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.

On the other hand, men of moral excellence make us ashamed.  Now it takes a rarely magnanimous spirit to be shamed and not resent it.  We are apt to feel that, if we can pull another down, we raise ourselves.  To realize this, consider the growl of joy that comes from the worse sort of citizen and newspaper when some public leader is caught in a private scandal.  As if pulling him down, raised us!  We are all tarred with his disgrace.  There are, indeed, two ways of stating the ideal of democracy:  you can say, “I am just as good as any one else,” which in the first place, is not true, and, in the second, would be unlovely of you to express, were it true.  You can say, on the contrary, “Every other human being ought to have just as good a chance as I have,” which is right; and yet you will hear the ideal of democracy phrased a dozen times the first way, where it is expressed once in the second form.