to the brave man whose life his cowardice jeopardizes, so in civil affairs it is revolting to every principle of justice to give to the lazy, the vicious, or even the feeble or dull-witted, a reward which is really the robbery of what braver, wiser, abler men have earned.  The only effective way to help any man is to help him to help himself; and the worst lesson to teach him is that he can be permanently helped at the expense of some one else.  True liberty shows itself to best advantage in protecting the rights of others, and especially of minorities.  Privilege should not be tolerated because it is to the advantage of a minority; nor yet because it is to the advantage of a majority.  No doctrinaire theories of vested rights or freedom of contract can stand in the way of our cutting out abuses from the body politic.  Just as little can we afford to follow the doctrinaires of an impossible—­and incidentally of a highly undesirable—­social revolution, which in destroying individual rights—­including property rights—­and the family, would destroy the two chief agents in the advance of mankind, and the two chief reasons why either the advance or the preservation of mankind is worth while.  It is an evil and a dreadful thing to be callous to sorrow and suffering and blind to our duty to do all things possible for the betterment of social conditions.  But it is an unspeakably foolish thing to strive for this betterment by means so destructive that they would leave no social conditions to better.  In dealing with all these social problems, with the intimate relations of the family, with wealth in private use and business use, with labor, with poverty, the one prime necessity is to remember that though hardness of heart is a great evil it is no greater an evil than softness of head.

But in addition to these problems, the most intimate and important of all, and which to a larger or less degree affect all the modern nations somewhat alike, we of the great nations that have expanded, that are now in complicated relations with one another and with alien races, have special problems and special duties of our own.  You belong to a nation which possesses the greatest empire upon which the sun has ever shone.  I belong to a nation which is trying on a scale hitherto unexampled to work out the problems of government for, of, and by the people, while at the same time doing the international duty of a great Power.  But there are certain problems which both of us have to solve, and as to which our standards should be the same.  The Englishman, the man of the British Isles, in his various homes across the seas, and the American, both at home and abroad, are brought into contact with utterly alien peoples, some with a civilization more ancient than our own, others still in, or having but recently arisen from, the barbarism which our people left behind ages ago.  The problems that arise are of well-nigh inconceivable difficulty.  They cannot be solved by the foolish sentimentality