every man his chance, we have to be very sympathetic, very broad-minded, very tolerant.

This matter of giving equal opportunity to all must be something more than a mere theory. A few years ago, I attended a meeting of educators in one of our great States. A representative of the State Department of Education called attention to the fact that although the constitution of that state written nearly a hundred years ago guaranteed equal opportunities to all the citizens of the State, as a matter of fact, never in all that entire century had the boys and girls of the farm had equal opportunities with those of the city for an education. It is idle for us to discuss a Christian program for society unless we are prepared to insist upon real opportunity and are willing to pay the price.

2. The Common Welfare

What is true liberty? Surely not the right to do as we please. Are all men equal? Certainly not equal in capacity. The right of personal opportunity, therefore, is checked at once by the fact that we cannot stand in the way of the opportunity for others, nor will democ

racy progress with complete satisfaction if we hold that one man is as good as another in the sense that he is as able as another. As a matter of fact, democracy needs the superior man, the expert, just as much as any other form of social organization needs him; and he should have his chance. We must educate the superior boy as well as the inferior boy, one equally with the other. We will not necessarily give them the same education. We will give them, however, an equal chance to get all the education that they can master. We will give each the education that fits him best for his best service to society, because in that way we minister best to his personal good. A Christian program, therefore, while it guarantees an equal chance for every man, modifies that principle at once by indicating that there must be for each his special opportunity. Social purposes and values are essential to a Christian program. One cannot be given his chance by denying another his chance. There must be a common chance.

In fact, one of the difficulties about this particular matter is that most of us think of equal opportunities in the terms of the old pagan

ambition to secure power. Now, so far as rights of property, as freedom of speech, as liberty of occupation minister to the larger good of all, they become legitimate parts of equal opportunity. But the first term in a Christian program, that is, giving each man his chance, is modified by the second term, which is that there is a common welfare, a common purpose, a common development, a common good. And when we say "common,' we mean common. We cannot allow special privileges or prerogatives, or opportunities for even our most efficient social groups, to stand in the way of giving to each man a chance to develop according to his capacity, so long as that development is consistent with a similar chance for every man.

3. Morals in a Crowded World

I think the major part of our difficulties at the present time, although not all of them, grow out of the fact that we are attempting to apply ethical principles gained out of an experience with a comparatively simple life, to a situation that is extremely complex. If I am a teacher and my neighbor is a coal miner,

we ought to be able to work out our mutual relations and our mutual services in a fairly satisfactory way. I teach his children and he keeps my house warm. But when I live five hundred miles away from this miner and he is one of hundreds of thousands of other miners, and they are working in a mine that is managed by still another group of people who do not do the actual work of mining, and this managerial group represents not their own persons but the persons of still other numerous people, a set of owners in the form of stockholders who know nothing directly about the mine and are not interested in the mine except as it brings them an income from their investment, and the coal is brought to me over transportation lines that represent still other services and is managed by still other groups, and my coal is delivered to me by several other sets of people who have no interest in either the miner or me, and expect to take toll for the service they render, I find myself in a situation that makes it next to impossible for me to deal justly with my friend the miner. As a matter of fact, I do not deal with him at all. Yet I am profoundly affected by what he does and

by what happens to him. And presumably he is similarly concerned about me.

What we are obliged to discover, if we can, in a Christian program is how not only the rights of groups, but the obligations of groups, can be defined and influenced, just as we think we would like to define and influence the sense of personal rights and obligation between individuals. How to do it is our problem. One way of putting our question is, "How to be moral in a highly organized society." We have to settle such questions as to how to secure fair dealing, the relation between profits and service, advantages and disadvantages of industrial competition, and a hundred other matters of like significance and difficulty. The most that we can do at this hour is to suggest two or three considerations that have, I think, a rather vital bearing upon this question of group morals, or, as I would prefer to put it, of collective religion.

(1) And first of all, I should like to say a word about the righteousness of justice. We have already called attention to the fact that the struggle for rights may lead us astray.