A VISION OF AMERICAN CITIZENSHIP 257 



of lawless feeling, a deliberate contempt for law enactment 

 and law enforcement, which is at present somewhat in the 

 formless shape of a philosophic theory, but which pervades 

 a large portion of our people. It is not confined to those who 

 call themselves Socialists, Liberals or even Anarchists; it 

 rather has its roots and being in those who have, as the phrase 

 is, "a stake in the country." It is a deliberate setting of the 

 individual opinion above the enacted law, and it is carrying out 

 a practical defiance to that law. In its lowest stage, it mani- 

 fests itself in petty evasions of the law, whether by subter- 

 fuge, trickery or graft; in its highest, it calmly sneers at the 

 statutes, and even buys representatives among officials, legis- 

 latures and perhaps in the courts. It is the very antithesis 

 of the orderly conduct of human affairs, and it is the breeder 

 of more social disorder than even the wildest agitator. It 

 is the survey of these things that makes the poor man rebel, 

 the one of small means cherish hatred and envy towards his 

 fellow-man, and produces the discontent which finally leads to 

 open outbreak. 



The cause of these two phenomena may be ascribed largely 

 to the mere piling up of material things to the neglect of the 

 moral and intellectual side of man. Nor by intellectual side 

 must we mean merely the ability to use and profit by book 

 knowledge and mentality. That is merely surface intellect — 

 and every modern business venture requires a substantial por- 

 tion of that in order to become even approximately successful. 

 The neglect of the intellectual side refers rather to an atrophy, 

 a deadening and a blinding of the light-appreciating powers 

 in the mind of every man. To illustrate it, I can do no better 

 than to cite the instance mentioned in the book "Is Mankind 

 Advancing?" where the Western farmer, surveying his past 

 at the close of a successful life, discovered to his consterna- 

 tion that he had spent his entire existence in growing corn to 

 feed hogs in order to make money so as to buy more land on 

 which to grow corn to feed more hogs, in order to buy more 

 land on which to grow more corn to raise more hogs, and so 

 on. No doubt he employed a corner of his intellect for the 

 accomplishment of the result, but the entire performance, 

 like many more instances in our modern world, can hardly be 

 called intellectual. 



And when I speak of the neglect of the moral side of man's 



