FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote 34:  See some curious facts given in Darwin’s Origin of Species.]

[Footnote 35:  David Grieve, by Mrs. Humphry Ward, sixth edition, p. 401.]

[Footnote 36:  David Grieve, p. 524.]

[Footnote 37:  Nineteenth Century, May, 1892.]

CHAPTER X

NATIONAL AND IMPERIAL ASPECTS

I cannot conclude these imperfect suggestions as to how we may best carry up the moral training of our children, and especially of our boys, to a higher level, without touching on the wider and national aspect of the problems we have been considering.  Especially is this necessary in relation to that attribute which, in common parlance, arrogates to itself the name that covers the vast sweep of all moral obligation and calls itself emphatically “morality.”  “Language,” Dr. Martineau has finely said, “is the great confessional of the human heart”; and it may be in some instinctive sense that this question of personal purity or the reverse is the determining force for good or evil to the nation, as well as to the family, that has given this restricted sense to the words “morality” and “immorality.”  Yet we are possessed with an inveterate and almost irreclaimable tendency to look at the question of purity of life from a purely individualistic standpoint, and to regard it as a matter concerning the individual rather than the social organism.  In electing a member for the Legislature how often have we not been told that we are only concerned with his public career, and have nothing whatever to do with his private life, though the private life is only another expression for the man himself; and how can we be called upon to entrust the destinies of our country to a libertine who habitually violates the obligations of his own manhood and does his best to lower and degrade the womanhood of the people he is called as a member of the Legislature to protect and to raise?  When shall we learn that whatever touches the higher life and well-being of the family still more vitally affects the wider family of the State, and threatens its disintegration?  The family in some lower form will survive in the most corrupt form of society; but the State, as an organized polity, capable of embodying, preserving, and promoting the higher life of the nation, perishes.

I am the more led to dwell earnestly on these wider aspects, since that great epoch-making commemoration which marked the sixtieth year of the reign of our Queen, and which brought home to the consciousness of the nation, as nothing else has ever done, its vast world-wide responsibilities.  That great national festival, with its proud imperial note, in which we celebrated the rise and progress of that “larger Venice with no narrow canals, but the sea itself for streets,” will forever form a landmark in English