Sending defective steel to a gunmaker is no more certain to result in unsafe guns than turning out boys who are shifty and tricky is to result in a corrupt and unhappy community.
Appalled by the seriousness of the task, or lured from it by the joys of liberty and education, the woman has too generally shifted it to other shoulders--shoulders which were waiting to help her work out the problem, but which could never be a substitute.

She has turned over the child to the teacher, secular and religious, and fancied that he might be made a man of integrity by an elaborate system of teaching in a mass.

Has this shifting of responsibility no relation to the general lowering of our commercial and political morality?
For years we have been bombarded with evidence of an appalling indifference to the moral quality of our commercial and political transactions.

It is not too much to say that the revelations of corruption in our American cities, the use of town councils, State legislatures, and even of the Federal Government in the interests of private business, have discredited the democratic system throughout the world.

It has given more material for those of other lands who despise democracy to sneer at us than anything that has yet happened in this land.