Now I do not mean that this training was by any means all bad.

On the contrary, the insistence upon individual responsibility was, and is, and always will be, a prime necessity.

Teaching of the kind I absorbed from both my text-books and my surroundings is a healthy anti-scorbutic to the sentimentality which by complacently excusing the individual for all his shortcomings would finally hopelessly weaken the spring of moral purpose.

It also keeps alive that virile vigor for the lack of which in the average individual no possible perfection of law or of community action can ever atone.

But such teaching, if not corrected by other teaching, means acquiescence in a riot of lawless business individualism which would be quite as destructive to real civilization as the lawless military individualism of the Dark Ages.