MORALITY, MONDAYS AT NINE

For centuries the very slow progress of morality through processes of natural evolution has proved a constant reproach to the more virtuous and earnest members of the human race. Law, persecution, and reform have all been tried as experiments for forcing people, to measure up to the proper moral standards, but have alike proved failures in the attempt at wholesale elevation of human morality.

And now comes a new and more ingenious suggestion for making morality a commodity of wholesale consumption. The element of force is still predominant in this twentieth century attempt to bring about the reign of virtue, but the force instead of being externally applied, as through law, is to be internally administered by means of education. The proposal in its concrete form, is a bill introduced in to the Nebraska State Legislature, by State Senator Allen S. Stinson, a former school teacher, providing for courses in "common honesty, morality, courtesy, obedience to law, respect to the flag, respect for parents and the home, and the dignity and necessity of honest labor," to be given in all the grade and high schools of the state. The standards which these courses are to meet and the way in which they are to perform their somewhat difficult mission will all be cared for by that worthy individual, the state superintendant of schools.

Without questioning the competence of successive superintendants to pass judgement on just the sort of morality, honesty, and respect which should be instilled in their youthful charges one is still somewhat puzzled on trying to visualize the future morality course in actual operation. Such vexing matters as the text book of morality which should be chosen or its proper interpretation, just how honesty is to be made the guiding principle of a prominent swindler's son, or how respect for the flag is to be inspired without arousing dangerous international antipathies indicate a more difficult problem than the Senator seems to contemplate. Finally we are led to wonder how the youthful Nebraskans are to be instructed in the proper sense of the dignity of honest labor. Will they be shown what ravages idleness wrecked on the civilizations of antiquity, or will they by any chance be taught to learn the next day's grammar and arithmetic and history a little more thoroughly than under the old regime of the immorality and vice?