Such ordinary, every-day qualities include the will and the power to work, to fight at need, and to have plenty of healthy children.  The need that the average man shall work is so obvious as hardly to warrant insistence.  There are a few people in every country so born that they can lead lives of leisure.  These fill a useful function if they make it evident that leisure does not mean idleness; for some of the most valuable work needed by civilization is essentially non-remunerative in its character, and of course the people who do this work should in large part be drawn from those to whom remuneration is an object of indifference.  But the average man must earn his own livelihood.  He should be trained to do so, and he should be trained to feel that he occupies a contemptible position if he does not do so; that he is not an object of envy if he is idle, at whichever end of the social scale he stands, but an object of contempt, an object of derision.

In the next place, the good man should be both a strong and a brave man; that is, he should be able to fight, he should be able to serve his country as a soldier, if the need arises.  There are well-meaning philosophers who declaim against the unrighteousness of war.  They are right only if they lay all their emphasis upon the unrighteousness.  War is a dreadful thing, and unjust war is a crime against humanity.  But it is such a crime because it is unjust, not because it is war.  The choice must ever be in favor of righteousness, and this whether the alternative be peace or whether the alternative be war.  The question must not be merely, Is there to be peace or war?  The question must be, Is the right to prevail?  Are the great laws of righteousness once more to be fulfilled?  And the answer from a strong and virile people must be, “Yes,” whatever the cost.  Every honorable effort should always be made to avoid war; just as every honorable effort should always be made by the individual in private life to keep out of a brawl, to keep out of trouble; but no self-respecting individual, no self-respecting nation, can or ought to submit to wrong.

Finally, even more important than ability to work, even more important than ability to fight at need, is it to remember that the chief of blessings for any nation is that it shall leave its seed to inherit the land.  It was the crown of blessings in Biblical times; and it is the crown of blessings now.  The greatest of all curses is the curse of sterility, and the severest of all condemnations should be that visited upon wilful sterility.  The first essential in any civilization is that the man and the woman shall be father and mother of healthy children, so that the race shall increase and not decrease.  If this is not so, if through no fault of the society there is failure to increase, it is a great misfortune.  If the failure is due to deliberate and wilful fault, then it is not merely a misfortune, it is one of those crimes of ease and self-indulgence, of shrinking from