doing business, the natural mental reaction of the average man of the community, then it will be true, as an investigating committee has said, that there is no virtue in the legislative printing press. Philanthropy is no cure for the evils which cause crime, poverty, squalor, and degeneracy. It is a necessary means of dealing with certain definite conditions, but those conditions are symptoms of ulterior maladies which the charitable relation does not reach. Neither alms-giving nor preventive measures touch the real sources of regeneration and health. Education, in the specific sense of preparation for efficient work and the development of the mental powers, such education as by mutual consent we expect from our public schools, does not begin early enough, or last long enough, or go far enough into the fields of personal habits, ideals, and motives to guard even against ignorance, at least that kind of wilful and appalling ignorance which prevents half the world from knowing how the other half lives, even when the facts are spread abroad equally in official reports and in popular literature; that kind of ignorance which blinds the eyes of the more favored of fortune and blasts the tender shoots of altruism which their hearts here and there put forth. If education cannot prevent even ignorance of this kind how much less can it be regarded as a remedy for deliberate exploitation and conscienceless greed. If neither revolution nor laws nor yet formal education can cure these root evils, is there no cure? There is one potent, wholly efficacious cure, and that is such teaching and such an experience as will supplant selfishness and greed by generosity and compassion, the desire for privilege by the desire for equal opportunity, the instinct of injustice by the passion for justice, the tendency to exploit by the tendency to nobly serve, ignorance and neglect by a clear-eyed and persistent determination to know and understand and to act on that knowledge and understanding. This teaching, wherever it is carried on and in whatever name, is essentially religious teaching, and this experience, seizing upon the individual, is nothing else than a religious conversion. This is not to distort words from their established and usual meaning but only to apply them as they must be applied.