The Richmond palladium and sun-telegram. [volume] (Richmond, Ind.) 1907-1939, 1913-11-29
Social Morality

"Moses looked this way and that and THEN
slew the Egyptian" The Book Of Exodus was
written long while ago, but even then man S
social environment tied itself to his conscience
and thwarted or encouraged moral action.
But if then how much more today! In those
times and since until two or three genera
lions ago, everything was based on individual
ism. The large majority lived in tiny villages
and hamlets and were almost isolated from the
great world around. Morality and religion were
both quarantned within limits and man
almost lived unto himself and died unto himself
Doing right and being bad were, for the most
part mere neighborhood matters. Each individ-
ual felt himself almost entirely responsible for
his own acts and condition, and the appeals made
to him were addressed to his Individual con-
science. Religion pretty much matter of
private piety and ethics was translated in the
terms of man and his next neighbor
But today how different! No longer does a
man live or die unto himself. No longer are we
segregated in villages where the rustic cackle of
the gossps and the oracles of rural wiseacres
are taken for the murmur of the world. No long
er is the local parson the community's sole ency-
copedia of religious and political knowledge. Lo-
calities have ceased to be independent and those
scattered atoms of humanity are fused into a
homogeneous mass.
Railways traction cars mail service, news
papers, steamship lines, cables, wireless, automo-
biles, telegraph and telephone have the
warp and the wosf of human lives into contin-
uous web that stretches around the world like
the mystic cloth of the Lady of Shallott.
Along all these living filaments of commu-
nication the highest blessings of the age be-
ing sent out to the last in the world so that
the desert places and the wastes made glad
But the same wires that carry good may also
carry evil.
Every individual is tied up to the race. We
must rise fall together. No stand
alone. Every act affects every other person and
his acts. There is no such thing as private NOR
atty. because nothing is private any more. A
mans thoughts reveal themselves in mans life
and get published from the house-tops at last
One can't be good by HIMSELF he must be good
by wholesale.
Whether we like it or not we are caught in
this web that binds us all up together and any
effort at reforming that doesn't lift all at
will always be a waste of time. There was
a time when a revivast could gather up his
sheaf of individual souls unto the harvest of the
Lord and leave the parish feeling his work would
live after him. But now when the same Cody
pricks the private conscience and cOnvicts
the private soul unto righteousness and then
goes away, he leaves operating behind him the
forces and the social machinery which tear all
down at once. He finds the water runs through
the open spigot faster than he can mop it from
the floor.
There is but way by which we can get
ourselves saved and that is by collectively work
ing to right those permanent forces and condi-
tions which surround us all and put right the
causes of immortality. To life a solitary drunk
ard from the depths and then leave him to sub
side back into the very conditions which made
him drunkard is not salvation but exaspera-
ton. Let us set ourselves to the building of safe
and solid foundations for this society which
binds us all into itself and we shall find all other
things added unto us.
The Recearch R,rao,, MI O,,. pra.t