aggravate them, point to the one radical fact which men have hardly begun to admit, viz., that the words around which our civilization has rallied no longer convey our ultimate ideas; or rather they stop short of notions which we will accept as ultimate. They are irredeemable currency, and men are clamoring for liquidation. Thus we declaim of "liberty," but men are wondering whether we have begun to know wherein liberty consists. We have boasted of "rights," but the suspicion is rife that the majority of men have never understood a tithe of their rights, and that the rights which our institutions assure are possibly not more than a tithe of the goods upon which complete men will insist. We have appealed to "ethics," but at this late day there is no more open question than. What is ethical? We declare the sacredness of life, but men are asking, What is life? What does life presume? What does life involve? What should life contain? To whom does the prerogative of life belong?
These conditions are the setting of the urgent problems that confront today's men. Scholars are shirkers unless they grapple with these problems. It is for this that society supports us. We are presumed to be exponents of the higher excellencies of thought and action. We are expected to hold up ideals of the best, to guide the endeavors of the masses of men. It is squandering money to put more endowments into the keeping of educational institutions that are not devoting their energies in larger and larger proportion to search for solution of these moral problems, together with the solution of the physical problems, through both of which the larger welfare of men is to be secured.
Scholarship may get in its work in either or both of two ways: first, in clarifying fundamental or general conceptions; second, in perfecting and applying subordinate devices and plans. The second purpose of this paper is to indicate by an illustration the sort of share which scholarship ought to have in prosecuting the former of these methods. I turn, therefore not to the most fundamental relation which needs exposition, but to discussion of the institution of property, with its incidents, inheritance and bequest. Certain agitators declare that
