The standards have to be raised for all or they cannot be held firm for the favored few.

Democracy, which aims to make all better, may work to make all cheaper in taste, more vulgar in language, less capable of fine expression of noble ideals, unless a social conscience and a social intelligence take command of the common life.
It is, therefore, to-day, not enough to call upon parents to try and keep their own sons and daughters from the prodigal life, it is a necessity, stronger than ever before, to make the influences which all must share what all careful and wise parents wish for their own children.
This is a mighty task, one that in the United States of America, with its cosmopolitan population, and its multitude of people with a smattering only of education or culture but with economic ability to gratify their undeveloped tastes, is more vast and more pressing than any nation has yet tried to accomplish.

While we are working at it we may well comfort ourselves by remembering that each generation has to meet new problems, and that somehow, even when the young start wrong or meet with overwhelming temptations or fail to get at the right time the impulse toward the best which they need, life has them in hand and teaches by experience much which helps them onward.

The tendency of life is toward strength and health and goodness and idealistic aims and choice of the best each person knows.

It is true, and the best thing in human experience, that what parents cannot do for those they love, life itself does for them, perhaps with needless suffering that the wise and loving parent would have saved them had they but heeded, but with a thoroughness which experience alone can give.
=Parental Love for the Black Sheep.=--The attitude of parents toward the black sheep who does not change his ways of evil and does not become a comfort but remains always a burden and sorrow, is one of the saddest and one of the noblest of human exhibits in sympathy and affection.