THE COMPOSITE OF RACES AND RELIGIONS IN AMERICA. 245 



with moral and religious safeguards and in providing educa- 

 tional advantages for tliose who had no opportunities early in 

 life, or who may be compelled to toil during the day ; the use 

 of public scliools as social and neighbourhood centres out of 

 hours ; the establishment of playgrounds and other places of 

 physical enjoyment and recreation ; and a multitude of other 

 agencies, all looking to the betterment of social conditions and 

 the perfecting of the social order. 



I instance these efforts to lessen, and so far as possible 

 eliminate, social inequalities, injustices, miseries and defects, 

 not for the purpose of calling attention to the efforts them- 

 selves, but for the much more important purpose of illustrating 

 the social evolution of a great people. My desire is not to call 

 attention to what is being done to mitigate social inequalities 

 and injustice, but what the doing of these things is accom- 

 plishing for society itself. The very fact that millions of 

 people have come to us who need what we can do for them 

 creates an obligation, furnishes an inspiration, and points out 

 the method whereby the people may add to their virtue of 

 individualism the greater virtue of social responsibility, losing 

 not one jot of personal initiative but gaining immensely in 

 sympathy and the consciousness of universal brotherhood. 



Such a consummation in some land is the great desire of 

 nations. For it the peoples of the earth are anxiously waiting. 

 The social consciousness in its evolution extends out to include 

 society in its broadest conception and becomes ultimately the 

 fully developed international mind and the international heart. 

 One man thinks in terms of self ; another in terms of his own 

 family; another in terms of his city or state or nation. No 

 man has come into his own until he learns to think in terms 

 of nations. Eace antipathy is universal. The millennium 

 cannot come till this utterly ceases to exist. The people of one 

 nation belittle the people of another, simply because they are 

 different, not because they are inferior. If this feeling should 

 be non-existent anywhere it should be in America ; and if any 

 nation should gather all peoples of all climes within the 

 circle of its sympathy and regard, it should be this same 

 America. 



Dr. Edward Alfred Steiner recently wrote : " Can we learn 

 to think and feel in terms of all the races, or must there 

 always be antipathy which grows into prejudice, and prejudice 

 which ripens into hate ? Must we be doomed to live looking 

 at one another as problems, meeting one another with fear, and 

 irritating one another with war ? 



