dazzling outside may cover a black heart. Illustrate this fact to him by the story of those beautiful flowers whose sweet odor is laden with death. Tell him of William M. Tweed, whose gigantic thefts almost bankrupted a great city, yet who read a chapter in his Bible every day, and who possessed many kind and even noble qualities. Many other public men of ancient and modern times will afford equally striking examples of inconsistency.

A certain excellent country gentleman, who did not realize the possible deceitfulness of the outside, went down to the capital of his state to see about some bills which vitally affected his business. He had written to the Senator from his section that he was coming and had asked for an appointment to meet him. He had never met this man, but the papers had criticized him severely, and our friend was prepared to encounter a mean and churlish creature.

"Instead," he reported upon his return to his home, "I found him a perfect gentleman. He met me at the train and took me to my hotel in his own automobile, and invited me to dine with him the next day. He lives in a beautiful home. I was surprised to see what kind of a man he really is. You would think by the way the papers go on about him that he had horns and hoofs, but," he repeated, "he was a perfect gentleman."

Yet this man was one of the most dangerous "practical politicians" in the state—one of those who believe that the Ten Commandments have no place in politics, and who scrupled at nothing which could benefit himself and his friends. He simply could not understand a man who could "swear to his own hurt and change not."

"Unlike the old-time villain," says Mr. E. A. Reed, "the latter-day malefactor does not wear a slouch-hat and a comforter, and breathe forth curses and an odor of gin. Fagin and Bill Sykes and Simon Legree are vanishing types. Good, kindly men let the wheels of commerce and industry redden rather than pare their dividends, and our railroads yearly injure one employee in twenty-six, while we look in vain for that promised day of the Lord, which shall make 'a man more precious than fine gold.'"

And, again, "The tropical belt of sin into which we are now sweeping is largely impersonal. The hurt passes into that vague mass, 'the public,' and is there lost to view. Hence it does not take a Borgia to knead 'chalk and alum and plaster' into the loaf, seeing that one cannot know just who will eat that loaf. The purveyor of spurious life-preservers need not be a Cain. The owner of rotten tenements, whose 'pull' enables him to ignore the orders of the Health Department, fore-dooms babies, it is true, but for all that, he is no Herod.

"Often there are no victims. If the crazy hulk sent out for 'just one more trip' meets with fair weather, all is well. Briber and grafter are now 'good men,' and would have passed for virtuous in the American community of seventy years ago. Therefore, people do not always see that boodling is treason; that blackmail is piracy, that tax-dodging is larceny. The cloven hoof hides in patent leather, and to-day, as in Hosea's time, the people are destroyed for lack of knowledge."

Let us see to it that our children are not so destroyed.

In the old abolition days, Mr. Emerson wrote: "What an education in the public spirit of Massachusetts have been the speeches and reading of our public schools! Every district school has been an anti-slavery convention for these two or three years last past."

Special policies cannot often be taught like this in the modern public school, but the broad principles of pure politics can and should be.

For instance, a lesson in Civil Service management may be given without once uttering those words, simply by teaching the sentiment well uttered by Ruskin: "The first necessity of social life is the clearness of the national conscience in enforcing the law,—that he should keep who has justly earned."

Children can be taught the dangers, not only to their principles, but their worldly fortunes, of office-seeking and of making a profession of politics. The child of wealth should be especially instructed in his duty to look after the affairs of his own town, county, state and nation. The man whose powers are strained to the utmost in order to support and educate his family, can of necessity give little time to the searching out of civic wrongs and their remedies. The well-to-do citizen must give all the more to make up for the limitations of his poorer neighbor.

Children can be taught, too, something of the protean forms of bribery, the schemes for trading votes; the duty of every voter to vote and do jury-work; the need of looking at every question from both sides; of avoiding blind partisanship; and much of the rest of the elementary ethics of politics.

And, again, it is upon the mother that this patriotic duty must chiefly devolve. As with all of her training, she may often feel that the work is slow and uncertain, but she may well take to heart the encouraging words of the poet: